TALK ABOUT BURYING THE LEDE: “Nuclear Deal Fuels Iran’s Hard-Liners — Since completion of the agreement, Tehran has stepped up arrests of political opponents ahead of next month’s national elections,” the Wall Street Journal notes, with a key historical detail buried over 20 paragraphs deep in the article:

But the ranks of reformists in Iran have been depleted. Many activists are angry at the Obama administration for failing to support them six years ago in a rebuff that hasn’t been previously reported.

Iranian opposition leaders secretly reached out to the White House in the summer of 2009 to gauge Mr. Obama’s support for their “green revolution,” which drew millions of people to protest the allegedly fraudulent re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The demonstrations caught the White House off guard, said current and former U.S. officials who worked on Iran in the Obama administration.

Obama, portrayed as omniscient by the MSM in 2008 and who believed his mere presence on the world scene would calm Islamic tensions? Say it ain’t so! But it gets worse:

U.S. officials said the White House also was getting conflicting messages from Green Movement leaders. Some wanted Mr. Obama to publicly warn Mr. Khamenei against using force. Others said such a declaration would give Iran’s supreme leader an excuse to paint the opposition as American lackeys.

Mr. Obama and his advisers decided to maintain silence in the early days of the 2009 uprising. The Central Intelligence Agency was ordered away from any covert work to support the Green Movement either inside Iran or overseas, said current and former U.S. officials involved in the discussions.

“If you were working on the nuclear deal, you were saying, ‘Don’t do too much,’ ” said Michael McFaul, who served as a senior National Security Council official at the White House before becoming ambassador to Russia in 2012.

After a week of demonstrations, Iran’s security forces went on to kill as many as 150 people and jail thousands of others over the following months, according to opposition and human rights groups. Mr. Khamenei accused the U.S. of instigating the uprising. Iran denied killing protesters.

Some of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said in retrospect the U.S. should have backed the Green Movement. “If we could do it again, I would give different counsel,” said Dennis Ross, Mr. Obama’s top Mideast adviser during his first term. At the time, he said, he argued against embracing the protests.

Utterly pathetic. Obama has famously said, “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.” And he’s not going to let anyone slander or attack the mullahs of Iran, either. As John Rivers tweets, “Remember in 2008 when America voted to become best friends with Iran? Me neither.”