The exposé is extensive and covers a wide array of purported activities over a ten-year period all across the US, Latin America, West Africa, Europe, and the Mideast, though the point of this analysis isn't to summarize what's contained in the report or to judge its veracity, but to interpret the significance of it being made public at this point in time. The codename given to the investigation into Hezbollah's global economic network was "Operation Cassandra", and it alleges to have discovered the mechanics behind the group's self-sustaining financial ecosystem, some of which supposedly dealt with organized criminal activities such as drug trafficking and money laundering.

Politico's bombshell wasn't just the alleged facts that it uncovered, but the claims from some of the operation's participants that the Obama Administration was undermining their work because it feared that taking action against Hezbollah would endanger Washington's efforts to clinch the 2015 nuclear deal with the group's patrons in Tehran. If true, then this would represent a major split within the American "deep state", or permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies, because it suggests that the State Department and possibly even the CIA were conspiring to subvert the law enforcement duties of the FBI and DEA on behalf of the President.