President Barack Obama has once again broken the law in his swap of an U.S. Army sergeant for five Taliban leaders without consulting Congress, says Elliott Abrams, former deputy National Security Advisor under George W. Bush.
"The president is a kind of a serial scofflaw … and just sort of ignoring laws that he doesn't like,'' Abrams told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV. "On this one he clearly did not comply with the law and the question really is whether it is constitutional to limit the ability of the president to conduct foreign policy in that way.
"If the law is constitutional he certainly violated it. It said: Inform Congress.''
Abrams, now a senior fellow at The Council on Foreign Relations, said the trade sets a new — and dangerous — precedent for American policy.
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"We used to say we don’t negotiate with terrorists. We used to be contemptuous frankly [when] you'd hear that the French ransomed somebody or the Italians ransomed somebody and we'd say, 'oh man, we're Americans we don't do that kind of thing,'" Abrams said.
"The Israelis do trades … but this is going to happen to them very, very rarely because they don't have soldiers overseas.
"We have 250,000 soldiers all over the world including in some very dangerous places like Afghanistan and … they've now got targets on their backs because now the terrorists have learned we'll trade and it's really worthwhile kidnapping an American.''
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