Well, it looks like Donald Trump is settling in well into his fascist tendencies. This story is straight up dictator-tactics, but the Republican majority in Congress is too busy going after other Trump enemies to bother with those pesky checks and balances.

We all know that Trump's ideology is little more than "Erase Barack Obama's legacy." So that's part of the reason that Trump has been crowing about how terrible the Iran nuclear deal is since the campaign trail. He's never actually been able to provide why it's so terrible, other than it's a "bad deal."

The truth of the matter is that the deal is not without some problems, but it is the work of years and years of sanctions, negotiations (at times, INTENSE negotiations) and multi-lateral cooperation from many nations. Can it be improved? Sure. But not by pulling out the deal, which will also no doubt have impact on the North Korean negotiations as well. After all, if we don't hold up our end of a deal with a nation that the world agrees is complying, how can Kim Jong Un trust the US in their forthcoming meeting?.

But that hasn't dissuaded Trump from continuing on this path, aided and abetted by soon-to-be-indicted Bibi Netanyahu, who has been drumming a war beat against Iran for literally decades. And now Trump appears to be taking the same kind of mob tactics that Netanyahu has been accused of before.

Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.

People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.

The extraordinary revelations come days before Trump’s 12 May deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme.

Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary was involved in earlier efforts to restrict Iranian weapons, said: “These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it.”

Kahl tweeted last night about a strange incident involving his wife that he believes may have been part of this attempt to dig up dirt on him.

It's stunning to see how quickly we've devolved into banana republic tactics (looking at you, Devin Nunes) and with so much tacit enabling by the media, few of whom have covered this story, focusing instead on Stormy Daniels.