As President Obama reflects on his legacy, a recording of Secretary of State John Kerry conversing with leaders of Syrian opposition groups is casting more light on his approach to ISIS, indicating his administration believed that allowing the Islamic State to grow would serve the White House's objective of ousting Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The recording was leaked to the New York Times and reported Sept. 30, but the Conservative Tree House blog this week featured portions of Kerry's statements that were virtually ignored at the time.

Regime change was Obama's only objective in Syria, Kerry indicates, and the administration not only hoped ISIS would carry out the task, it gave arms to the jihadist army and its allies, confirming WND's reporting.

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Kerry admits the U.S. didn't calculate that Assad would turn to Russia for help.

The Obama administration's betrayal is exposed in "See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government's Submission to Jihad," by former DHS officer Philip Haney and WND Editor Art Moore.

"And we know that this was growing, we were watching, we saw that DAESH (ISIS) was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened," Kerry told the Syrians.

"(We) thought, however," he continued, "we could probably manage that Assad might then negotiate, but instead of negotiating he got Putin to support him.”

Kerry's off-record, 40-minute discussion with two dozen Syrians who worked with nongovernmental organizations took place during the U.N. General Assembly.

It confirms WND's reporting since 2011 of evidence that Clinton's State Department engineered the clandestine transfer of weapons from Libya to Syria that ended up in the hands of terrorist groups aligned with ISIS and al-Qaida.

The Conservative Tree House noted that in August 2014, President Obama gave a press conference in which he stated he “did not have a strategy” against ISIS. Then two months, later, his chief spokesman, Josh Earnest, stated: “Our ISIS strategy is dependent on something that does not yet exist.”

Benghazi tie

In May 2015, WND reported evidence that U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was involved in shipping weapons from Benghazi to support the al-Qaida-affiliated militias fighting the Assad regime, effectively arming the Sunni jihadists who morphed into ISIS.

Judicial Watch, which obtained much of the evidence, noted an August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report, written at time the U.S. was monitoring weapons flows from Libya to Syria, said “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI (Al-Qaida in Iraq) are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”

In an Aug. 17, 2014, email released by WikiLeaks, Clinton, after her service as secretary of state, suggested to adviser John Podesta: “At the same time, we should return to plans to provide the FSA [Free Syria Army], with some group of moderate forces, with equipment that will allow them to deal with a weakened ISIL, and stepped up operations against the Syrian regime.”

In September 2013, WND reported Kerry and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had relied on the work of Elizabeth O’Bagy, a 26-year-old graduate student, to argue in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Obama administration should send weapons to arm the “moderate” Free Syria Army to oppose the Assad government in Syria.

WND detailed the extensive lobbying efforts conducted in Washington to advance the FSA as a “moderate group,” despite clear evidence the al-Nusra Front – operating under the FSA umbrella – had been declared a terrorist organization by the State Department; has pledged allegiance to al-Qaida’s top leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri; and was the group of choice for foreign jihadis pouring into Syria.

In September 2014, WND reported O’Bagy, who had been fired from her job with a Washington think-tank after her exposure by WND as a source for Kerry’s argument that the FSA is a “moderate” rebel force in Syria, had also arranged for McCain a trip to Syria in May 2013 during which senator met with Abdul Hakim Belhaj, who was then represented as a leader of the FSA.

In November 2013, WND reported trusted Libyan expatriates had claimed Belhaj was at large in Libya. The expatriates identified Belhaj as an al-Qaida operative, noting he was at the top of a list of Libyan terrorists banned by the European Union from obtaining entrance visas and was the principal organizer of the terrorist attack in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2011, in which Ambassador Stevens was murdered.

A weapons shipment from Benghazi to Syria that occurred just days before the Benghazi attack was coordinated by Belhaj.

The shipment been arranged by Marc Turi, a professional arms dealer who had been indicted by federal prosecutors for supplying arms to Libyan “rebels.” But the Obama administration dropped the criminal case one day before a court-ordered deadline to disclose information about its efforts to arm Muslim rebels.

The DOJ was forced to drop the Turi prosecution because federal prosecutors were convinced his defense would expose Clinton’s secret arms running to the radical al-Qaida-affiliated militia in Libya, contends Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano.

WND also published visual evidence Clinton’s State Department secretly provided weapons to Islamic jihadists in Libya.

The Obama administration's betrayal is exposed in "See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government's Submission to Jihad," by former DHS officer Philip Haney and WND Editor Art Moore.