Top Democrats on the House Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees called for the Israeli spy firm to share data on the alleged campaign against Rhodes and Kahl. “We are writing to request documents relating to reports that Black Cube conducted a ‘dirty ops’ campaign against former Obama administration officials Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl at the behest of associates of President Donald Trump,” said the letter sent on Thursday by Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, and Eliot Engel of New York, his counterpart on the Foreign Affairs panel.“If these reports are accurate, they raise grave questions about how and why a foreign entity was engaged to attempt to secretly influence the foreign policy of the United States,” the congressmen wrote.The letter was mostly symbolic: As the minority party in the House of Representatives, Democrats do not have subpoena powers, and even with such powers, congressional authority over a foreign entity would be limited.Cummings and Engel, both notably pro-Israel, said they were not taking at face value Black Cube’s assertion that it has no ties to the Trump administration.“Your firm has denied these reports only in the broadest terms, stating – in the present tense – that ‘Black Cube has no relation whatsoever to the Trump administration, to Trump aides, to anyone close to the administration, or to the Iran nuclear deal,’” they wrote. “You have not denied the operation itself, you have not explained who was aware of it, and you have not identified the clients who funded it,” they wrote.Wow! @RichardEngel got his source to speak on camera that it was Trump that hired Israeli intelligence firm Black Cube to target former Obama's officials and supporters of the #IranDeal (including myself) in order to discredit and silence us...
— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) May 26, 2018