OF COURSE THE UAE WANTED A TALIBAN EMBASSY: IT’S WHAT THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION WANTED.

The New York Times has obtained a series of apparently hacked emails from the United Arab Emirate’s Ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, showing that the UAE competed with Qatar for the “honor” of hosting the Taliban’s sole foreign diplomatic mission. The source of the emails is unknown—this is only the most recent batch of Otaiba’s emails to be released since an initial HuffingtonPost article in June revealed that they were being shopped around to U.S. media outlets. But the content and timing of the email releases is suspiciously beneficial to Qatar.

The Taliban embassy emails are intended to scandalize the American people, if not the Trump Administration itself, over the UAE’s eagerness to host the Taliban. After all, if the Taliban are the enemy of the U.S. in Afghanistan, and the Qataris are Bad Guys for hosting the Taliban embassy in Doha, then how dare the UAE try to host the Taliban embassy as well? The fact that Saudi Arabia and the UAE cite the Taliban embassy in Doha as evidence of Qatar’s collusion with extremists may now have been revealed as hypocrisy, but the Times downplays the key to understanding this story. The UAE and Qatar competed to open this embassy because that’s what the Obama Administration wanted. . . . In other words, the Obama Administration wanted this office opened, they helped get it open, and it would not have opened were it not for U.S. pressure.

So much of what the Obama Administration did makes for scandal, until you point out to reporters that it was the Obama Administration doing it.