Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 139
October 24, 2023
October 24, 2023
Another of Trump’s lawyers has pleaded guilty to charges as part of a cooperation agreement with the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney’s office. This morning, Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting false statements and writings as part of the plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. She is the fourth of the 19 people charged in the Georgia racketeering case to plead guilty.
In late September, bail bondsman Scott Hall, who helped to breach voting equipment and data in Coffee County, Georgia, pleaded guilty; lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro pleaded guilty last week.
Ellis opposed Trump’s 2016 nomination but supported him after his election in frequent television appearances as a “constitutional law attorney” although she had not worked on election law. After Trump saw her on the Fox News Channel, Ellis became a “senior legal advisor” to Trump’s reelection campaign.
After he lost, she was a very visible television spokesperson for the Big Lie that the election was stolen. On November 19, 2020, she joined Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee to insist that Democrats had rigged the voting in majority-Black cities and that communist forces in Venezuela had tampered with U.S. voting machines. She also peppered her social media feed with MAGA statements, mixing it up with anti-Trump figures, making her a more public figure than the other lawyers.
Nonetheless, Trump declined to cover her legal fees after her indictment as a co-defendant in the Georgia racketeering case, possibly because she had supported Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid. While Ellis said she had stopped supporting the former president because of his “narcissistic” tendencies, she continued to echo Trump’s rhetoric. In September she raised more than $216,000 for her legal defense fund from crowdfunding, claiming she was fighting “a weaponized government and the criminalization of the practice of law.”
Today, in a court of law rather than in front of the television cameras, she sounded quite different.
“As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously, and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings,” a tearful Ellis told the court. “I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information.” (Ellis worked closely with older Trump lawyer Giuliani; she will be 39 on November 1.)
“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” Ellis said in court. “I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse. For those failures of mine, your honor, I have taken responsibility already before the Colorado bar, who censured me, and I now take responsibility before this court and apologize to the people of Georgia.”
Ellis’s plea agreement spelled out the statements she made that were lies. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, this means the court has identified the specific lies that made up the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and that Ellis will testify that they are lies. Those claims include the lie that there were 96,000 fraudulent mail-in ballots, that 2,506 felons voted illegally, that 66,248 underage people illegally registered to vote, that 2,423 unregistered people voted, that more than 10,000 dead people voted, that Fulton County election workers counted ballots with no oversight.
In the civil case in New York in which Trump, his older sons, two employees, and the Trump Organization are on trial for fraud, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen testified today that he and the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, would reverse engineer Trump’s financial statements to meet whatever number Trump wanted.
His testimony suggested that the alleged massive fortune on which Trump based his identity, as well as his presidential bid, was an illusion.
In a series of motions filed overnight, Trump’s defense team appears to be throwing anything it can at the wall to challenge the election conspiracy case in Washington, D.C.
But as Trump’s legal peril escalates, Republicans in the House of Representatives continue to reject any House speaker who does not embrace Trump. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) today said, “We need a speaker of the House that reflects the values and the views of Republican voters across the country, and they support President Trump and they support his agenda.” Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX) suggested nominating Trump himself for the job.
CNN’s Jake Tapper has had enough. “I'm covering life and death issues, serious tragedies, serious momentous occurrences here in Israel and of course in Gaza,” he said today. But, he said, “We have to interrupt this for one moment to cover the complete and utter clown car that is the House Republicans' Speaker's race.”
House Republicans today selected Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN) as their choice for the post, only to have him drop out of the race after Trump, apparently angry that Emmer had dodged a question about whether he supported Trump’s nomination for president, turned on him.
Trump went on social media to call Emmer, whose work in Congress has earned him a 79% lifetime approval rating from the right-wing Heritage Action for America, a “Globalist RINO,” meaning “Republican In Name Only.” Trump warned that Emmer “never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement, or the breadth and scope of MAGA…. I believe he has now learned his lesson, because he is saying that he is Pro-Trump all the way, but who can ever be sure? Has he only changed because that’s what it takes to win?”
Trump ally Ohio Representative Jim Jordan’s failure to win the speakership even after threatening his colleagues showed that Trump cannot put his chosen candidate into the chair, but Emmer’s failure to win the speakership suggests Trump’s opposition can keep a candidate out of it.
Just hours after Emmer dropped out, the House Republican conference threw up a fourth candidate for speaker: Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Johnson is a self-described Christian and staunch Trump ally. He defended the former president during both of his impeachment trials and fought for Texas v. Pennsylvania, the key lawsuit contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election (the Supreme Court decided that Texas did not have standing to sue). He voted against certifying the 2020 election results.
Johnson won the conference’s nomination with 128 votes to 29 votes for Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, who only entered Congress in 2021. In an interesting sign that Republicans might be reconsidering their rejection of former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) three weeks ago, 43 Republicans voted for him even though he was not standing for the position. Johnson told reporters he expects a floor vote at noon tomorrow.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has offered a bipartisan deal in which Democrats would help Republicans elect a speaker. In exchange for their help, Democrats have said they want a candidate who is not an election denier and who agrees to hold up-or-down votes for bills that have broad support across the parties. Such a deal would mean some security for future elections. It would also mean that a measure funding Ukraine, which is popular across Congress but which the extremists oppose, would get a hearing.
So would funding the government.
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Notes:
https://www.newsweek.com/maga-wants-their-money-back-after-jenna-ellis-pleads-guilty-1837356
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/us/georgia-trump-scott-hall-guilty-plea.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-lawyer-jenna-ellis-tears-up-court-georgia-guilty-plea-2023-10
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-trump-train-finally-crashed-for-jenna-ellis
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/trump-motions-to-dismiss-jan-6-case
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/24/politics/takeaways-michael-cohen-donald-trump/index.html
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance Cooperation vs. ImmunityThe Trump administration brought out the best and the worst in lawyers. Early on, as a shell-shocked nation watched civil rights abuses take shape, it was the lawyers who flocked to airports to try and intervene in Trump’s Muslim ban. Civil rights lawyers who tried to help migrants who were being denied the right to seek asylum and separated from their …Read more8 hours ago · 241 likes · 49 comments · Joyce Vancehttps://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24079495-criminal-accusation-for-ellis-102423
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/24/mike-johnson-house-speaker-republican-candidate
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/house-speaker-vote-live-updates-10-24-2023/
Twitter:
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October 23, 2023
The word of the day is “conversations.”
The White House and the Commerce Department announced the designation of 31 communities across 32 states and Puerto Rico in the first phase of the Regional Innovation and Technology Hub Program (Tech Hubs Program). The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law in August 2022, authorized the creation of these hubs, where private industry, state and local governments, colleges and universities, labor unions, Tribal communities, and nonprofit organizations work together to innovate, create jobs, and protect our supply chains.
The administration explained that because economic growth and opportunity has been “clustered in a few cities on the coasts,” the tech hubs selected were spread across the country. Nearly three quarters of them are in small cities or rural areas, and more than three quarters of them directly support historically underserved communities. The government will invest $500 million of public money in these hubs to attract private investment, hoping to create high-paying jobs and support innovation across the country.
The hubs focus on autonomous systems for manufacturing and transportation, drugs and medical devices, healthcare, clean energy, semiconductors, and so on. They “will boost U.S. manufacturing, create more good-paying jobs and bolster U.S. global competitiveness,” said Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves.
The administration is trying to sell the idea of investing in America rather than turning the economy over to the operation of markets. The latter has been the nation’s focus since 1981, but that ideology has not nurtured the economy so much as concentrated wealth among a few individuals. The White House has called instead for government investment in new industries, and it noted today that such investment has prompted record private investments in clean power and job growth in clean energy.
Private companies have announced investments of about $133 billion in clean energy production, which has in turn helped to spur the strong job growth and robust economic growth. Employers have added about 260,000 jobs a month this year, on average.
Today the ongoing United Auto Workers strike spread to a key Stellantis plant, where 6,800 workers walked off their jobs making Ram pickup trucks, Stellantis’s top-selling vehicle in the U.S. The strike will cost the company an estimated $110 million a week. There are now more than 40,000 UAW workers on strike. Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis have offered what union leader Shawn Fain says are record contracts but still not in line with the company’s record profits.
The UAW has reached a tentative deal with General Dynamics, covering about 1,100 workers who make military vehicles at defense contracting facilities. Union members still have to approve the agreement.
Conversations continue in foreign affairs as well.
Today is the fortieth anniversary of the 1983 bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 U.S. military personnel in the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. Minutes after the first bombing on that day, a second suicide bomber killed 58 French paratroopers. Six Lebanese civilians also died. Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken recalled that tragedy and blamed it on Hezbollah militants, a charge Hezbollah denies.
“As we reflect on this day, and in light of the ongoing challenges in Lebanon and the region, we remain committed to building a brighter future for Lebanon, the Lebanese people, and the broader Middle East,” Blinken said.
Attacks from Hezbollah on Israel and Israeli retaliation have been increasing since the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut has told American citizens who want to leave that they should go now. The Biden administration has warned Israel not to launch a preemptive strike against Hezbollah as the tensions on the border rise. The U.S. is also sending more air defense systems to the Middle East and is moving the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike group to the Middle East to discourage attacks.
President Biden, Secretary Blinken and their teams have been talking constantly with those involved in the Middle East and elsewhere, trying to build coalitions to stave off an expansion of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, backed by Iran.
On Sunday, after Biden spoke with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Pope Francis, Biden spoke with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the United Kingdom. The latter group issued a joint statement reiterating their support for Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism and also called for all parties to keep within the bounds of international humanitarian law, including the protection of civilians.
Today, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan submitted to the Turkish parliament a bill approving Sweden’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a step he has been delaying to pressure Sweden into clamping down on members of the Kurdistan Workers Party in Sweden, a party that aims to create an autonomous Kurdish region that would include parts of Turkey.
While taking pains to emphasize that it is not making decisions for Israel, the U.S. has been stressing to Israeli leaders its discomfort with what seems to be a lack of a plan for a careful ground invasion of Gaza or for what would come after the ground operation. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller today declined to detail private conversations but offered: “[I]n all of our conversations we continue to talk to them about the importance of having meaningful goals, meaningful objectives, and a plan to achieve those objectives.”
Miller used the word “conversation” twenty times in his press conference.
Tomorrow, Secretary Blinken will travel to New York City for a United Nations Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East. He will also meet with his counterparts and with officials of the United Nations.
As Israeli airstrikes pound Gaza and Hamas rockets fire back, relief trucks continue to trickle across the Egyptian border into Gaza. Fourteen crossed on Sunday; another small group today. Fuel, which is necessary to take the salt out of water as well as for medical care and transportation, is still embargoed out of Israeli concerns Hamas will take it for military purposes. Also today, Hamas released two more hostages, elderly Israeli women this time, for a total of four so far.
Conversations of a different sort are going on among the Republican members of the House of Representatives, but they are unwilling to talk to their Democratic colleagues, who have repeatedly offered to work with those Republicans who reject MAGA extremism.
Republicans remain unable to agree on a candidate for speaker. So far, they have shut down the House for three weeks, eating up 20 of the 45 days the continuing resolution bought for them to come up with measures to fund the government.
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Notes:
https://www.eda.gov/funding/programs/regional-technology-and-innovation-hubs
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/roaring-us-economy-foreign-murk-feeds-home-bias-2023-10-18/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/22/economy/stocks-week-ahead-q3-gdp/index.html.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/22/economy/stocks-week-ahead-q3-gdp/index.html
https://www.state.gov/secretary-blinkens-travel-to-the-united-nations/
https://www.state.gov/40th-anniversary-of-the-beirut-marine-corps-barracks-bombing/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/10/22/joint-statement-on-israel-2/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/22/israel-gaza-war-hezbollah-iran/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/us/politics/biden-israel-hezbollah-war.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/23/us/politics/israel-us-gaza-invasion.html
https://www.state.gov/briefings/department-press-briefing-october-23-2023/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/23/business/uaw-stellantis-strike/index.html
October 22, 2023
October 21, 2023
Today, a convoy of 20 trucks crossed into Gaza from Egypt to bring food, water, and hospital equipment. Secretary of State Antony Blinken thanked “our partners in Egypt and Israel, and the United Nations, for facilitating the safe passage of these shipments through the Rafah border crossing” after “days of exhaustive U.S. diplomatic engagement in the region and an understanding President Biden reached with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi during his recent historic visit to Israel.” Since then, Special Envoy David Satterfield has worked to get the aid flowing.
Israel had vowed not to allow any aid to Gaza until Hamas released the 210 hostages it is holding, but Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant explained that officials had to back down: “The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”
The convoy is a test to see if Hamas will permit the aid to get to civilians. Blinken warned that if it interferes, “it will hinder the international community from being able to provide this aid. Civilian lives must be protected, and assistance must urgently reach those in need. We will continue to work closely with partners in the region to stress the importance of adhering to the law of war, supporting those who are trying to get to safety or provide assistance, and facilitating access to food, water, medical care, and shelter for citizens wherever they are located in Gaza.”
While more than 200 trucks are waiting at the border and Egypt says the crossing is now open permanently, the next convoy is not expected to cross the border until Monday, even as conditions in Gaza worsen.
The U.S. is continuing to work to get U.S. citizens and their families out of Gaza through Egypt.
Also today, Egypt held a hastily convened peace summit with leaders from Arab countries, Europe, Africa, and North America to figure out how to stop the violence in Gaza. While the parties were unable to agree on a statement, there was a broad consensus that Israel must abide by the laws of war, which prohibit making war on civilians. (Israel claims it honors this prohibition as it tries to eliminate Hamas and its infrastructure, and also to recover the hostages Hamas is holding. Hostage-taking is also prohibited by the rules of war.)
Neither Israel nor Hamas was at the meeting. The head of the Palestinian Authority (which has partial control of the West Bank), Mahmoud Abbas, spoke for the Palestinians. He decried what he called war crimes as Israeli airstrikes kill civilians, and called for a two-state solution to the crisis, although a recent Gallup poll suggests a strong majority of Palestinians do not support that effort.
Abbas’s call harks back to the longstanding plan for two independent states that Hamas rejects and that the 2020 Abraham Accords negotiated by the Trump administration undermined by normalizing relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain without providing for a Palestinian state. Since then, Israel has accelerated the settlement of Israelis on Palestinian lands in the West Bank.
The call to resurrect a two-state solution was echoed by Egypt’s president Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who do not want Palestinians displaced by Israel to destabilize their countries. Chinese leader Xi Jinping backed that idea on Thursday in his first statement on the crisis, and in his own speech on Thursday, Biden also said, “We cannot give up on a two-state solution.”
Meanwhile, Israel has increased its warnings to those in the north of Gaza of an approaching ground invasion, in which those who do not evacuate risk being “identified as a partner in a terrorist organization.”
As this conflict plays out, observers have already identified widespread disinformation about it on social media. “X,” formerly known as Twitter, is one of the worst actors.
In the U.S., such disinformation pits Americans against each other, and today the U.S. sent a cable to more than 100 countries warning that U.S. intelligence officials assess that Russia is using such methods to affect the elections around the world. A senior State Department official told reporters that Russia was so successful in amplifying disinformation about the 2020 U.S. election and the COVID-19 pandemic that the Kremlin decided to up its game.
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Notes:
https://www.state.gov/humanitarian-assistance-for-gaza/
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-759762
https://www.mei.edu/publications/one-state-solution-existential-threat-jordan
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/world/middleeast/peace-summit-gaza-egypt.html
https://www.turkiyenewspaper.com/politics/16829
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/19/china/china-xi-israel-hamas-ceasefire-comment-intl-hnk/index.html
https://news.gallup.com/poll/512828/palestinians-lack-faith-biden-two-state-solution.aspx
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/21/idf-prepares-for-ground-invasion-00122881
https://apnews.com/article/palestinian-jordan-egypt-israel-refugee-502c06d004767d4b64848d878b66bd3d
https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/10/17/magazine/two-state-solution-israel-palestine/
Twitter (X)
https://twitter.com/WorldAffairsPro/status/1715673980231639142
https://twitter.com/CBSEveningNews/status/1715918168365944971
October 21, 2023
October 20, 2023
Last night, President Joe Biden spoke to the nation from the Oval Office to shore up U.S. support for Ukraine and Israel. “[H]istory has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction. They keep going, and the cost and the threats to America and to the world keep rising,” he said.
“[I]f we walk away and let Putin erase Ukraine’s independence, would-be aggressors around the world would be emboldened to try the same,” he said. “The risk of conflict and chaos could spread in other parts of the world—in the Indo-Pacific… [and] especially in the Middle East.”
Biden noted that Russian president Vladimir Putin has suggested he might like to take part of Poland, while one of his top advisors has called three other NATO allies, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Russia’s “Baltic provinces.” Russian aggression there would draw the U.S. into war.
Iran is supporting Russia in Ukraine, he noted, and “it’s supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups” in the Middle East.
“The United States and our partners across the region are working to build a better future for the Middle East, one where the Middle East is more stable, better connected to its neighbors, and—through innovative projects like the India–Middle East–Europe rail corridor that I announced this year at the summit of the world’s biggest economies—more predictable markets, more employment, less rage, less grievances, less war when connected. It…would benefit the people of the Middle East, and it would benefit us.”
Biden explained that he was sending to Congress “an urgent budget request to fund America’s national security needs, to support our critical partners, including Israel and Ukraine. It’s a smart investment that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations, help us keep American troops out of harm’s way, help us build a world that is safer, more peaceful, and more prosperous for our children and grandchildren,” he said.
That money, he said, would harden the Iron Dome that protects Israel’s skies after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas that took more than 1,300 lives. But he also said that the U.S. “remains committed to the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and to self-determination. The actions of Hamas terrorists don’t take that right away”
He explained that he had discussed with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “the critical need for Israel to operate by the laws of war. That means protecting civilians in combat as best as they can. The people of Gaza urgently need food, water, and medicine.” Biden secured an agreement for such relief when he visited Israel on Wednesday, but so far the route from Egypt has not opened, at least in part because Israel and Egypt can’t agree on a way to inspect the trucks to make sure they are not carrying weapons.
Ethan Bronner and Henry Meyer of Bloomberg reported yesterday that President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have pressured Israel more deeply than any recent administration, demanding they adjust their planned ground assault on Gaza to minimize civilian casualties and think about what happens when the assault is over. U.S. officials are worried that Israel’s response to the October 7 attack could prompt Hezbollah to join the war, scuttling the administration’s attempt to stabilize the region and drawing the U.S. further into the conflict.
But Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners who have backed further settlements in the West Bank are eager to exact revenge on the Palestinians there, killing at least seven in the last week. U.S. officials told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times that “the representatives of those settlers in the cabinet are withholding tax money owed the Palestinian Authority [that exercises authority over the West Bank], making it harder for it to keep the West Bank as under control as it has been since the start of the Hamas war.” Netanyahu, who has been charged with corruption and fraud, needs those partners in order to remain prime minister and thus stay out of jail.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is worsening as Israel has launched extensive airstrikes, killing what U.N. observers estimate to be more than 2,800 Palestinians, including several relatives of former representative Justin Amash (Libertarian-Michigan) who had been sheltering in a church. It has also driven about a million people of the 2.3 million in Gaza from their homes. Hospitals are closed, and food and water are scarce.
Foreign policy journalist Laura Rozen of Diplomatic gave Biden credit for his attempt to calm the region, support Israel, and protect Palestinian civilians but was, she said, “very worried” that the conflict would drag out and “inflame & destabilize [the] region & spark blowback & it will be very very ugly.” The U.S. had not been able to get “a single truck of aid into Gaza, much less set up a quasi-safe zone…five days after it thought it had a deal to do so.” It is not helping that X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, is amplifying disinformation about the crisis.
The U.S. and governments in Europe have pressured Israel not to go into Gaza while diplomats in Qatar try to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas. Today, Hamas released two dual U.S. citizens who had been held hostage in Gaza.
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Roger Marshall (R-KS) took a different tack, noting that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (believed to be the group responsible for the hospital explosion in Gaza) received more than $130 million in cryptocurrency in the past two years, and researchers believe this is just a fraction of the total. Cryptocurrency funds crime and terror, they wrote: more than $20 billion in illicit transactions last year “that we know of.”
Those exchanges are currently unregulated, and Warren and Marshall have introduced the bipartisan Digital Asset Anti–Money Laundering Act to bring digital assets under the same rules that regulate traditional payment systems.
Today the administration asked Congress for a little over $105 billion in funding for national security. The package would devote $61.4 billion to support Ukraine (some of it to replenish U.S. stockpiles after sending weapons to Ukraine); $14.3 billion to Israel for air and missile defense systems; $9.15 billion for humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Gaza, and other places; $7.4 billion for initiatives in the Indo-Pacific; and $14 billion for more agents at the southwestern border, new machines to detect fentanyl, and more courts to process asylum cases.
But Congress is currently unable to act. Seventeen days after the extremists in the House Republican conference ousted then-speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the Republican civil war continues to paralyze the House. After key Trump ally Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) lost a second round of balloting on Wednesday, his allies apparently spent Thursday threatening the colleagues who didn’t vote for him.
Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) explained: “So far I've had four death threats. I've been evicted from my office in Colorado…because the landlord is mad with my voting record on the Speaker issue. And everybody in the conference is getting this…. Family members have been approached and threatened, all kinds of things are going on….”
The threats simply hardened Jordan’s opposition. He lost a third ballot today, with 25 Republicans voting against him, and in a secret ballot the Republicans took privately over whether to keep him as their nominee for speaker, only 86 voted for Jordan, with 112 against. The House recessed for the weekend, despite the mounting crises that need to be addressed.
Having a key lieutenant in the House speaker’s chair, where he could, among other things, smear Biden by pushing to impeach him in the months before the election, would have been a huge boost for Trump. That Republicans refused to get behind Jordan even when he forced them into a public vote and then threatened them, much as Trump threatened them to line up behind him in the past, suggests they are starting to fear Trump less than they have for years.
Three plea deals in the past two days have intensified Trump’s legal troubles. Two of his own lawyers, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, have pleaded guilty to some of the charges brought by Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis in the racketeering case against Trump and 17 others.
Yesterday, Powell pleaded guilty to trying to tamper with voting machines. In exchange for a lenient sentence, she will have to testify against others. As she was the person Trump considered tapping as a special counsel to investigate alleged voter fraud, she was at a key meeting with Trump allies Rudy Giuliani, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and former Overstock chief executive officer Patrick Byrne.
Powell’s unexpected jump to the prosecution side—she was lying about the election just this week—put pressure on others, and today Chesebro also flipped. He was allegedly the one who designed the false electors scheme, although he has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to file false documents. In exchange for a lenient sentence, he has to turn over any evidence he has and testify truthfully against others in the case, including Trump.
In Michigan, a Republican man charged with participating in the false-elector plot also entered into a cooperation agreement yesterday, meaning he will talk to investigators and, if necessary, testify.
Finally, today, Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the fraud case against Trump and the Trump Organization, fined Trump $5,000 for violating the gag order he had imposed on October 3. Trump told Engoron that day he had taken down a social media post disparaging one of Engoron’s law clerks, but it remained up on his campaign website.
Engoron warned Trump that “future violations, whether intentional or unintentional, will subject the violator to far more severe sanctions, which may include, but are not limited to, steeper financial penalties, holding Donald Trump in contempt of court, and possibly imprisoning him pursuant to New York Judiciary Law.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/18/politics/jim-jordan-speaker-bid/index.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cryptocurrency-feeds-hamass-terrorism-e0db54f5
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-ukraine-israel-budget-3762a0bdf00653e3c8a38175d3c3d3cb
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/20/gaza-aid-egypt-rafah-crossing/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/18/jim-jordan-maga-intimidation-threats/
https://apnews.com/article/israel-netanyahu-corruption-trial-courts-4e18ed8f34e65707bd47e37696da4705
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/opinion/biden-speech-israel-gaza.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/19/politics/sidney-powell-plea-takeaways/index.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/7-accounts-warp-israel-hamas-war-news-x-musk-rcna121465
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October 19, 2023
October 19, 2023
This book tour has finally caught up with me and I’ve hit the wall. Must get a decent night’s sleep, so will leave it here and pick it up tomorrow. Lots of pieces moving on lots of chess boards, but I think—hope!— they can all wait a day.
Buddy’s got more time to play with his camera since I'm away, and he’s doing it to some purpose.
[Photo by Buddy Poland]
October 18, 2023
October 18, 2023
President Joe Biden spoke today in Tel Aviv, Israel, reiterating support for the Israelis but also hammering on the need to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Biden called the actions of Hamas “pure unadulterated evil” and noted that such brutality “would have cut deep anywhere in the world, but it cuts deeper here in Israel.” The attack,” he said, “has brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by…millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people.” In the past, he said, the world watched and did nothing, but “[w]e will not stand by and do nothing again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
Biden promised the U.S. is working to recover the hostages, and he empathized with those who had lost loved ones. He promised that Israel would always be a safe home for the Jewish people. He promised military aid and once again warned “any state or any other hostile actor thinking about attacking Israel…. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.”
But in a statement that spoke to the Arab world, Biden also warned Israel not to give into the “primal feeling” of “[s]hock, pain,… an all-consuming rage.” “I caution this,” he said: “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
Biden also appeared to speak to the administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he spoke about what it means to be a war leader. “[I]t requires being deliberate,” he said. “It requires asking very hard questions. It requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you are on will achieve those objectives.”
“The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.”
Biden reiterated that Hamas uses families in Gaza as human shields, putting command centers, weapons, and communications tunnels in residential areas. “The Palestinian people are suffering greatly as well,” Biden said. And then he took on the issue of yesterday’s explosion at the hospital in Gaza, expressing outrage and sadness.
And then he clarified what had happened in that explosion: “Based on the information we’ve seen to date, it appears the result of an errant rocket fired by a terrorist group in Gaza.” This statement reflects the assessment of the U.S. Defense Department and was echoed today by the Senate Intelligence Committee, with a Democratic majority, and the House Intelligence Committee, with a Republican majority.
“While we continue to collect information, our current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday,” White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said today.
Biden went on to explain that the United States stands unequivocally for the protection of civilian life during conflict—a key tenet of the laws of war—and said “I grieve—I truly grieve for the families who were killed or wounded by this tragedy.”
“The people of Gaza need food, water, medicine, shelter,” Biden said, adding that he had asked the Israeli cabinet to agree to the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. He said that Israel has agreed, based on the promise that the aid would go to civilians. Should Hamas divert or steal that aid, he said, access will stop and Hamas “will have demonstrated once again that they have no concern for the welfare of the Palestinian people.” Biden said the U.S. is working closely with Egypt and the United Nations to get trucks moving across the border as quickly as possible. It is also demanding that the International Red Cross be able to visit Hamas’s hostages.
Biden also announced that the U.S. will dedicate $100 million in new funding for humanitarian assistance in Gaza and the West Bank to help the more than 1 million displaced Palestinians.
Biden urged Israelis to remember that their state is a democracy. It must live not by the rules of terrorists, but by the rule of law. “What sets us apart from the terrorists is we believe in the fundamental dignity of every human life—Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, Jew, Muslim, Christian—everyone,” he said. “You can’t give up what makes you who you are. If you give that up, then the terrorists win. And we can never let them win.”
“Nations of conscience like the United States and Israel are not measured solely by the example of their power,” he said. “We’re measured by the power of our example. That’s why, as hard as it is, we must keep pursuing peace. We must keep pursuing a path so that Israel and the Palestinian people can both live safely, in security, in dignity, and in peace.” “For me, that means a two-state solution,” he said. He also reiterated that Israel must be better integrated with its neighbors.
“May God protect all those who work for peace,” Biden concluded. “God save those who are still in harm’s way.”
The speech was one of Biden’s best, drawing on personal experience, religion, history, politics, and the present. But it was not just rhetoric. Biden’s personal arrival in an area at war—his second as president—and his adamant support for Israel were a key demonstration that the U.S. does not want this war to expand, either by the introduction of the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia or by Israeli overreaction in the Palestinian territories.
It also put Netanyahu on notice that the U.S. is watching his actions. As David Rothkopf discussed today in The Daily Beast, Netanyahu allied himself with former president Trump and has appeared to consider his U.S. relationships with right-wing figures more important than his relationship with Biden. Now, with his own government on shaky ground as Israelis blame him for failing to protect them, Netanyahu jumped at the chance to be seen with Biden, whose response to the explosion and his steady handling of the ongoing crisis has made him enormously popular.
On Air Force One on the way home, Biden told reporters that his quest to get humanitarian aid had succeeded. Egypt has agreed to send up to 20 trucks of aid to Gaza, seemingly testing whether the aid will get through and if it will disappear into the hands of Hamas. If Hamas “doesn’t let it get through or just confiscates it, then it’s going to end,” Biden said. He continued: “[T]he bottom line is that [Egyptian president Abdel Fattah] El-Sisi deserves some real credit because he was very accommodating and, quite frankly, as everyone I’ve spoken to thus far since this trip began.”
Biden said that Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues David Satterfield was already in Cairo to coordinate the aid.
When reporters asked if Biden was disappointed that his trip to Jordan was canceled, the president said no and laughed. “Disappointed? Look, I came to get something done. I got it done…. Not many people thought we could get this done, and not many people want to be associated with failure…. [H]ad we gone and this failed, then, you know, the United States failed, Biden’s presidency fails, et cetera, which would be a legitimate criticism…. I thought it was worth taking the chance to get it done.”
Biden’s steady hand, experience, and courage stood in contrast today to the House Republicans in the ongoing fight to elect a speaker. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a far-right extremist and key Trump ally, lost more votes in the second round of voting than in the first, in part because he and his allies infuriated colleagues by threatening people. After saying yesterday that it was imperative to finish the balloting and get on to the people’s business, today he announced he would not retire from his crusade but would keep trying to get the votes he needs as the crisis stretches into a third week.
The House will vote again tomorrow, but Republicans predict Jordan’s support will fall even further. Some Republicans are exploring the possibility of sidestepping the question of electing a speaker by expanding the powers of acting speaker Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC).
On Thursday night, President Biden will address the nation from the Oval Office.
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/us/politics/patrick-mchenry-house-speaker.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-address-nation-after-israel-trip-aid-gaza/story
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October 17, 2023
October 17, 2023 (Tuesday)
This morning, the Ukrainian military launched a surprise attack on two Russian airfields in occupied Ukraine, using a longer-range missile system secretly supplied in the last few weeks by the United States. The Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, has a range of about 100 miles, or 161 kilometers. It enabled the Ukrainians to damage runways and destroy nine Russian helicopters. The missiles also killed a number of Russian soldiers. One of the conditions of Ukraine’s acquisition of these weapons was that they would only be used within Ukraine against the occupiers, not in Russia itself.
The thirty-one M1 Abrams main battle tanks the U.S. had promised Ukraine have all arrived, the U.S. confirmed today. All the Ukrainian military personnel who trained to use those tanks in Germany have also returned.
A recent Russian offensive has been largely unsuccessful, while the Ukrainian goal of dividing the Russian invaders in two (much as the U.S. did to the Confederacy) has been partially achieved but troops have not punched through. At the same time, strategic Ukrainian attacks have pushed Russia’s Black Sea fleet out of its main base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, and the Institute for the Study of War assesses that the attacks on the airfields will force Russia to pull its aircraft back and either to disperse its ammunition depots or to fortify them.
Meanwhile, the struggle in the House of Representatives today looked like a preview of the 2024 election.
Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), a staunch supporter of former president Trump and a key figure in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, is pushing hard for election as speaker, emphasizing how imperative it is for the House Republicans to enable the House to get back to business. As Karoun Demirjian outlined in the New York Times, Jordan and his allies have deployed a pressure campaign against those Republicans opposed to him, as she puts it, “working to unleash the rage of the party’s base voters against any lawmaker standing in his way.”
This is the same tactic that the extremists have used for decades to move the Republican Party to the right. But there is a different dynamic at play in this speakership crisis. Jordan and his allies created the crisis in the first place by supporting Trump’s demands to shut down the government, tossing out former speaker Kevin McCarthy because he would not agree to shut down the government, and refusing to abide by the vote of the Republican conference to accept the choice of the majority: first McCarthy and then Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA).
There is another way in which this moment is different. Jordan is a flamethrower who was one of the original organizers of the right-wing Freedom Caucus. Republicans saw McCarthy, who was an excellent fundraiser, as a pro-business Republican who worked with the far right, but Jordan is the real deal: a far-right extremist. Republican donors have already suggested they are not enthusiastic about working with him to fund Republican candidates.
The third way this moment is different is that putting Jordan in the speaker’s chair makes him, along with Trump, the face of the Republican Party going into the 2024 election. Representative Pete Aguilar (D-CA) previewed the many downsides of Jordan as speaker when he nominated Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) for the speaker’s chair. Aguilar blamed extremism and partisanship for the unprecedented chaos of the House and urged the Republicans to embrace bipartisanship to do the work the American people had sent them to Washington, D.C., to conduct.
Aguilar noted that Jordan was “the architect of a nationwide abortion ban, a vocal election denier, and an insurrection inciter.” He has “spent his entire career trying to hold our country back, putting our national security in danger, attempting government shutdown after government shutdown, wasting taxpayer dollars on baseless investigations with dead ends, authoring the very bill that would ban abortion nationwide without exceptions, and inciting violence on this chamber. Even leaders of his own party have called him ‘a legislative terrorist.’”
Aguilar pointed out Jordan’s opposition to disaster relief, veterans’ relief, support for Ukraine, and military aid to our allies, including Israel, and added: “This body is debating elevating a speaker nominee who has not passed a single bill in 16 years. These are not the actions of someone interested in governing or bettering the lives of everyday Americans.” Jordan as speaker would mean the Republican Party would “continue taking marching orders from a twice-impeached former president with more than 90 pending felony charges.”
Even without mentioning Jordan’s involvement with the cover-up of a sexual assault scandal at Ohio State, Aguilar put Republicans on notice that placing Jordan at the head of the party would have brutal consequences in Democratic campaign ads.
When House members voted for speaker, the Democrats were unified behind Jeffries, who won all 212 of their votes. Jordan won only 200 of the 217 votes necessary to become speaker, with 20 Republicans voting for someone else. His allies initially said they would call a second vote tonight but changed their minds, apparently realizing that another loss would weaken his candidacy significantly. They say they will hold another vote tomorrow.
Tonight, hundreds of people were killed in an explosion at a packed hospital in Gaza City. Palestinian authorities blamed an Israeli airstrike for the explosion; hours later, Israel Defense Forces said the explosion was a misfired missile launched as part of a “barrage of rockets” by the Islamic Jihad militant group. Neither version of events has been confirmed.
Governments around the region have blamed Israel and sometimes the U.S. for the catastrophic loss of life, and protests have broken out in Lebanon, Iran, and Turkey as President Joe Biden travels to the region personally to demonstrate U.S. support for Israel, pressure Israel to permit humanitarian aid into Gaza, learn any new information about the hostages, and to try to keep the conflict from widening and escalating.
Biden will meet in Tel Aviv, Israel, with Israeli leaders, first responders, and families of hostages, but the second leg of his trip—to Jordan, for a meeting with King Abdullah II, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, and Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—was canceled as Abbas rushed home. National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told reporters Biden would speak with Abbas and Sisi on the trip back to the U.S.
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/14/us/house-speaker-republicans-jordan.html
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-october-17-2023
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/16/politics/jim-jordan-fundraising-concerns/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/17/conservative-pressure-jordan-speaker-bid-00122089
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/18/israel-hamas-war-news-gaza-update/
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October 16, 2023
October 16, 2023
This morning, the Justice Department announced that the United States has reached a settlement with the plaintiffs in the case of Ms. L. v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a class action lawsuit filed in 2018 over the Trump administration's policy of separating parents and children at the southwest border to deter migrants. That policy, implemented in 2017 and 2018, resulted in more than 5,500 children being separated from their parents.
In 2018 a judge ordered the families reunited, but it turned out the Trump administration had not kept records of the family members. As soon as he took office, President Joe Biden appointed a task force to accomplish the reunifications, but 85 children are still separated from their families. The task force also found that 290 of the children removed from their parents were U.S. citizens.
The lawsuit charged that the policy broke a number of U.S. laws—seeking asylum is legal, and taking children away from their parents without cause is not—and the settlement seeks both to heal the victims of the policy and to make sure it never happens again. The affected families will have a different process for applying for asylum than other migrants and will have access to benefits such as work authorization, possible housing assistance, immigration lawyers, and mental health care to address the trauma of the separations, and the government will agree not to turn back to such a policy in the future.
“The separation of families at our southern border was a betrayal of our nation’s values,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. “By providing services to these families and implementing policies to prevent future separations, today’s agreement addresses the impacts of those separations and helps ensure that nothing like this happens again.”
The judge will need to approve the settlement.
MAGA Republicans seem unconcerned with what the law says. Indeed, they have been working hard to discredit the law in order to protect former president Trump, attacking the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After Trump has publicly attacked prosecutors and witnesses in the case over his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Judge Tanya Chutkan today prohibited him from such attacks on the court’s staff, witnesses, testimony, and prosecutors.
Last week, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) called for shutting down the government in November unless Democrats agree to cutting all spending for processing or releasing into the country any new migrants. He says the demand is “non-negotiable.” But U.S. and international law require the U.S. to process asylum requests, even if a migrant arrives in between legal points of entry.
Former senior Department of Homeland Security lawyer Tom Jawetz told Greg Sargent of the Washington Post that Jordan’s plan “would be both illegal and a practical impossibility.” Administration officials “are legally obligated to process people for asylum on request,” he said. “It’s not a choice.”
But therein lies the heart of today’s Republican Party: its extremist leaders no longer believe that rules apply to them. Jordan, a staunch ally of Trump, was key to the former president’s efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election. He is now gathering votes for a bid to become the speaker of the House of Representatives after the MAGA extremists threw former House speaker Kevin McCarthy out.
In 2017, former Republican House speaker John Boehner told journalist Tim Alberta: “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate…. A terrorist. A legislative terrorist.” In 2021, he clarified: “I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart—never building anything, never putting anything together.”
After a secret ballot showed that 55 of his colleagues would not support him in a floor vote, Jordan has insisted on a public vote, putting his colleagues under pressure to support him and thus to support Trump. They are caving, one at a time.
But Representative Don Bacon (R-NE) called out the MAGA group that revolted repeatedly against the Republican conference and now is demanding Republican unity for the unpopular Jordan, forcing the party to fully embrace Trump. “I can’t abide by the fact a small group violated the rules to get what they wanted [and] now I’m supposed to play by the rules,” Bacon said. “I think we’ve got to have consequences, and you’ve got to stand up for this. That’s what Americans do.”
We used to be able to assume that Americans did, in fact, play by the rules, accepting the principle of the rule of law. That principle is now openly challenged here in the U.S.
That principle is also at stake around the world. In a piece in The Atlantic on October 9, foreign policy journalist Anne Applebaum noted the fragility of the rules-based international order, a system of norms and values established after World War II in an attempt to create a system for resolving international disputes, preventing territorial wars, and ending no-holds-barred slaughter.
A series of agreements, including the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war established those rules, and while they have often been flouted, they offered grounds for challenging those nations and military personnel who broke them.
Applebaum pointed out that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians “are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all.” They feel justified in ignoring the rules-based international order and sowing terror and chaos among civilians.
Their “goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online.” Applebaum suggests “we might miss the Geneva Conventions when they are gone.”
Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have made no secret of their determination to strengthen the rules-based international order, and tonight the White House announced that Biden will travel on Wednesday to the Middle East, where he will visit Israel before traveling to Jordan, where he will meet with the country’s leader King Abdullah II, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.
We might miss the idea of the rule of law here at home if we continue to empower MAGA Republicans. Voters in Poland missed it, and yesterday 73% of them turned out to oust from power the nationalist-conservative party that, Anne Applebaum notes in a different Atlantic article, “turned state television into a propaganda tube, used state companies to fund its political campaigns,… politicized state administration[,]… altered electoral laws and even leaked top-secret military documents, manipulating their contents for electoral gain.”
Opponents of the ruling party, which took power in 2015, came together in a coalition that rejected angry nationalism in favor of civic patriotism, met in demonstrations around the country, featured women prominently in their campaigns, promised to end Poland’s strong abortion restrictions, and offered closer cooperation with Europe.
Rebuilding democracy will be neither fast nor easy, Applebaum notes, but “Poland shows that autocracy is not inevitable.”
—
Notes:
https://time.com/5678313/trump-administration-family-separation-lawsuits/
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/26/politics/federal-court-order-family-separations/index.html
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6316323/1/ms-l-v-us-immigration-and-customs-enforcement/
https://www.justice.gov/media/1319516/dl?inline
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-announces-major-settlement-in-family-separation-lawsuit
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance Twice GaggedToday, Monday, Judge Chutkan entered a limited restraining order that will apply to all parties in the special counsel’s election interference case, but mostly, to Donald Trump. There is no written order yet, but she ruled from the bench, so we know the broad contours of her order. Judge Chutkan adopted the government’s view that the First Amendment can…Read more12 hours ago · 840 likes · 166 comments · Joyce Vancehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/10/jim-jordan-house-gop-government-shutdown/
https://apnews.com/article/poland-election-vote-720f7b81838c33ccb2865fb3bc6e0414
The BulwarkJim Jordan: An Absurd and Dangerous Choice for House SpeakerTWO YEARS AGO, I called for Congress to punish and even expel lawmakers who betrayed America by trying to overturn the 2020 election. Now a majority of House Republicans have chosen Jim Jordan, one of Donald Trump’s …Read morea day ago · 137 likes · Jill LawrenceTwitter (X)
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October 15, 2023
October 15, 2023
“We came here with four key objectives,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in Egypt: “to make clear that the United States stands with Israel; to prevent the conflict from spreading to other places; to work on securing the release of hostages, including American citizens; and to address the humanitarian crisis that exists in Gaza.”
Blinken has been traveling country to country in the Middle East since shortly after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas fighters, who crossed into Israel and killed at least 1,300 people, of whom more than 1,000 were civilians, 30 were Americans, 12 were Thais, and 2 were French nationals. They also took 126 hostages, including not only Israelis, apparently, but also 8 Germans, 5 U.S. nationals, and 2 Mexican nationals.
Retaliatory strikes by Israeli forces on Gaza since then have killed at least 2,670 people and displaced almost a million. Israel has stopped food, water, fuel, and electricity from getting to Gaza and has told the more than a million residents in northern Gaza to move south to clear the way for a military incursion. Israeli energy minister Israel Katz said the siege would continue until Hamas frees the hostages. About 500 U.S. citizens are in Gaza.
The Biden administration has been pushing diplomacy to stop the crisis from spreading. On October 11, Blinken traveled to Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and then to Jordan, where he met with the head of the Palestinian Authority that exercises limited government in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas.
Then he went on to Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Virtually everywhere, he said, he found “a shared view that we have to do everything possible to make sure this doesn’t spread to other places; a shared view to safeguard innocent lives; a shared view to get assistance to Palestinians in Gaza who need it, and we’re working very much on that.”
Blinken emphasized that the U.S. will stand with Israel “today, tomorrow, and every day…in word and also in deed.” He noted that the U.S. has moved a second carrier strike group (CSG) to the Eastern Mediterranean. A CSG is a powerful, flexible group of about 7,500 sailors and Marines on a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, a replenishment ship (which carries oil and supplies), a cruiser, destroyers, and a submarine, as well as various aircraft.
The U.S. maintains 11 CSGs. Two of them are now in the Eastern Mediterranean not as provocation, Blinken said, but “as a deterrent. It’s meant to make clear that no one should do anything that could add fuel to the fire in any other place.” Sending two CSGs to the region is a strong statement, almost certainly designed to address threats by Iran that it will “respond” if Israel proceeds with a ground invasion of Gaza.
Iran backs Hamas—although there is not yet evidence that Iranian officials directly helped plan the October 7 attack—and also backs Hezbollah, the militant group that controls southern Lebanon. Today, clashes broke out on the border between Israel and Lebanon as Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel and Israeli forces fired artillery back.
Israel has “the right—indeed it has the obligation—to defend itself against these attacks from Hamas, and to try to do what it can to make sure that this never happens again,” Blinken said. But, he added, “[i]t needs to do it in a way that affirms the shared values that we have for human life and human dignity, taking every possible precaution to avoid harming civilians.”
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres implored Hamas to release the hostages immediately and Israel to grant “rapid and unimpeded access…for humanitarian supplies and workers for the sake of the civilians in Gaza,” which “is running out of water, electricity and other essential supplies.” These two issues must not become bargaining chips, he said. “[W]e are on the verge of the abyss in the Middle East.” Opening a gate between Gaza and Egypt would allow supplies to be brought in and would help to move refugees south, away from the northern areas Israel is expected to attack.
Relief for Gaza’s people has been bottled up on the Egyptian side of the border as Israeli officials refuse to guarantee their forces will not bomb relief trucks out of concern they are carrying weapons. The U.S. has put strong pressure on Israel to reopen the water supply to Gaza, especially in the southern region since the influx of refugees was already stressing supplies, and today Israel did so, but observers say that without electricity and fuel, the pumping stations and the plants that take salt out of the water don’t work.
The U.S. is also clearly working to get the U.S. hostages released, but officials will not talk about the details of that operation.
Today President Biden appointed Ambassador David Satterfield as the U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues, charging him with bringing “urgently needed humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, in coordination with the U.N., Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and other regional stakeholders.”
A diplomat since 1980, Satterfield has worked in countries all over the region for both Republican and Democratic administrations. He has served as the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, U.S. deputy chief of mission in Iraq, assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, and director general of the body overseeing peace between Israel and Egypt.
“There are two very different visions for the future and what the Middle East can and should be,” Blinken said today. The U.S. stands behind a vision “that has countries in the region normalizing their relations, integrating, working together in common purpose, and upholding and bringing forth the rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people.”
The other vision is the one Hamas embraces: “a vision of death, of destruction, of nihilism, of terrorism. That’s a vision that does nothing to advance aspirations for Palestinians, that does nothing to help create better futures for people in the region, and does everything to bring total darkness to everyone that it’s able to affect.”
The visions are clear, Blinken said. He said he had no doubt that the overwhelming majority of people in the region would choose the first if given the chance. So it is the responsibility of “all of us who believe in that first path…to make it real, to bring it to light, to make it a clear, affirmative choice. And that’s what we’re determined to do…. If we do that, everyone in this region will be in a much better place and so will the rest of the world.”
And yet that vision must be reinforced at home. The murder of a six-year-old child and the attempted murder of the child’s mother yesterday in Illinois by their 71-year-old landlord prompted the president to warn against Islamophobia. The family was Palestinian and had immigrated to the U.S. “seeking what we all seek—a refuge to live, learn, and pray in peace,” Biden said. The child was born in the U.S.
“This horrific act of hate has no place in America, and stands against our fundamental values: freedom from fear for how we pray, what we believe, and who we are,” Biden said.
“We join everyone here at the White House in sending our condolences and prayers to the family, including for the mother’s recovery, and to the broader Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim American communities.”
—
Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/4256649-carrier-strike-group-us-what-to-know/
https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-remarks-to-the-press-12/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-few-updates-house-debacle-us-show-of-force-dismal-forensics
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/10/15/world/israel-news-hamas-war-gaza
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/15/israel-gaza-war-updates-hamas-palestine/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/15/israel-confirms-people-hostage-hamas
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-siege-hamas.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/15/biden-israel-gaza-crisis/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/world/middleeast/hamas-iran-israel-attack.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/10/15/world/israel-news-hamas-war-gaza
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/15/israel-resumes-water-supply-to-southern-gaza-after-us-pressure
https://abc7chicago.com/plainfield-murder-joseph-m-czuba-stabbing-16200-s-lincoln-hwy-il/13918623/
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