It’s hard to analyze public questions with dispassion and wisdom in today’s brutal cacophony of social media driven public conversations. It’s hard to do that when you bring deeply felt and even personal commitments to the questions at hand, though I seldom write about things I don’t have strong beliefs about. I wanted to share a few thoughts about the current arguments about anti-Semitism and Zionism.
There are a lot of American Jews at this moment who feel like they are seeing a wave of unconcealed anti-Semitism that they haven’t seen in their lifetimes.
Is that really true?
As the Israel-Hamas war grinds forward an emanation of that conflict is playing out in the United States with protests and counter-protests, fights over symbolic public actions, manifestos and public letters. Each in turn spurs a public debate about just what was going on in this or that social media viral video. Social media amplifies and accelerates every cut and thrust. What is anti-Semitic, what is simply protests against a war with harrowing numbers of civilian casualties? We see the same well-worn public debates, or rather yelling matches, about what’s anti-Zionism and what’s anti-Semitism, whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
It may help to start with some definitions and history, their relevance and often irrelevance.
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Recently I’ve been thinking about a story I first read decades ago. In his mid-50s Winston Churchill wrote an autobiography covering his life through his mid-20s: “My Early Life, A Roving Commission.” Churchill was born well past third base. He was the nephew of Lord Marlborough, one of the most exalted British noblemen, and ended up a commoner only by a small accident of birth. But in his own world he was something of a reject. And that gives his account a sympathetic or emotional approachability it might otherwise not have.
Churchill’s father found him a disappointment, not bright enough for anything but a career in the army. It was a judgment he took little trouble to hide. When Randolph Churchill sent his eldest son to the Sandhurst military academy, the young Churchill thought his father had great expectations for him as a heroic warrior. He only later realized his father doubted he had any ability for anything else. Churchill’s mother, an American heiress, also had little time for him and spent much of her life in serial affairs. Only later did she take much interest in him, using her accumulated friendships with powerful men to give him critical assists in his improbable ascent. So Churchill is packed off to military school and ends up in India on his first deployment.
In India, he’s generally bored. He begins reading a lot and gets it in his head to be a journalist. Over the next few years, in large part through his mother’s connections and their deepening relationship, he gets a mix of military leaves, postings and journalistic assignments that lead him on a kind of grand tour of the conflict zones of the world. Over a couple years he’s in Cuba for the Cuban war of independence; he’s in Africa for the reconquest of the Sudan after the Mahdi rebellion; he catches one military expedition on what is now the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I saw a new poll out today which reports that 70% of Jewish Israelis says Benjamin Netanyahu should resign from office as soon as the war ends. The same poll of Arab Israelis is currently in the field. There’s no doubt it will push that number higher. That represents a major deterioration from the first week or so after the October 7th massacres which had already shown a dramatic decline in public support for Netanyahu’s government. What does this mean exactly?
From following the news closely and talking to many Israelis it seems clear to me that this is about more than accountability for a security failure: ‘You’re Mr. Security. You had one job. You failed.’ There seems to be a much more thoroughgoing collapse of all sorts of basic assumptions about security and whether the status quo can ever really work. Turning on Netanyahu doesn’t mean any lack of support for prosecuting the current war. Fighting the current war seems to have all but universal support among Jewish Israelis though there are, of course, differences of opinion on how to prosecute it. The real questions are what comes afterwards.
What can be called a “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians ended with the failure of the Camp David summit and the onset of the Second Intifada in late 2000. Over the subsequent years, as settlement activity continued, it became increasingly common, especially among the more hard-bitten and realist-minded, to say that the time had run out on a so-called “two state solution.” From different quarters this verdict had different meanings. For Israeli maximalists it was a concluding judgment on the folly of the Oslo Accords and refusal of territorial concessions. For Palestinians it signaled a rejection of territorial compromise born of disappointment with the failure of Oslo. More concretely it was a simple statement of the reality on the ground. The West Bank had become so shot through with settlements — not just the large agglomerations along the 1967 border but lines of control reaching much deeper into Palestinian areas — that it simply wasn’t possible to create a viable state even if there was the will to create one. And quite clearly there wasn’t the will to make one.
On the Israeli side, the Oslo Accords had been born of a strategic recognition on the part of significant elements of the Israeli national security establishment. It wasn’t possible to keep the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians in a permanently stateless/occupied status. Nor was it possible to absorb them into Israel since Israeli Jews would cease to make up the overwhelming majority of the population. The years between 2000 and 2008 represented a kind of back and forth holding pattern. Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009 was based on a very different premise: that the Palestinian issue could be managed indefinitely rather than resolved and with no major repercussions.
One thing that is obscured into the current chaos and killing in Israel/Palestine is that the current government is essentially paralyzed. Benjamin Netanyahu remains Prime Minister despite a catastrophic loss of public support tied to his failure to prevent the October 7th massacres in southern Israel. In theory there’s a government of national unity now in place, with a war cabinet made up of Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, one of the two main leaders of the opposition. But just how much control Gantz, a former IDF chief of staff, is exercising is unclear.
Meanwhile many government ministers have been close to invisible since the war started. Some basic news about government policy comes out in the US first and only then gets reported in Israel. I should add that from a distance and without a subtle grasp of the textures of Israeli politics it’s difficult for me to judge the extent of this invisibility. But I’ve asked this question of numerous Israelis whose opinion I trust and all seem to agree with this basic read of the situation.
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On Speaker Mike Johnson’s first full day in office, half the journalism world was looking into the surprise Speaker’s past. In his meteoric one day rise from four term representative to Speaker there was no time for anyone to vet him. But one part of that past came out of left field. Video surfaced of an interview Johnson did with Walter Isaacson just after the death of George Floyd in June 2020 in which he revealed that he had an adopted black son, Michael. Johnson went on to explain that there was no question that his black 14-year-old son Michael faced challenges that his white fourteen year old Will never would. Many on the leftward side of the political spectrum were struck by Johnson’s empathy and frank recognition of discrimination in contemporary America while right wingers denounced him for his wokeness.
I had only heard this story in passing until this evening when TPM Reader RS flagged something odd about the story. No African-American son shows up in any of the family photographs on Johnson’s House website or on his personal Facebook page. Nor does Michael figure anywhere in any of Johnson’s campaign biographies.
As I went further down this rabbit hole tonight I was a bit dumbfounded. Is Michael made up? Is he excluded from family pictures? I was so baffled that I went pretty far down that rabbit hole trying to figure out what was going on.
We appear to have a very high casualty mass shooting unfolding in Lewiston, Maine. CNN reports that there are at least 16 fatalities and as many as 60 additional wounded. There appears to be a single gunman who opened fire at at least two three separate locations. The gunman is apparently still at large. And the entire city of Lewiston remains under a shelter in place order. There are lots of scattered reports, some of which seem contradictory or poorly sourced. But those seem to be the essential details as of this moment.
Late Update: NBC and Fox are now reporting at least 22 fatalities … the upshot of all the reports is that police in Lewiston were overwhelmed by the situation. They’ve had to call in state and federal manpower to assist with the manhunt. Police from other jurisdictions and states are moving in to assist. If you’re not from the northeast this is very far from anything that can be called a large city. So the time to get there is significant.
Donald Trump Jr. on Saturday said that his father did speak to fired FBI Director James Comey about his preferred outcome for the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, though President Donald Trump flatly denied doing so.
“When I hear the Flynn comments, you and I know both know my father for a long time. When he tells you to do something, guess what? There’s no ambiguity in it,” Trump Jr. told Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro. “There’s no ‘Hey, I’m hoping. You and I are friends. Hey, I hope this happens, but you’ve got to do your job.’ That’s what he told Comey.”
On Friday, however, the President flatly denied making those remarks to Comey or pressuring him to drop the investigation into Flynn, implicitly or otherwise.
“You said you hoped the Flynn investigation he could let go,” ABC News’ Jon Karl asked Trump during a press conference.
“I didn’t say that,” Trump interrupted.
“So he lied about that?” Karl asked, referring to Comey.
“Well, I didn’t say that,” Trump said. “And I mean I will you tell you I didn’t say that.”
But, he added, “There would be nothing wrong if I did say it, according to everybody that I’ve read today, but I did not say that.”
Trump Jr. on Saturday claimed that “everything that went on in the Comey testimony was basically ridiculous.”
“For this guy as a politician to then go back and write a memo, ‘oh, I felt,’ he felt so threatened, he felt that — but he didn’t do anything!” Trump Jr. said.
Comey’s blockbuster testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, however, prompted Trump to offer to do the same.
Off message here for Trump Jr. Says his father did tell Comey he hoped he let the Flynn investigation go. His dad says that's a lie. pic.twitter.com/oOhaFgZY4a
President Donald Trump on Sunday suggested that there are more revelations to come from fired FBI Director James Comey, and questioned their legality.
“I believe the James Comey leaks will be far more prevalent than anyone ever thought possible,” Trump tweeted early Sunday morning. “Totally illegal? Very ‘cowardly!'”
I believe the James Comey leaks will be far more prevalent than anyone ever thought possible. Totally illegal? Very 'cowardly!'
Trump made similar remarks on Friday in another early morning tweet where he labeled Comey a “leaker,” referring to Comey’s decision to share the contents of memos about his conversations with Trump to the press via a friend.
Comey revealed that decision during his testimony on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he painted Trump as a liar and testified that Trump tried to obtain a loyalty pledge from the former FBI head and pushed him to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Trump on Friday said he was “100 percent” willing to match Comey and testify under oath to contradict Comey’s testimony.
A spokesman for Attorney General Jeff Sessions late Thursday pushed back on several aspects of James Comey’s Senate testimony after the former FBI director raised new questions about Sessions’ actions before and after he recused himself from the federal investigation of Russia’s interference in the U.S. election.
Comey’s testimony touched on Sessions at several points. He hinted that the FBI was aware of information that led the bureau to believe Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia probe weeks before he actually did so, and reportedly told senators in a subsequent closed session that Sessions may have met with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. on a third occasion that the attorney general had not disclosed.
The morning after former FBI Director James Comey delivered blockbuster testimony in the Senate in which he painted President Donald Trump as a liar and said that the President pressured him to quash a probe into Michael Flynn, Trump published a tweet declaring “vindication.”
Trump published his tweet shortly after 6 a.m. on Friday morning, during the time frame when he typically shares his thoughts on Twitter.
He referenced “false statements and lies,” appearing to accuse Comey of lying under oath.
Trump also labeled Comey a “leaker,” referencing Comey’s decision to get a friend to share the contents of memos about his conversations with Trump to the press, a revelation the former FBI director shared on Thursday during with the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication…and WOW, Comey is a leaker!
James Comey testified Thursday that he was “stunned” by requests President Donald Trump made to curtail federal investigations related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and thought the President’s remarks were of investigative interest— and it seems other senior FBI officials agree.
Though the ousted FBI director did not go as far as accusing Trump of attempting to obstruct justice, Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee offered the clearest indication yet that the President may already be under scrutiny for exactly that.
Part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s job is to “sort that out,” Comey said, dismissing questions from the assembled senators on whether he personally believed Trump obstructed justice. His testimony made the case for why he felt “sure” that Mueller would look into the multiple one-on-one conversations that Trump requested of his then-FBI director.
Comey says Trump asked him to quash the FBI’s investigation into ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn in one Feb. 14 exchange in the Oval Office. In a March 30 phone call, Comey says Trump requested that he lift the “cloud” that the Russia probe was casting over his administration.
“I don’t think it’s for me to say whether the conversation I had with the President was an effort to obstruct,” Comey said of the Feb. 14 meeting. “I took it as a very disturbing thing, very concerning, but that’s a conclusion I’m sure the special counsel will work towards to try and understand what the intention was there, and whether that’s an offense.”
Importantly, Comey noted that Trump asked other senior officials, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, to clear the room before initiating the conversation about the Flynn probe. He noted those officials hesitated before complying.
“Why did he kick everybody out of the Oval Office?” Comey said. “That, to me as an investigator, is a very significant fact.”
Senior FBI officials briefed on that conversation said it was “of investigative interest” to determine the intent of Trump’s statements about Flynn, Comey testified.
Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe made similar remarks in separate testimony before the committee on Wednesday, telling Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) that it was “accurate” to assume that Comey’s private conversations with Trump either already are or are “likely to become part of a criminal investigation.”
These loaded comments apparently did not trouble Trump’s legal team or his defenders on Capitol Hill, who insisted that Comey’s testimony actually vindicated the President. They noted that, as Trump previously said, Comey confirmed that he informed Trump on three separate occasions that the President was not the subject of a counterintelligence investigation.
Republican lawmakers, the White House and Trump’s own family members also argued that the President was merely looking out for the interest of Flynn, a longtime adviser, and never explicitly ordered Comey to end any investigation. Those defenders neglected to mention that Comey testified that a senior FBI official cautioned him against telling Trump he was not a part of the federal investigation, because that person believed that “inevitably his behavior, his conduct will fall within the scope.”
Whether Trump requested or ordered that Comey drop the investigation into Flynn is an irrelevant semantic distinction. As Comey testified, Trump asked him to swear “loyalty” and repeatedly brought up the status of his job in their conversations, leaving the former FBI director with the impression that his continued tenure at the bureau was “contingent upon how he felt I conducted myself and whether I demonstrated loyalty.”
He did not comply with Trump’s requests and was fired only four months into Trump’s term. By the President’s own admission, Comey was dismissed because of the “Russia thing.”
“I was fired in some way to change, or the endeavor was to change, the way the Russia investigation was being conducted,” Comey testified. “That is a very big deal.”
The ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee said Thursday that it was “hard to overstate the significance” of fired FBI Director James Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), whose committee is leading its own investigation into Russian election meddling, wrote in a statement responding to Comey’s testimony that it “constitutes evidence of an intention to interfere or potentially obstruct at least a portion of the Russia investigation, if not more.”
Read Schiff’s full statement below:
“Today, former FBI Director James Comey testified that the President of the United States demanded his loyalty, and directed him to drop a criminal investigation into his former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn. Director Comey further testified that he believes President Trump ultimately fired him in order to alter the course of the FBI’s Russia investigation. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this testimony.
“These discussions and others took place in one-on-one telephone conversions and meetings initiated by the President, or after the President cleared the room of other people. Director Comey wrote memoranda about his conversations with President Trump because he was worried that the President and his Administration would misrepresent them.
“In my view, this testimony constitutes evidence of an intention to interfere or potentially obstruct at least a portion of the Russia investigation, if not more. It will be important for Congress to obtain evidence to corroborate this testimony — the memoranda, certainly, as well as any tapes, if they exist. We should also interview those around Director Comey at the time of these contacts, to get their contemporaneous impressions of his conversations with the President and to supplement his testimony. Finally, we cannot accept the refusal of Directors Rogers and Coats to answer questions about whether they were asked to intervene with Comey on the Flynn case or any related matter. Similarly, we will need to ask Director Pompeo the same questions. These additional steps are vital to determining the ultimate significance of the President’s actions.”
A routine budget hearing in the Senate next week featuring Attorney General Jeff Sessions took on heightened importance following ousted FBI Director James Comey’s explosive Thursday testimony, which raised questions about what Sessions did both before and after he recused himself from the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
At least one member of the Appropriations Committee, Vice Chair Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), plans to use next week’s budget hearing as an opportunity to grill Sessions about Russia, Comey and President Donald Trump. “I have many important questions for him to answer,” he said in a statement.
During his feverishly-anticipated testimony Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, ousted FBI Director James Comey made a host of major revelations about his handling of President Donald Trump and the federal investigation into Russian interference in the U.S. election in the months before he was abruptly fired in May.
Importantly, Comey disclosed new information about actions he took when he became concerned about the Trump administration’s attempts to establish a “patronage” relationship with him and persuade him to drop the FBI investigation into former national security adviser Mike Flynn. Here’s an overview of some of the most significant moments from the hearing, where Comey revealed exactly what steps he took and why he took them.
Throughout his testimony Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey repeatedly stressed the serious implications of Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election. He argued that the issue of Russian meddling it not about politics, but about the credibility of the American government.
Toward the beginning of the hearing, Comey said that he has no doubt that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election and that Russian government officials were aware of the meddling.
He later stressed that Russian interference is very real, countering President Donald Trump’s constant dismissals of the Russia probe.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) asked Comey about the way Trump has discussed Russia’s election meddling, noting that the President has described Russian interference “as a hoax and as fake news.” In response, Comey stressed that there’s no doubt that the Russian government tried to interfere in the 2016 election and that the conclusion on Russia’s actions is “about as unfake as you can possibly get.”
“There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever. The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. And it was an active measures campaign driven from the top of the government. There is no fuzz on that,” Comey said.
“It is a high confidence judgment of the entire intelligence community — and the members of this committee have seen the intelligence — it’s not a close call,” he continued. “That happened. That’s about as unfake as you can possibly get and is very, very serious, which is why it’s so refreshing to see a bipartisan focus on that. Because this is about America, not about any particular party.”
Asked if it was a “hostile act by the Russian government,” Comey replied, “Yes.”
Later in his testimony, Comey emphasized that Russia’s attempt to meddle in the election is a threat to the United States and should rise above politics. He delivered a passionate monologue about just how grave a threat Russia’s meddling is to America.
“The reason this is such a big deal is we have this big, messy, wonderful country where we fight with each other all the time but nobody tells us what to think, what to fight about, what to vote for, except other Americans. And that’s wonderful and often painful,” Comey said. “But we’re talking about a foreign government that — using technical intrusion, lots of other methods — tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act.”
“That is a big deal. And people need to recognize it. It’s not about Republicans or Democrats. They’re coming after America, which I hope we all love equally,” he continued. “They want to undermine our credibility in the face of the world. They think that this great experiment of ours is a threat to them. And so they’re going to try to run it down and dirty it up as much as possible. That’s what this is about. And they will be back, because we remain — as difficult as we can be with each other — we remain that shining city on the hill and they don’t like it.”
The former FBI director also noted that Russia’s attempt to interfere in the 2016 election was part of an ongoing effort targeted at the U.S.
“It’s a long-term practice of theirs. It stepped up a notch in a significant way in ’16. They’ll be back,” he told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
He stressed that the probe into Russian election meddling is also about prevention of future attacks, saying that Russia is not a threat to any one political party, but to the country as a whole.
Comey also addressed some of the details of the the FBI’s investigation into Russian hacking attempts. He said there was a “massive” effort to target government agencies and non-governmental groups, estimating that hundreds, possibly around 1,000, entities were targeted. He also said that the FBI never examined the hardware that was hacked at the Democratic National Committee’s, but that the FBI got the information they needed from a third party.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on Thursday reflected ruefully on his questions to fired FBI Director James Comey during an open session of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“I get the sense from Twitter that my line of questioning today went over people’s heads,” McCain said in a statement. “Maybe going forward I shouldn’t stay up late watching the Diamondbacks night games.”
McCain said he wanted to find out whether Comey believed “that any of his interactions with the President rise to the level of obstruction of justice.”
“While I missed an opportunity in today’s hearing, I still believe this question is important, and I intend to submit it in writing to Mr. Comey for the record,” he said.
