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Did the Trump campaign collude with Vladimir Putin to win the
2016 election? Maybe. We await Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s next
move to learn more about that. But in the meantime, why aren’t more
members of Congress or the media discussing the Trump transition team’s
pretty brazen collusion with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
to undermine both U.S. government policy and international law?
Shouldn’t that be treated as a major scandal?
Thanks to Mueller’s ongoing investigation, we now know that prior to
President Donald Trump’s inauguration, members of his inner circle went to bat on behalf of Israel,
and specifically on behalf of illegal Israeli settlements in the
occupied Palestinian territories, behind the scenes and in opposition to
official U.S. foreign policy. That’s the kind of collusion with a
foreign state that has gotten a lot of attention with respect to the
Kremlin – but colluding with Israel seems to be of far less interest,
strangely.
Here’s what we learned last week when Mueller’s team unveiled its
plea deal with Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Gen.
Michael Flynn. In December 2016, the United Nations Security Council was
debating a draft resolution that
condemned Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied territories as a
“flagrant violation under international law” that was “dangerously
imperiling the viability” of an independent Palestinian state.
The Obama administration had made it clear that the U.S. was planning to abstain on the resolution, while noting that “the settlements have no legal validity” and observing how “the settlement problem has gotten so much worse that it is now putting at
risk the … two-state solution.” (Rhetorically, at least, U.S.
opposition to Israeli settlements has been a long-standing and
bipartisan position for decades: Ronald Reagan called for “a real settlement freeze” in 1982 while George H.W. Bush tried to curb Israeli settlement-building plans by briefly cutting off U.S. loan guarantees to the Jewish state in 1991.)
So what did members of the Trump team do, as they listened to loud
objections to the U.N. resolution from the Netanyahu government while
counting down the days till Trump’s inauguration in January 2017?
“On or about December 22, 2016, a very senior member of the
Presidential Transition Team directed Flynn to contact officials from
foreign governments, including Russia, to learn where each government
stood on the resolution and to influence those governments to delay the
vote or defeat the resolution,” reads the statement of offense against Flynn, who pleaded guilty
to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador
to the U.S. “On or about December 22, 2016, Flynn contacted the Russian
Ambassador about the pending vote. Flynn informed the Russian
Ambassador about the incoming administration’s opposition to the
resolution, and requested that Russia vote against or delay the
resolution.”
Who was the “very senior member” of the transition team who “directed” Flynn to do all this? Multiple news outlets
have confirmed that it was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and main
point man on the Middle East peace process. “Jared called Flynn and told
him you need to get on the phone to every member of the Security
Council and tell them to delay the vote,” a Trump transition official revealed to BuzzFeed News on Friday, adding that Kushner told Flynn “this was a top priority for the president.”
According to BuzzFeed, “After hanging up, Flynn told the entire room
[at the Trump transition team HQ] that they’d have to start pushing to
lobby against the U.N. vote, saying ‘the president wants this done
ASAP.’” Flynn’s guilty plea, BuzzFeed continued, revealed “for the first
time how Trump transition officials solicited Russia’s help to head off
the UN vote and undermine the Obama administration’s policy on Middle
East peace before ever setting foot in the White House.”
None of this has been contested. In fact, on Sunday, Kushner made a rare public appearance
at the Saban Forum in Washington, D.C., to discuss the Trump
administration’s plans for the Middle East and was welcomed by the
forum’s sponsor, the Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban, who said
he “personally wanted to thank” Kushner for “taking steps to try and
get the United Nations Security Council to not go along with what ended
up being an abstention by the U.S.” Kushner’s response? The first
son-in-law smiled, nodded, and mouthed “thank you” to Saban.
Meanwhile, the Israelis have been pretty forthcoming about their own
role in all of this, too. On Monday, Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to
the U.S. and a close friend and ally of Netanyahu, told
Politico’s Susan Glasser that, in December 2016, “obviously we reached
out to [the Trump transition team] in the hope that they would help us,”
and “we were hopeful that they would speak” to other governments “in
order to prevent this vote from happening.”
Got that? The Trump transition team — in the form of key Trump
advisers Kushner and Flynn — reached out to the Russian government in
order to undermine the U.S. government because the Israeli government
asked them to.
Where’s the outrage? How is the sheer “scope and audacity” of the
Trump-Netanyahu backchannels — to quote one U.S. official who spoke to
me on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak
publicly on this issue — not a bigger story? For a start, as University
of Chicago law professors Daniel Hemel and Eric Posner argued in a New York Times op-ed on Monday, the much-mocked Logan Act
of 1799 remains “a serious criminal statute that bars citizens from
undermining the foreign policy actions of the sitting president.” These
two legal scholars point out that “if Mr. Flynn violated the Logan Act,
then so did the ‘very senior’ official who directed his actions. If that
official is Mr. Kushner, then Mr. Kushner could go to jail.”
Then there is the issue of Middle East policy itself. It wasn’t
outsourced to the Israelis by Trump and Co. only during the transition
or only over settlements. The outsourcing has continued in office.
Tomorrow, Trump is expected to announce
that the United States will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of
Israel — another key Israeli demand that every single previous
president, Republican and Democrat, has resisted. The decision on
Jerusalem is so contentious that it both undermines any chance of reviving the peace process and threatens to cost lives — not just those of Israelis and Palestinians, but of Americans too.
What was it that James Mattis, secretary of defense and former head of U.S. Central Command, said
back in 2013 at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado? He pointed out
that the chances of a two-state solution were “starting to ebb because
of the settlements,” before adding: “I paid a military security price
every day as a commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as
biased in support of Israel.”
Until Mueller issues his final report, we can all agree to disagree
on whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
For now, however, what we do know for sure and what seems beyond doubt
is that Flynn and Kushner colluded with Netanyahu and Dermer, on behalf
of Trump, to make America not great again, but much less secure.
Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Trump’s own defense secretary.
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