“No shame. No decency”: Experts shocked at “weakness” of Trump’s bizarre Supreme Court ballot appeal
Igor Derysh – January 4, 2024
Donald Trump Scott Olson/Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday appealed the Colorado ruling barring him from the state’s primary ballot to the Supreme Court.
The Colorado Supreme Court last month found that Trump engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6 and was barred from appearing on the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — a post-Civil War provision barring insurrectionists from office.
Trump’s lawyers in a filing asked the U.S. Supreme Court to put his name back on the ballot, arguing it would “mark the first time in the history of the United States that the judiciary has prevented voters from casting ballots for the leading major-party presidential candidate.”
Trump’s team called on the court to “return the right to vote for their candidate of choice to the voters,” arguing that only Congress has the authority to determine who is eligible for the presidency.
Trump’s team also disputed that he engaged in insurrection, citing a “long history of political protests that have turned violent.”
Legal experts criticized Trump’s filing starting with the very first line, which noted that it is a “fundamental principle” of the Constitution that “the people should choose whom they please to govern them.”
“No shame. No decency,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, alluding to Trump’s own efforts to disenfranchise voters after his 2020 loss.
“The sort of gall that the brief represents, it’s really, I think, shocking,” former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team, told MSNBC. “It’s really sort of beyond the pale and legally wrong.”
“Donald Trump is charged with, essentially, disenfranchising, trying to disenfranchise 80 million people,” Weissmann said.
Conservative attorney George Conway went through the indictment on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday.
“This is a bizarre document, and I think it reflects the weakness of Trump’s position,” he said.
“He is throwing stuff up at the wall, or throwing stuff up in a zoo cage, and seeing what would stick,” Conway said, noting that Trump lacks “real appellate advocates” on his legal team and that the filing is effectively “channeling Trump’s narcissism.”
“The third reason, I think, is the fundamental weakness of his position. The fifth point in this brief, point five, Roman numeral five, is he didn’t engage in insurrection. It is not number one. The reason is, it’s because his arguments are very, very weak. If you look at the question in terms of President Trump should be removed from the ballot, it’s kind of a shocking notion to those of us who haven’t lived, until now, in an era where public officials engage in insurrection. But it was familiar to the people who enacted the 14th amendment,” he said.
“When you go through the issues one by one by one, the way lawyers are supposed to, his case looks terrible,” he added.
CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, noted that Trump’s argument that he did not engage in insurrection is a “weak argument.”
“First on the facts but second, the Supreme Court’s not going to touch that,” he said. “They’re not a fact-finder, they don’t do trials. They generally won’t make that kind of finding.”
Honig said it is unclear how the court might look at Trump’s arguments that the matter should be left to Congress or that he was not given due process in the Colorado case.
“And then the fourth argument is this claim that the term ‘officers,’ as it’s used in the insurrection clause, doesn’t include the president. I tend to side with Colorado and [the plaintiffs] on that one. You can carve that up linguistically either way but just [on] common sense, how could it not apply to the president?” Honig questioned. “All of this is new… whatever happens here, we’re all going to learn together.”
How Rep. Andy Biggs proves House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Texas border bonanza was bogus
EJ Montini, Arizona Republic – January 4, 2024
Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs was at the border community of Eagle Pass, Texas, on Wednesday, part of a group of 60-plus Republicans led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, all of whom made the trip to make speeches, make the news, make (perhaps) some campaign cash, and accomplish … nothing.
Accomplishing nothing is something Biggs has proven to be very good (?) at.
“No more money for this bureaucracy of his (President Joe Biden’s) government until you’ve brought this border under control,” Biggs is quoted as saying in The New York Times. “Shut the border down or shut the government down.”
The congressman made the same threat on X, formerly Twitter.
”Shut the border down, or we’ll shut the government down,” he posted, standing with three other Republicans, including Arizona Rep. Eli Crane, who appears to have spent his time in Congress being tutored by Biggs on how to get zero done.
Some make progress. Biggs make noise
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, center left, and Texas Department of Public Safety chief Steve McCraw, center right, lead a group of Republican members of Congress during a tour of the Texas-Mexico border, Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024, in Eagle Pass, Texas.
There are two groups of elected officials operating in Washington, D.C.
There is a very small collective who want to make progress. And there is an overwhelming majority who want to make noise. You can guess which group Biggs, Speaker Johnson and the other Texas tinhorns belong to.
Meantime, back at the Capitol, there is a small working group of senators, including Arizona’s independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who are trying to hammer out a bipartisan agreement on border measures.
Sinema told The Arizona Republic, “We’re dealing with very, very difficult, complex issues. Drafting is very technical. It must be done incredibly precise and to avoid unintended consequences and decades of litigation. And so this is really hard. But everyone is working in good faith to solve this crisis.”
Not everyone.
Border isn’t a crisis, it’s a GOP gold mine
Republicans already are using the border crisis as their primary campaign argument for the 2024 election. It’s how they hope to help Donald Trump get back to the White House.
The worst thing that could happen to them, politically, would be for Republicans and Democrats of good faith to reach a bipartisan deal on the border.
Speaker Johnson, like Biggs and Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar, was among those who tried to stage a nonviolent coup to keep Trump in office after he lost the election in 2020.
The bogus bonanza in Texas on Wednesday wasn’t about the border. It was about Trump.
Congress can solve this, but will it?
It wasn’t even the first time Biggs threatened a government shutdown.
He did that last year when he and some Republican cronies were trying to strongarm then Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
On Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer in Washington said of the Republicans and their Texas two-step, “It’s very nice that they have a trip to the border, but the only way to solve this is here, working in a bipartisan way with Senate Republicans, Senate Democrats and House Democrats to get it done, period.
“I hope the speaker will realize that if he wants to solve the problem on the border.”
Trump’s businesses received millions from foreign entities during his presidency, House report says
Will Steakin – January 4, 2024
Former President Donald Trump’s businesses received millions of dollars from foreign entities located in 20 different countries during his presidency, according to a new report released Thursday by Democrats on the House Oversight committee.
The top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, released the report and provided documents from Trump’s former accounting firm that show that 20 governments, including China and Saudi Arabia, paid at least $7.8 million during Trump’s presidency to business entities that included Trump International Hotels in Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas, and Trump Towers in New York.
The 156-page report by House Democrats is entitled “White House For Sale.”
In the forward to the report, Raskin wrote, “By elevating his personal financial interests and the policy priorities of corrupt foreign powers over the American public interest, former President Trump violated both the clear commands of the Constitution and the careful precedent set and observed by every previous commander in chief.”
The reports says that, according to “limited records” obtained by the committee, Saudi Arabia likely paid Trump-owned business at least $615,422 during Trump’s first term in office.
“While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was making these payments, President Trump chose Saudi Arabia as the destination of his first overseas trip — a choice that was unprecedented among U.S. presidents,” the report says.
PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump attends a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa, Dec. 19, 2023. (Scott Morgan/Reuters, FILE)
The report claims that the payments violated the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, a rule that bars the president and other federal officials from accepting money or gifts from foreign governments without Congressional approval.
In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed lawsuits accusing Trump of profiting from his presidency, on the grounds that he is no longer in office.
“Through entities he owned and controlled, President Trump accepted, at a minimum, millions of dollars in foreign emoluments in violation of the United States Constitution,” Democrats write in the report. “The documents obtained from former President Trump’s accounting firm demonstrate that four Trump-owned properties together collected, at the least, millions of dollars in payments from foreign governments and officials that violated the Constitution’s prohibition on emoluments ‘of any kind whatever’ from foreign governments.”
ABC News has reached out to Trump’s representatives for comment on the report.
Related:
AFP
Foreign govts paid Trump firms millions while president: report
AFP – January 4, 2024
A Chinese embassy delegation spent $19,391 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC (CHIP SOMODEVILLA)
Former US president Donald Trump‘s businesses received at least $7.8 million from foreign governments including China during his time in the White House, a congressional report claimed Thursday.
Officials from Saudi Arabia, India, Turkey and Democratic Republic of Congo were among some 20 countries’ representatives who paid money to Trump’s hotel and real estate businesses during his presidency, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee wrote in their report.
The authors claim that such revenues from overseas governments violated a constitutional ban on “foreign emoluments.”
“As President, Donald Trump accepted more than $7.8 million in payments from foreign states and their leaders, including some of the world’s most unsavory regimes,” said the report titled “White House for Sale.”
“We know about only some of the payments that passed into former President Trump’s hands during just two years of his presidency from just 20 of the more than 190 nations in the world through just four of his more than 500 businesses.”
– ‘Prohibited emoluments’ –
In the case of China, the report alleged that Beijing as well as businesses including ICBC bank and Hainan Airlines spent $5.5 million at Trump-owned properties.
“Former President Trump violated the Constitution when the businesses he owned accepted these emoluments paid by (Beijing) without the consent of Congress,” the report said.
The authors say that the full amount could be higher as the $5.5 million figure is based only on limited disclosures from Trump’s accountants Mazars and filings with the American financial regulator, the SEC.
In one expenditure dated August 27, 2017, a Chinese embassy delegation spent $19,391 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
The report also claims that “Saudi Arabia paid at least $615,422 in prohibited emoluments to former President Trump’s businesses over the course of his term in office from just (the Trump World Tower) and the March 2018 stay at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC.”
“Former President Trump has also boasted about the continued willingness of the Saudis to do business on terms highly favorable to him,” the report stated.
Trump’s Washington hotel was sold in 2022 to a private investor group and rebranded under the luxury Waldorf Astoria line.
The frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Trump separately faces a civil fraud trial in New York over claims that his real estate businesses fraudulently inflated the value of their assets.
He is to go on trial in Washington in March for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and in Florida in May on charges of mishandling top secret government documents.
The twice-impeached former president also faces racketeering charges in Georgia for allegedly conspiring to upend the election results in the southern state after his 2020 defeat by Democrat Joe Biden.
Related:
CNN
China spent over $5.5 million at Trump properties while he was in office, documents show
Zachary Cohen and Kara Scannell, CNN – January 4, 2024
Gabriella Demczuk/Getty Images
The Chinese government and its state-controlled entities spent over $5.5 million at properties owned by Donald Trump while he was in office, the largest total of payments made by any single foreign country known to date, according to financial documents cited in a report from House Democrats released Thursday.
Those payments collectively included millions of dollars from China’s Embassy in the United States, a state-owned Chinese bank accused by the US Justice Department of helping North Korea evade sanctions and a state-owned Chinese air transit company. Accounting records from Trump’s former accounting firm, Mazars USA, were obtained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.
China is one of 20 countries that made at least $7.8 million in total payments to Trump-owned businesses and properties during the former president’s stint in the White House, including his hotels in Washington DC, New York and Las Vegas, the report states.
The documents offer additional evidence of the rare practice of foreign governments spending money directly with businesses owned by a sitting president but are not a complete record of all foreign payments made to Trump’s businesses during his time in the White House.
At the time, Trump’s lawyer said the former president planned to donate foreign profits from his hotels to the US Treasury Department. However, the amount reportedly donated by the Trump Organization in 2017 and 2018 falls well short of estimated foreign payments that were made to its properties.
Trump refused to divest himself of corporate assets and properties prior to taking office, meaning he could still profit from his various businesses with little transparency.
Democrats say the additional accounting records raise new questions about possible efforts to influence Trump through his companies while he was in the White House.
As an example, committee Democrats point to the fact that Trump declined to impose sanctions on the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), a state-owned entity that leased property at Trump Tower in New York.
A Securities and Exchange Commission filing from 2012 shows that the Chinese bank’s base rent paid was $1.9 million and documents produced by Mazars confirm the bank stayed in Trump Tower through 2019 at least.
In 2016, the Justice Department accused the bank of conspiring with a North Korean bank to evade US sanctions.
But upon taking office, Trump did not sanction ICBC despite calls from Republican members of Congress to “apply maximum financial and diplomatic pressure” by “targeting more Chinese banks that do business with North Korea,” House Oversight Committee Democrats wrote in a report summarizing the contents of the Mazars USA records.
Asked about China’s payments to Trump-owned properties, Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu told CNN, “China adheres to the principle of non-interference in internal affairs and does not comment on issues related to US domestic politics.”
“At the same time, I want to stress that the Chinese government always requires Chinese companies to operate overseas in accordance with local laws and regulations. China-US economic and trade cooperation is mutually beneficial. China opposes the US politicizing China-US economic and trade issues,” Pengyu added.
The Trump Organization says it donated over $450,000 in estimated profits from foreign government patronage to the US Treasury over the time of Trump’s term. The company also worked to track all foreign government business across its entire portfolio and did not make new business investments overseas while Trump was in office.
In a statement, Eric Trump said that the former president was tough on China regardless of any business interests.
“There is no President in United States history who was tougher on China than Donald Trump … a President who introduced billions and billions of dollars worth of tariffs on their goods and services,” Eric Trump said.
Democrats also argue that the Mazar documents show Trump repeatedly violated the US Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prohibits a president from receiving an “emolument,” or profit, from any “King, Prince, or foreign State” unless Congress consents. Yet despite ethical concerns that have been raised about Trump’s lack of adherence to constitutional norms that were embraced by his predecessors, legislation to enforce the Emoluments Clause has gone nowhere in Congress.
The committee, which has investigated Trump’s businesses and his lease of the Old Post Office in Washington from the US government that housed his hotel, was provided the records following a years-long court battle that ended in a settlement in 2022.
Many of the documents in the subset released Thursday have not been previously made public.
“These countries spent – often lavishly – on apartments and hotel stays at Donald Trump’s properties – personally enriching President Trump while he made foreign policy decisions connected to their policy agendas with far-reaching ramifications for the United States,” Democrats wrote in their report.
Saudi Arabia, for example, spent roughly $600,000 at Trump-owned properties during his time in office and was making significant payments in May 2017 when it signed a massive arms deal with the Trump administration.
The Trump administration agreed to the controversial arms deal, worth over $100 billion, despite bipartisan concerns about civilian casualties resulting from Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Yemen.
The report produced by House Democrats also highlighted comments made by Trump during a 2015 campaign rally regarding his view of Saudi Arabia.
“Saudi Arabia, I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million.” He continued, “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much!” Trump said at the time.
Committee Democrats have previously released some of the accounting records, but those documents only accounted for a fraction of the foreign payments to Trump-owned businesses during the years he occupied the White House.
Foreign spending at Trump World Tower
A sizable percentage of foreign spending disclosed in the latest report comes from leases or common charge payments countries made for apartments their diplomatic missions rent or own at Trump World Tower, an apartment building across the street from the United Nations.
Many of the countries bought properties years before Trump ran for office, but they continued to make payments to the Trump Organization during the presidency.
Saudi Arabia, India, Qatar, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and a Chinese-government linked petroleum company each owned or rented apartments at Trump World Tower and combined paid the Trump Organization an estimated $1.7 million in charges and fees, according to House Democrats.
The figure is based on records the Democrats received from Mazars for the year 2018 – the only year Mazars gave to the committee – and then an extrapolation based on the assumptions the charges remain the same during the course of Trump’s presidency.
The biggest payment to the UN property came from Saudi Arabia, which owns the 45th floor of the apartment tower. Democrats estimate the Saudi government paid $537,080 during Trump’s presidency – out of a total $615,422 in emoluments. The remainder came from payments to Trump’s hotel in Washington DC.
Qatar paid an estimated $465,744 for the properties it owned during Trump’s presidency; India paid at least $264,184; Afghanistan spent an estimated $153,208 for its unit; and Kuwait paid Trump’s company $152,664 for the Trump World Tower.
Kuwait also spent roughly $150,000 to the Washington hotel for National Day events held by its embassy in 2017 and 2018, according to Mazars records.
The national day event was also held at the hotel in 2019, but the Democrats said they did not receive records from Mazars related to the cost. The events were attended by Trump administration officials, the Democrats said citing press releases from the Kuwaiti embassy.
This story has been updated with additional details.
Related:
BBC News
Trump companies got millions from foreign governments, Democrats say
Natalie Sherman – BBC News – January 4, 2024
Trump International Hotel opened in 2016 in Washington
Donald Trump‘s hotels and other businesses accepted more than $7.8m (£6.1m) from foreign governments during his presidency, according to a new report from Democrats in Congress.
They found that China was responsible for more than $5.5m of those payments, which Mr Trump is accused of accepting in violation of the US constitution.
The report is based on documents released by Mr Trump’s former accounting firm after a court battle.
Mr Trump did not immediately comment.
The US constitution bars presidents from accepting gifts or other benefits derived from their position without express permission from Congress.
The former businessman, who made his name as a hotel and property developer, has been dogged by questions about his firms’ dealings since he entered the White House in January 2017.
At the time, he placed his sons in charge of the companies’ day-to-day operations but maintained ownership of the businesses, which included the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which became a known haunt for lobbyists, foreign delegations and others.
Mr Trump, who is currently campaigning for a second term, faced numerous lawsuits alleging conflicts-of-interest.
In 2021, America’s highest court threw out the cases, saying they were moot after he lost the 2020 election.
Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said the investigation showed Mr Trump “put lining his pockets with cash from foreign governments seeking policy favors over the interests of the American people”.
“The report’s detailed findings make clear that we don’t have the laws in place to deal with a president who is willing to brazenly convert the presidency into a business for self-enrichment and wealth maximization with the collusive participation of foreign state,” he wrote in the introduction to the report.
Democrats said their investigation showed that Mr Trump’s loyalties were split by the payments, which came from at least 20 governments many of which had sensitive or politically charged matters before the US.
They cite as an example that Mr Trump supported arms sales to Saudi Arabia that were opposed by Congress due to fears the weapons would be used against civilians.
The report also notes he cast doubt on US intelligence assessments that the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman had ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
After China, Saudi Arabia and its royal family was the second biggest patron of the Trump businesses, spending more than $600,000 at his properties, according to the report.
Qatar, Kuwait and India rounded out the top five list.
Democrats said that the findings reflect just the first two years of his presidency and only four of his properties, claiming it likely represented just a fraction of the money Mr Trump’s businesses made from foreign governments during his time as president.
In 2022, Democrats lost control of Congress and could no longer compel release of documents, cutting short the investigation.
Republican James Comer, who is leading an inquiry into the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, during his father’s vice presidency, dismissed the findings.
“It is beyond parody that Democrats continue their obsession with former President Trump,” he said in a statement. “Former President Trump has legitimate businesses but the Bidens do not.”
Mr Trump’s tax records, released in 2022, revealed significant business losses during his presidency and he has scaled back his business.
The Trump Organization sold the Washington hotel to an investment group for $375m in 2022.
Related:
CBS News
Trump businesses got millions in foreign payments while he was president, Dems say
Kathryn Watson, Stefan Becket – January 4, 2024
Washington — Donald Trump‘s businesses received at least $7.8 million in payments from foreign governments and government-backed entities from 20 countries while he was in the White House, according to a new report by House Democrats.
Drawing upon 451 pages of documents received from Trump’s longtime accounting firm Mazars and a federal agency, Democratic staffers on the House Oversight Committee on Thursday issued their 156-page report entitled “White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump.”
The records, the report said, “demonstrate that four Trump-owned properties together collected, at the least, millions of dollars in payments from foreign governments and officials.” The Democrats alleged these payments violated what’s known as the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, which prohibits federal officials from accepting gifts or other benefits from foreign countries without congressional approval.
“This report sets forth the records showing foreign government money — and all the spoils from royals we can find — pouring into hotels and buildings that the President continued to own during his presidency, all in direct violation of the Constitutional prohibition,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee.
The Democrats noted that they had access to a limited number of financial documents and that “the foreign payments to President Trump identified in this report are likely only a small fraction of the total amount of such payments he received during his presidency.”
Where the payments came from
The Democratic report focuses on payments to four Trump-controlled businesses: the Trump hotels in Washington, Las Vegas and New York, and Trump Tower in Manhattan.
While Trump turned over day-to-day operations of his businesses to his sons when he entered the White House in 2017, he declined to divest his assets and retained “personal ownership and control of all his businesses, as well as the ability to draw funds from them without any outside disclosure,” the report alleged. This arrangement, Democrats said, “reinforced (rather than severed) his ties to his businesses and enabled him to prioritize his personal interests over those of the nation.”
During his presidency, the Trump International Hotel in Washington attracted many foreign diplomats and dignitaries hoping to mingle with Trump allies and administration officials. According to Trump’s financial disclosure reports from when he was president, he earned more than $40 million from the D.C. hotel in 2017, and $40.8 million the following year.
A view of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 18, 2021. / Credit: Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Despite Trump’s frequent criticism of China and insistence that the country was taking advantage of the U.S., the majority of foreign payments included in Thursday’s report came from the Chinese government and two state-owned entities.
The payments totaled nearly $5.6 million at properties including Trump Tower, and the Trump International Hotels in Washington and Las Vegas, the report found. The bulk of the payments came from the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which paid $5.35 million in rent for space in Trump Tower from February 2017 to October 2019.
The nation that spent the second-most at the Trump properties, according to the report, was Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government spent more than $615,000 at Trump World Tower in New York and the Trump hotel in Washington from 2017 to 2020.
The report noted that Trump praised Saudi Arabia and mentioned “his transactional relationships” with the kingdom before taking office. During an August 21, 2015, rally in Alabama, Trump said Saudi nationals had spent millions of dollars on his apartments.
“Saudi Arabia, I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million,” he said. “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much!”
The report said that Trump “oversaw several highly consequential decisions on a range of issues involving U.S. policy towards Saudi Arabia” while his businesses were receiving payments from the Saudi government. The Democrats noted Trump’s response to the 2018 death of Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident Jamaal Khashoggi, in which he publicly doubted the conclusion of the intelligence community that the Saudi crown prince had ordered his killing.
Qatar follows Saudi Arabia’s spending, with $465,744 spent at Trump World Tower. Nearly all of the remaining payments, from countries including Kuwait, India, Malaysia, Afghanistan, the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates, occurred at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
The fight over emoluments
Trump’s business dealings as president were the subject of three major court cases while he was in office, the first of which was filed in 2017. The cases, brought by Democratic lawmakers, several states and an oversight group, were the first legal battles over the Emoluments Clause, but failed to resolve questions about the definition of an “emolument” or the scope of constitutional provision. The Supreme Court dismissed two of them once Trump left office and declined to review the third.
The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the new report. Trump dismissed the “phony Emoluments Clause” and concerns about his business dealings in 2019.
The Trump Organization has said it voluntarily donated proceeds from foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury every year from 2018 to 2021. In 2017, the Trump Organization said it would rely on foreign representatives to self-report if they were paying a Trump company for something in their official capacity.
The company said it donated $191,538 in foreign payments in 2019, $105,465 in 2020 and $10,577 in 2021.
Biden’s first 2024 ad focuses on ‘extremist’ threat to democracy
AFP – January 4, 2024
Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as they storm the US Capitol in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021 (Olivier DOULIERY)
President Joe Biden‘s campaign released its first television ad for the 2024 election on Thursday, warning of an “extremist” threat to democracy over images of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
The advertisement, entitled “Cause,” will get its first network showing on Saturday, the third anniversary of the historic assault by Donald Trump supporters which left five people dead.
“All of us are being asked right now, what will we do to maintain our democracy?” the 81-year-old Democrat says in a passage lifted from a speech he gave in Arizona last year.
“There’s something dangerous happening in America. There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy,” says the ad, released early on social media.
During the one-minute ad, Biden does not mention by name former president Trump — the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination and the man he beat in 2020.
But over swelling, dramatic music, the ad features repeated images of pro-Trump signs held by the January 6 rioters, as well as a hangman’s noose brought by the protesters to the Capitol.
It also includes pictures of torch-bearing white supremacists at a rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
The Biden campaign is increasingly painting the election as a fight for American democracy against Trump, with the president set to give a speech on similar lines in Pennsylvania on Friday.
Polls show Biden and Trump neck and neck despite the populist Republican tycoon, 77, facing multiple criminal trials, including one linked to the January 6 riot.
Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said Republicans had “doubled down” on threats to undermine elections.
“This ad serves as a very real reminder that this election could very well determine the very fate of American democracy,” she said in a statement.
Letters to the Editor: I immigrated to the U.S. in 1971. I’ll leave if Trump is reelected
Los Angeles Times Opinion – January 4, 2024
An immigrant holds a flag and the Oath of Allegiance during a naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles in 2021. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
To the editor: After I immigrated to the U.S. in 1971, my introduction to national politics was the Watergate hearings, which I followed closely on TV. The role that prominent members of the Republican Party played in the downfall of President Nixon was expected and commendable. (“Is 2024 the year you’ll become an American expat?” Opinion, Jan. 1)
Forty-five years later, I watched Trump get elected and left the country in horror. Unfortunately, my American family was unable to join me in Switzerland due to job obligations, so after three months I returned to suffer for four years watching the principles of my beloved adopted country being systematically dismantled.
If former President Trump gets reelected, I will once again move to Europe, unwilling to spend another four years experiencing the deterioration of our country at home, and being a laughingstock abroad.
The complicity of Republicans in Trump’s ego-driven schemes reminds me too much of the developments leading to World War II, and I abhor the mindless adherence of Trump supporters to his amoral behavior. They will still be around long after Trump is a nightmarish memory.
Isabelle H. Meyer, Glendale
..
To the editor: In “The Dawn of Everything,” the book Virginia Heffernan mentions in her op-ed article, authors David Graeber and David Wengrow mention three freedoms. Heffernan focuses only on one — the right to move.
Why does she not discuss options for people who are rich enough to leave the United States? What about exhorting her readers to disobey and change society, the two other freedoms, before abandoning the country?
Abcarian: Really, young voters? You want to teach Democrats a lesson by letting Trump back into the White House?
Robin Abcarian – January 3, 2024
President Biden poses with Students Demand Action in Connecticut in June. In 2020, the youngest American voters were squarely in his corner. Not now, according to polls. (Susan Walsh / Associated Press)
I almost spit out my Geritol the other day when I read what one young voter in Philadelphia told NBC News about why she is disillusioned about the upcoming presidential election.
“I don’t think the presidency has too much of an effect on what happens in my day-to-day life,” said Pru Carmichael, who supported Biden in 2020 but says she will not vote for president at all this year if she has to choose between the disappointing incumbent and former President Trump.
Seriously?
Maybe she believes she will never have an unintended, unwanted pregnancy. (However, if she does, she is lucky enough to live in Pennsylvania, where abortion is still legal.)
But how can she not appreciate the profound changes the Trump presidency inflicted on this country? Had there been no President Trump, there would be no ultraconservative majority on the Supreme Court, no Dobbs decision overturning nearly half a century of reproductive rights, no outright abortion bans in 13 states and no suffering by people like Kate Cox of Texas, who was forced to seek abortion care in another state after the Texas Supreme Court said she could not abort her severely compromised fetus, who suffered a condition that was incompatible with life.
In 2020, the youngest American voters were squarely in Biden’s corner. According to exit polls, 65% of those 18 to 24 years old chose him, the largest percentage of any age group. And yet, if recent national polls are to be believed, voters up to age 34 have grown disenchanted with the president. Perhaps this is a reflection on the impatience of youth, or, worse, a fundamentally weak grasp on how government operates.
Listen to what younger voters told NBC News they’re upset about: the country’s slow pace on reversing climate change, Biden’s failure to fully cancel student loan debt, his inability to federally codify the right to abortion and, perhaps most starkly, his handling of Israel’s war against Hamas and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“I mean, he made a lot of really big promises in his campaign and virtually none of them were followed through on,” one poll respondent, Austin Kapp, 25, of Colorado, told NBC News.
He did try to codify Roe, but was unable to marshal the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster by Senate Republicans.
And what has Trump been doing about abortion, besides taking credit for the overturning of Roe vs. Wade? He’s urging Republicans to mislead voters: “In order to win in 2024, Republicans must learn how to properly talk about abortion,” he told a group of Iowa supporters in September. “This issue cost us unnecessarily but dearly in the midterms.”
We now know, thanks to the horrific experience of Cox and other women who have brought suit in Texas, that the idea of an “exception” to abortion bans for cases of rape, incest, fetal anomalies or the health of the pregnant person is nothing more than a shimmering lie, a mirage to make abortion bans slightly more palatable to the majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to choose.
As for the Middle East crisis, even if you agree that Biden’s handling of the situation has been uneven, why would anyone think Trump, an outspoken supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would handle it better, particularly if your sympathies lie more with the Palestinians caught in the violence than the Israeli government’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack?
On the campaign trail, Trump has signaled a lack of engagement in the conflict, suggesting that he would “let this play out.” His one concrete suggestion? In an interview with Univision in November, he said that Israel needed to “do a better job of public relations, frankly, because the other side is beating them at the public relations front.”
He has also pledged to “revoke the student visas of radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities, and we will send them straight back home.” (Muslim ban, anyone?) Does that sound like an appealing counter-message for the 70% of voters under 35 who told NBC News pollsters they disapprove of the way Biden has handled the war?
With 2024 upon us, and the first contests of the Republican presidential primaries set to take place on Jan. 15 in Iowa and on Jan. 23 in New Hampshire, barring some unforeseen development it could become clear very quickly that the much-indicted Trump is bound for the November ballot as the Republican presidential nominee.
A Suffolk University/USA Today poll released on New Year’s Day showed that Trump is out-polling Biden among groups the pollsters described as “stalwarts of the Democratic base,” that is, Hispanics and younger voters. Biden’s support among Black Americans has also slipped significantly, though he still leads Trump.
This is alarming, not catastrophic. Biden, and Democrats, have time to make their case. I remain skeptical that the Democratic base will not come home by November, particularly as Trump continues to embrace his inner dictator on the campaign trail.
“A Republican getting elected isn’t the end. It is the beginning of a much larger fight,” a 23-year-old Wisconsin Starbucks worker and union organizer who is considering withholding his vote from Biden told NBC News. “I want to show the Democratic Party as a young person that you still need to earn our vote and if you don’t, the consequences will be your career.”
Teach Democrats a lesson by electing a democracy-destroying authoritarian?
My mother used to call that cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Here’s why MAGA politicians are deflecting hard & getting VERY NERVOUS about that Epstein list
Ariel Messman-Rucker – January 3, 2024
Alex Jones, Donald Trump, and Marjorie Taylor Greene
After spending decades calling queer people child predators and groomers, we can’t help but notice that Republicans are getting REAL NERVOUS about who is going to be named in the Jeffrey Epstein court documents that are about to be released.
U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska recently ordered that the names of 200 associates of Epstein be released on Wednesday, January 3, causing some members of the GOP to push wild conspiracy theories to explain why Donald Trump is going to appear on documents connected to a child sex trafficker.
It’s almost as if right-wing zealots will say literally anything to stay in power.
The list of names will include victims, associates, and employees and could potentially contain the names of high-profile figures. Trump, former President Bill Clinton, and the U.K.’s Prince Andrew are all believed to be among the names on the list, reports Forbes.
While the names of the two former presidents are expected to appear on Epstein’s flight logs, there is no evidence that either of them spent time on Epstein’s island, where underage girls were taken. But that hasn’t stopped admitted liar Alex Jones and MAGA-die hard Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from floating the theory that the former president’s name only appears on the list because “deep state” federal operatives are trying to destroy his name.
They need a new story because this one is getting tired. Honestly, we’ve known these documents were coming out for a while now; you’d think they would have used that time to come up with something a little more creative—though, that might be impossible because they clearly suffer from MAGA brain rot.
Recently, on his show InfoWars, Jones claimed that the CIA has previously faked lists like this in connection with Israeli and British intelligence agencies. “If they put out a client list, and that’s possible that it could be fake, because Epstein’s dead. And that’s something very possible.” Jones said, according to LGBT Nation.
The ease at which Jones tries to blow off Trump being associated with a known child sex trafficker is especially rich considering he and his guests have repeatedly called LGBTQ+ people pedophiles.
“[Trump] gets devoted to one woman at a time, gets totally obsessed with them, totally nice to them,” Jones continued.
Right, because a man who has been married three times, has been accused of sexual misconduct by 26 women, and allegedly had multiple extra-marital affairs is loyal to one woman. The math ain’t mathing.
Greene, on the other hand, took a different tack and focused her vitriol on Clinton to draw attention away from Trump. “For some us, it’s no surprise at all that Bill Clinton will be named in the Jeffrey Epstein files,” she wrote in a January 3 post on X, formerly Twitter. “We said it a long time ago, but they labeled us conspiracy theorists. There will be lots of names you’ve never heard of, and the IC collected info on them. Pedophiles belong in jail, not on secret government lists.”
Did she forget that Trump’s name will appear on that same list? Are these people capable of not being GIANT hypocrites?
We guess it would be too much to ask for Greene, a woman who has spent years spewing hate at the LGBTQ+ community and calling all queer people pedophiles, to hold members of her party accountable for the heinous acts she accuses us of. It’s better to play a game of ‘Hey, look over there!”
Republicans may close their eyes and pretend there are no right-wingers on the list, but we’ll be here to remind them.
Trump Will Lose 2024 Because Americans Worry ‘He’s Going to Start a World War,’ Biden’s Deputy Campaign Manager Says | Video
Dessi Gomez – January 3, 2024
Joe Biden’s deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks thinks Donald Trump won’t be reelected in 2024 because American voters fear, among other things, a world war.
Fulks appeared on “CNN News Central” with anchor John Berman Wednesday to discuss why Trump shouldn’t be reelected considering the lessons learned in the first term of his presidency.
“American voters know what it feels like to wake up every day and be afraid of what their president is going to tweet, if he’s going to start a world war because he can’t control his temper, right? These are the things that are at stake. And voters know that now,” Fulks said. “They’ve seen Donald Trump, which is exactly why the most people turned out than ever before to send Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House in 2020.”
Fulks added that voters today should look to Hillary Clinton, who largely predicted Trump’s behavior as president while running against him in 2016 simply by taking the embattled politician at his word.
“Sec. Clinton was right: We should have taken Donald Trump at his word. But the difference here is that Donald Trump has now had four years to prove exactly what he would do,” Fulks said.
He added: “So, maybe you’re right, maybe we should take him at his words and his actions because when he was president, he did all the things that he said he would do. And so that’s the major difference that we have now heading into 2024 is that American voters have seen what Donald Trump would do.”
Watch the full clip from the “CNN News Central” segment in the video above.
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Credit…Amir Cohen/Reuters
I’ve been The Times’s foreign affairs columnist since 1995, and one of the most enduring lessons I’ve learned is that there are good seasons and bad seasons in this business, which are defined by the big choices made by the biggest players.
My first decade or so saw its share of bad choices — mainly around America’s response to Sept. 11 — but they were accompanied by a lot of more hopeful ones: the birth of democracy in Russia and Eastern Europe, thanks to the choices of Mikhail Gorbachev. The Oslo peace process, thanks to the choices of Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat. China’s accelerating opening to the world, thanks to the choices of Deng Xiaoping. India’s embrace of globalization, thanks to choices initiated by Manmohan Singh. The expansion of the European Union, the election of America’s first Black president and the evolution of South Africa into a multiracial democracy focused on reconciliation rather than retribution — all the result of good choices from both leaders and led. There were even signs of a world finally beginning to take climate change seriously.
On balance, these choices nudged world politics toward a more positive trajectory — a feeling of more people being connected and able to realize their full potential peacefully. It was exciting to wake up each day and think about which one of these trends to get behind as a columnist.
For the last few years, though, I’ve felt the opposite — that so much of my work was decrying bad choices made by big players: Vladimir Putin’s tightening dictatorship and aggression, culminating in his brutal invasion of Ukraine; Xi Jinping’s reversal of China’s opening; Israel’s election of the most right-wing government in its history; the cascading effects of climate change; the loss of control over America’s southern border; and, maybe most ominously, an authoritarian drift, not only in European countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary but in America’s own Republican Party as well.
To put it another way: If I think about the three pillars that have stabilized the world since I became a journalist in 1978 — a strong America committed to protecting a liberal global order with the help of healthy multilateral institutions like NATO, a steadily growing China always there to buoy the world economy, and mostly stable borders in Europe and the developing world — all three are being shaken by big choices by big players over the last decade. This is triggering a U.S.-China cold war, mass migrations from south to north and an America that has become more unreliable than indispensable.
But that’s not the half of it. Because now that advanced military technologies like drones are readily available, smaller players can wield much more power and project it more widely than ever before, enabling even their bad choices to shake the world. Just look at how shipping companies across the globe are having to reroute their traffic and pay higher insurance rates today because the Houthis, Yemeni tribesmen you never heard about until recently, have acquired drones and rockets and started disrupting sea traffic around the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal.
This is why I referred to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as our first true world war, and why I feel that Hamas’s war with Israel is in some ways our second true world war.
They are being fought on both physical battlefields and digital ones, with huge global reach and implications. Like farmers in Argentina who were stymied when they suddenly lost their fertilizer supplies from Ukraine and Russia. Like young TikTok users around the world observing, opining, protesting and boycotting global chains, such as Zara and McDonald’s, after being enraged by something they saw on a 15-second feed from Gaza. Like a pro-Israel hacker group claiming credit for shutting down some 70 percent of Iran’s gas stations the other day, presumably in retaliation for Iran’s support for Hamas. And so many more.
Indeed, in today’s tightly wired world, it is possible that the war over the Gaza Strip — which is roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. — could decide the next president in Washington, D.C., as some young Democrats abandon President Biden because of his support for Israel.
But before we become too pessimistic, let us remember that these choices are just that: choices. There was nothing inevitable or foreordained about them. People and leaders always have agency — and as observers we must never fall prey to the cowardly and dishonest “well, they had no choice” crowd.
Gorbachev, Deng, Anwar el-Sadat, Menachem Begin, George H.W. Bush and Volodymyr Zelensky, to name but a few, faced excruciating choices, but they chose forks in the road that led to a safer and more prosperous world, at least for a time. Others, alas, have done the opposite.
To close out the year, it’s through this prism of choices that I want to re-examine the story that has consumed me, and I dare say much of the world, since Oct. 7: the Israel-Hamas war. It was not as inevitable as some want you to think.
Credit…Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
I began thinking about this a few weeks ago, when I flew to Dubai to attend the United Nations climate summit. If you’ve never been there, the Dubai airport has some of the longest concourses in the world. And when my Emirates flight landed, we parked close to one end of the B concourse — so when I looked out the window I saw lined up in a perfectly symmetrical row some 15 Emirates long-haul passenger jets, stretching far into the distance. And the thought occurred to me: What is the essential ingredient that Dubai has and Gaza lacks? Because both began, in one sense, as the convergence of sand and seawater at crucial intersections of the world.
It’s not oil — oil plays only a small role in Dubai’s diversified economy today. And it’s not democracy. Dubai is not a democracy and does not aspire to be one. But people are now flocking to live here from all over the world — its population of more than 3.5 million has surged since the outbreak of Covid. Why? The short answer is visionary leadership.
Dubai has benefited from two generations of monarchs in the United Arab Emirates who had a powerful vision of how the U.A.E. in general and the emirate of Dubai in particular could choose to be Arab, modern, pluralistic, globalized and embracing of a moderate interpretation of Islam. Their formula incorporates a radical openness to the world, an emphasis on free markets and education, a ban on extremist political Islam, relatively little corruption, a strong rule of law promulgated from the top down and a relentless commitment to economic diversification, talent recruitment and development.
There are a million things one could criticize about Dubai, from labor rights for the many foreign workers who run the place to real estate booms and busts, overbuilding and the lack of a truly free press or freedom of assembly, to name but a few. But the fact that Arabs and others keep wanting to live, work, play and start businesses here indicates that the leadership has converted its intensely hot promontory on the Persian Gulf into one of the world’s most prosperous crossroads for trade, tourism, transport, innovation, shipping and golf — with a skyline of skyscrapers, one over 2,700 feet high, that would be the envy of Hong Kong or Manhattan.
And it has all been done in the shadow (and with the envy) of a dangerous Islamic Republic of Iran. When I first visited Dubai in 1980, there were still traditional wooden fishing dhows in the harbor. Today, DP World, the Emirati logistics company, manages cargo logistics and port terminals all over the world. Any of Dubai’s neighbors — Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Iran and Saudi Arabia — could have done the same with their similar coastlines, but it was the U.A.E. that pulled it off by making the choices it made.
I toured the site of the U.N.’s global climate conference with the U.A.E.’s minister of state for international cooperation, Reem al-Hashimy, who oversaw the building of Dubai’s massive 2020 Expo City, which was repurposed to hold the event. In three hours spent walking around, we were stopped at least six or seven times by young Emirati women in black robes in groups of two or three, who asked if I could just step aside for a second while they took selfies with Reem or whether I would be their photographer. She was their rock-star role model — this Harvard- and Tufts-educated, nonroyal woman in a leadership role as a government contractor.
Compare that with Gaza, where the role models today are Hamas martyrs in its endless war with Israel.
Among the most ignorant and vile things that have been said about this Gaza war is that Hamas had no choice — that its wars with Israel, culminating on Oct. 7 with a murderous rampage, the kidnappings of Israelis as young as 10 months and as old as 86 and the rape of Israeli women, could somehow be excused as a justifiable jailbreak by pent-up males.
No.
Let’s go to the videotape: In September 2005, Ariel Sharon completed a unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli forces and settlements from Gaza, which Israel occupied in the 1967 war. In short order, Hamas began attacking the crossing points between Gaza and Israel to show that even if Israel was gone, the resistance movement wasn’t over; these crossing points were a lifeline for commerce and jobs, and Israel eventually reduced the number of crossings from six to two.
In January 2006, the Palestinians held elections hoping to give the Palestinian Authority legitimacy to run Gaza and the West Bank. There was a debate among Israeli, Palestinian and Bush administration officials over whether Hamas should be allowed to run in the elections — because it had rejected the Oslo peace accords with Israel.
Yossi Beilin, one of the Israeli architects of Oslo, told me that he and others argued that Hamas should not be allowed to run, as did many members of Fatah, Arafat’s group, who had embraced Oslo and recognized Israel. But the Bush team insisted that Hamas be permitted to run without embracing Oslo, hoping that it would lose and this would be its ultimate refutation. Unfortunately, for complex reasons, Fatah ran unrealistically high numbers of candidates in many districts, dividing the vote, while the more disciplined Hamas ran carefully targeted slates and managed to win the parliamentary majority.
Hamas then faced a critical choice: Now that it controlled the Palestinian parliament, it could work within the Oslo Accords and the Paris protocol that governed economic ties between Israel, Gaza and the West Bank — or not.
Hamas chose not to — making a clash between Hamas and Fatah, which supported Oslo, inevitable. In the end, Hamas violently ousted Fatah from Gaza in 2007, killing some of its officials and making clear that it would not abide by the Oslo Accords or the Paris protocol. That led to the first Israeli economic blockade of Gaza — and what would be 22 years of on-and-off Hamas rocket attacks, Israeli checkpoint openings and closings, wars and cease-fires, all culminating on Oct. 7.
These were fateful choices. Once Sharon pulled Israel out of Gaza, Palestinians were left, for the first time ever, with total control over a piece of land. Yes, it was an impoverished slice of sand and coastal seawater, with some agricultural areas. And it was not the ancestral home of most of its residents. But it was theirs to build anything they wanted.
Had Hamas embraced Oslo and chosen to build its own Dubai, not only would the world have lined up to aid and invest in it; it would have been the most powerful springboard conceivable for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, in the heart of the Palestinian ancestral homeland. Palestinians would have proved to themselves, to Israelis and to the world what they could do when they had their own territory.
But Hamas decided instead to make Gaza a springboard for destroying Israel. To put it another way, Hamas had a choice: to replicate Dubai in 2023 or replicate Hanoi in 1968. It chose to replicate Hanoi, whose Củ Chi tunnel network served as the launchpad for the ’68 Tet offensive.
Hamas is not simply engaged in some pure-as-the-driven-snow anticolonial struggle against Israel. Only Hamas’s useful idiots on U.S. college campuses would believe that. Hamas is engaged in a raw power struggle with Fatah over who will control Gaza and the West Bank, and it’s engaged in a power struggle in the region — alongside other pro-Muslim Brotherhood parties and regimes (like Turkey and Qatar) — against pro-Western monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and the U.A.E. and military-led regimes like Egypt’s.
In that struggle, Hamas wanted Gaza isolated and in conflict with Israel because that allowed Hamas to maintain its iron-fisted political and Islamist grip over the strip, forgoing elections and controlling all the smuggling routes in and out, which funded its tunnels and war machine and the lifestyle of its leaders and loyalists — every bit as much as Iran’s Islamic regime today needs its hostility with America to justify its iron grip over Iranian society and the Revolutionary Guard’s control of all of its smuggling. Every bit as much as Hezbollah needs its conflict with Israel to justify building its own army inside Lebanon, controlling its drug smuggling and not permitting any Lebanese government hostile to its interests to govern, no matter who is elected. And every bit as much as Vladimir Putin needs his conflict with NATO to justify his grip on power, the militarization of Russian society and his and his cronies’ looting of the state coffers.
This is now a common strategy for consolidating and holding power forever by a single political faction and disguising it with an ideology of resistance. It’s no wonder they all support one another.
There is so much to criticize about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, which I have consistently opposed. But please, spare me the Harvard Yard nonsense that this war is all about the innocent, colonized oppressed and the evil, colonizing oppressors; that Israel alone was responsible for the isolation of Gaza; and that the only choice Hamas had for years was to create an underground “skyline” of tunnels up to 230 feet deep (contra Dubai) and that its only choice on Oct. 7 was martyrdom.
Credit…Pool photo by Menahem Kahana
Hamas has never wavered from being more interested in destroying the Jewish state than in building a Palestinian state — because that goal of annihilating Israel is what has enabled Hamas to justify its hold on power indefinitely, even though Gaza has known only economic misery since Hamas seized control.
We do those Palestinians who truly want and deserve a state of their own no favors by pretending otherwise.
Gazans know the truth. Fresh polling data reported by AFP indicates that on the eve of Oct. 7, “many Gazans were hostile to Hamas ahead of the group’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel, with some describing its rule as a second occupation.”
As Hamas’s grip over Gaza is loosened, I predict we will hear a lot more of these Gazan voices on what they really think of Hamas, and it will be embarrassing to Hamas’s apologists on U.S. campuses.
But our story about agency and choices does not stop there. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister — 16 years — also made choices. And even before this war, he made terrible ones — for Israel and for Jews all over the world.
The list is long: Before this war, Netanyahu actively worked to keep the Palestinians divided and weak by strengthening Hamas in Gaza with billions of dollars from Qatar, while simultaneously working to discredit and delegitimize the more moderate Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, committed to Oslo and nonviolence in the West Bank. That way Netanyahu could tell every U.S. president, in effect: I’d love to make peace with the Palestinians, but they are divided, and moreover, the best of them can’t control the West Bank and the worst of them control Gaza. So what do you want from me?
Netanyahu’s goal has always been to destroy the Oslo option once and for all. In that, Bibi and Hamas have always needed each other: Bibi to tell the United States and Israelis that he had no choice, and Hamas to tell Gazans and its new and naïve supporters around the world that the Palestinians’ only choice was armed struggle led by Hamas.
The only exit from this mutually assured destruction is to bring in some transformed version of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — or a whole new P.L.O.-appointed government of Palestinian technocrats — in partnership with moderate Arab states like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. But when I raise that with many Israelis right now, they tell me, “Tom, it’s not the time. No one wants to hear it.”
That makes me want to scream: No, it is exactly the time. Don’t they get it? Netanyahu’s greatest political achievement has been to persuade Israelis and the world that it’s never the right time to talk about the morally corrosive occupation and how to help build a credible Palestinian partner to take it off Israel’s hands.
He and the settlers wore everyone down. When I covered the State Department in the early 1990s, West Bank settlements were routinely described by U.S. officials as “obstacles to peace.” But that phrase was gradually dropped. The Trump administration even decided to stop calling the West Bank “occupied” territory.
The reason I insist on talking about these choices now is because Israel is being surrounded by what I call Iran’s landcraft carriers (as opposed to our aircraft carriers): Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq. Iran is squeezing Israel into a multifront war with its proxies. I truly worry for Israel.
But Israel will have neither the sympathy of the world that it needs nor the multiple allies it needs to confront this Iranian octopus, nor the Palestinian partners it needs to govern any post-Hamas Gaza, nor the lasting support of its best friend in the world, Joe Biden, unless it is ready to choose a long-term pathway for separating from the Palestinians with an improved, legitimate Palestinian partner.
Biden has been shouting that in Netanyahu’s ears in their private calls.
For all these reasons, if Netanyahu keeps refusing because, once again, politically, the time is not right for him, Biden will have to choose, too — between America’s interests and Netanyahu’s.
Netanyahu has been out to undermine the cornerstone of U.S. Middle East policy for the last three decades — the Oslo framework of two states for two people that guarantees Palestinian statehood and Israeli security, which neither side ever gave its best shot. Destroying the Oslo framework is not in America’s interest.
In sum, this war is so ugly, deadly and painful, it is no wonder that so many Palestinians and Israelis want to just focus on survival and not on any of the choices that got them here. The Haaretz writer Dahlia Scheindlin put it beautifully in a recent essay:
The situation today is so terrible that people run from reality as they run from rockets — and hide in the shelter of their blind spots. It’s pointless to wag fingers. The only thing left to do is try and change that reality.
For me, choosing that path will always be in season.
Turkey blocks passage of British minehunter ships destined for Ukraine
Dmytro Basmat – January 2, 2024
Two British minehunter ships destined for Ukraine will not be able to travel through Turkish waters, President Erdogan’s Directorate of Communications announced on Jan. 2, citing an international pact.
“Our pertinent allies have been duly apprised that the mine-hunting ships donated to Ukraine by the United Kingdom will not be allowed to pass through the Turkish Straits to the Black Sea as long as the war continues,” a statement from the President’s communications office read.
Referring to an international convention which governs maritime traffic in the region, the Turkish government emphasized that Russian and Ukrainian warships are prohibited from entering Turkish Straits due to the ongoing war.
As per the Montreux Convention, warships from non-belligerent nations are allowed passage through the straits during wartime. However, the convention also states that Ankara retains the ultimate authority over the passage of all warships, if Turkey perceives a risk of being involved in the conflict.
The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense revealedits plan to donate Sandown class vessels from Britain’s Royal Navy last month, amid the ongoing disbursement of sea mines in the Black Sea. The donated minehunter ships were intended to clear sea mines for the safe passage of larger ships, as well as “help save lives at sea and open up vital export routes.”
The Netherlands has also previously pledged two Alkmaar class minehunter ships to Ukraine to arrive in the Black Sea by 2025. It is now unclear if the intended donation will reach Ukraine.
Hundreds of mines have been spread throughout the Black Sea since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. On several occasions, civilian ships or navy ships belonging to countries not party to the war struck sea mines.
