seriously by sanctions that were imposed on russia and individuals there by the obama administration. that s in a gray area. that has potential for being a problem if you re trying to get a deal to get the sanctions reduced. that s a potential problem, right? the third subject we re told was talk about can we cooperate in containing china, which was a bit of a stunner because we hadn t heard that before. but the contacts after the election, we are told, focused on the possibility of setting up a direct back channel between russian president vladimir putin and president trump that could have circumvented the u.s. national security establishment. now, let s not forget that president trump had major beeves with that establishment and so does russia. so, that might be bad management. the only way, again, ken help me out with this. the problem is if, i assume, if flynn was doing something to meddle with the election, get
essentially fact-free. what u.s. officials have said on background to the washington post is that it s fictional. he s living in fantasyland. you don t believe iran is as close to getting nuclear weapons as he will say they are. well it s not me. you have the almost the entire israeli national security establishment, 200 israeli generals came out this week to say that netenyahu s claims are not accurate. you have the white house spokesman saying his claims are not accurate. the entire u.s. national security establishment, 16 of our, all 16 of our intelligence agencies say that netenyahu is not accurate. what is critically important is that the administration is saying that the israelis and netenyahu in particular and kerry said this to congress cannot come here yet again as netenyahu did in 2012 on the eve of the iraq war, to give us 2002. to give us a false story to help lead us into war. they re saying we re not going to do that again.
and i think he has the firm support of the u.s. national security establishment behind him, as we heard from general david petraeus and a statement to congress several months ago. the persistence and the continuance of this conflict hurt america s ability to achieve their goals in the middle east. so, president obama has been very clear that he s not just doing this just for kicks or for legacy, but he sees the resolution of this conflict as firmly within the u.s. natural interest. let s talk about the outside players and hamas and richard mentioned the fact that we had these two incidents and there were four settlers who were killed and then in a separate incident, two more were injured. can hamas play the spoiler, again, as they have in the past. can they, by insighticiting thi violence come to these talks? you look at the history of negotiations over the last decades and extremist actors on both sides have tried to use violence to scutthal talks.