Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) got himself into a bit of trouble responding to a social media post that claimed “26 ships in Iran’s shadow fleet have made it past the US blockade in the Gulf of Oman” with a one-word response: “awesome.”
The senator now contends that his response was merely sarcasm and that “Trump’s bungled mismanagement of this war” isn’t “awesome.”
I’m skeptical because I’m aware of Murphy’s history. Even if we accept the best framing of his reaction, the senator is shilling for the Iranian regime. The post in question relies on an unverified claim offered by Iranian propagandist Ali Vaez. Maybe 26 Iranian ghost ships have slipped by the U.S. blockade, or maybe not. We’ll find out. But Murphy could not have known whether that was true when he spread the claim.
And when I contend that Vaez is a regime-booster, I don’t mean that he holds exotic views about terrorist regimes. I mean that Vaez is literally a conspirator.
“As an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty,” Vaez wrote to the Islamic regime’s foreign minister in 2014, “I have not hesitated to help you in any way; from proposing to Your Excellency a public campaign against the notion of [nuclear] breakout, to assisting your team in preparing reports on practical needs of Iran.”
The emails were uncovered by Iran International in 2022. They included a cache of similar obsequious messages from other “experts” within the orbit of Hamas fanboy Rob Malley and Obama administration.
Yet, Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, regularly reposts unverified claims from these people.
If Murphy is truly angered by “Trump’s bungled mismanagement of this war,” does that mean he wants the administration to improve its blockade efforts? Of course not. Murphy believes the blockade is counterproductive. The reason he spreads Vaez’s claims is to try to demoralize Americans.
To be fair, the senator’s obsession with defending the regime goes back to his earliest days in Washington. In 2017, during President Donald Trump’s first term, Murphy secretly met Iranian Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Munich to almost surely try to undermine the president’s efforts to exert maximum pressure on the regime to abandon nuclear weapons. Murphy, who wanted to investigate Trump staffers for merely speaking to the Russian ambassador and claimed an open letter sent by Republican senators to the Iranian regime in 2015 “undercut the credibility” of the United States, had no problem hobnobbing off the record with a representative of a country that refers to the U.S. as the Great Satan.
By 2018, Murphy was on the Senate floor condemning not the clerics but anti-regime Muslim-reformist groups such as American Islamic Forum for Democracy. Murphy has always had far harsher words for pro-Western Americans and our allies than for the mullahs and their proxies.
The senator was also agitated when Trump took out Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps terrorist leader Qassem Soleimani, responsible for the murder of over 600 dead and thousands of maimed servicemen, contending that it was “equivalent of the Iranians assassinating the U.S. secretary of defense.”
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Most of us can make a clear moral distinction between the Soleimanis of the world and the Mark Espers or Lloyd Austins or Pete Hegseths. Murphy, apparently, can’t.
By 2022, Murphy was openly advocating lifting sanctions on the Revolutionary Guard, designated as a terrorist group by the Justice Department, even ragging about it to pro-regime advocacy groups like the National Iranian American Council.
Millions of people have good-faith reasons to oppose the war in Iran. They advocate their position without cheering on the enemy or pushing the regime’s framing of events. Murphy, on the other hand, had been rooting for the Iranian regime for a decade. It’s not surprising. And it’s not just one post.