On Saturday, former US President Donald Trump commented on Hamas’ attack on Israel with fake news. “American taxpayers helped fund these attacks, which many reports say came from the Biden administration,” he said. Trump Republicans like candidate Vivek Ramaswamy have been claiming for days that the surprise attack was financed by $6 billion frozen in some South Korean banking institutions, which the White House released three weeks ago as part of a prisoner release agreement. Five American prisoners in Iran.
The agreement stipulates that Tehran can only use these funds for non-sanctioned items and humanitarian aid that are under US control. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced yesterday that “so far not a single dollar has been spent from those accounts.” The money released by the Biden administration has nothing to do with Saturday’s coordinated and widespread attack against Israel, but for Trump, every opportunity is a good opportunity to serve the cause of division within American politics. After last week’s chaos, with the impeachment of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Congress is paralyzed, a state that threatens to slow an adequate response to the war in Israel, America’s most important ally in the Middle East.
CNN’s Stephen Collinson, one of its most trusted political journalists, wrote yesterday that “such a grave situation demands a calm, unified, and measured American response, with support from the entire political spectrum. But the turmoil in American politics — plagued by domestic extremism, and threats to democracy — And the excessive politicization of foreign policy means that bringing the country together at a perilous time will be an impossible task.
First, there is the problem of the US ambassador to Israel, appointed by Washington, who is awaiting confirmation by Congress. Yesterday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Ben Cardin, a Democrat, said he hoped his fellow senators would join me in confirming the man who was confirmed just over a month ago, Jack Lew, as soon as possible. Republican Ted Cruz, a believer in Trumpism who believes that Biden is not the legitimate president, is among those who launched the obstruction of appointments to the White House in the Middle East because officials “continue to lie to Congress.” They want to conclude a “secret and strict nuclear agreement with Iran.” Jacob Lew, former Treasury Secretary under Barack Obama in 2015, is not very popular with Trump Republicans and the Israeli right because he worked on dialogue and agreement with Tehran.
The other issue concerns Robert Malley, the former head of the Washington think tank’s International Crisis Group and who since January 2021 has been the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran. Malley was suspended in July – without attracting much attention – from his post over issues related to the management of classified information and his alleged ties to Iranian intelligence. His story is controversial, full of shade, and therefore easily manipulated by those who want at all costs to show the collusion of the Biden White House with those who want to abolish Israel. At the end of September, an investigation by Semafor highlighted the links of three Malian collaborators to the Iran Experts Initiative, an association created by Tehran to enhance its influence and influence internationally. Much of the investigation is based on emails exchanged about ten years ago between Tehran’s leaders, and although the US State Department denies there is any real “infiltration” by Iran into US institutions, there is “a problem that is being handled in a clumsy manner.” “. Malley, who is also under investigation by the FBI, is not charged with anything at the moment, but the only news we have about him comes from Iranian state media – it was the Tehran Times that first wrote, along with documents from the US government, that Mali was informed of his investigation on April 21, but the news was not confirmed by the person concerned until the end of June. Journalist Laura Rosen wrote last Saturday that the emails underlying the Semafor investigation were circulated by “a former senior official in the Trump administration” in order to “discredit American experts on Iran and the Biden administration.”
Blinken said yesterday that so far “we have not seen any evidence that Iran directed this particular attack or was behind it, but there is certainly a long relationship” between Tehran and Hamas. Israel is also moving cautiously, but the problem in Washington today is a Congress that must prepare itself with a new president, and which is under siege by the Trumpist wing of the majority Republican Party and which is blocking every decision, whether it is the work of the government. The machine is American or international.
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