President Obama announced two years ago that he would stop eavesdropping on leaders of U.S. allies, after the world learned the reach of long-secret U.S. surveillance programs. According to The Wall Street Journal, this meant an end to spying on French President François Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders.

However, Israel apparently failed to make Obama’s list of true allies. The Journal reports that the NSA continued routinely to intercept the communications of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and send them to White House officials for dissection.

And that’s not all. Spying on Netanyahu reportedly led to eavesdropping on members of Congress and leaders of American Jewish organization with whom the Israeli prime minister and his government communicated.

Originally, the stated justification for spying on Netanyahu was fear that he would attack Iran without first warning the U.S. However, by 2013, U.S. intelligence agencies had determined that Israel wasn’t going to strike Iran, so the rationale shifted. Now, Team Obama wanted to know whether Israel had learned of secret negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

As negotiations with Iran proceeded, Obama’s appetite for information about Netanyahu’s intentions grew. According to the Journal’s sources, the NSA tried to send updates to U.S. policy makers quickly, often in less than six hours after a notable communication was intercepted.

Obama also convinced himself that Israel was obtaining information about his negotiations with Iran by spying on the U.S. Israel has maintained that whatever it learned was the product of spying on the Iranians.

Read the article “Report: Obama Had the NSA Spy Not Only on Israel But Also on Congress and U.S. Jewish Organizations” on powerlineblog.com.