On Saturday, the British newspaper The Observer published an article that, if true, should rocket into the top tier of Donald Trump scandals. Aides to the president, it said, “hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a ‘dirty ops’ campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal.”

The Israeli agents, said The Observer, specifically targeted Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, a deputy assistant to Obama and national security adviser to Joe Biden. The idea, apparently, was to smear them as corrupt in order to discredit the Iran deal as a whole.

The Observer did not identify the Israeli intelligence firm. But on Twitter, Kahl described a strange overture made to his wife last year, when she was serving on the fund-raising committee for their daughter’s elementary school. A woman claiming to represent a British private equity firm interested in donating to the school emailed his wife and insisted that they meet. (Kahl and his wife were suspicious, and the meeting never happened.)

Image Ben Rhodes, center, on Air Force One in 2016. Credit... Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

As Laura Rozen, a foreign policy journalist, reported, the woman who emailed Kahl’s wife claimed to work for Reuben Capital Partners. That’s the same fake firm that a female operative for the Israeli intelligence firm Black Cube used as a cover when she spied on the actress Rose McGowan for Harvey Weinstein.