theintercept | The Trump transition team — in the form of key Trump advisers Kushner
and Flynn — reached out to the Russian government in order to undermine
the U.S. government because the Israeli government asked them to.
Where’s the outrage? How is the sheer “scope and audacity” of the
Trump-Netanyahu backchannels — to quote one U.S. official who spoke to
me on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak
publicly on this issue — not a bigger story? For a start, as University
of Chicago law professors Daniel Hemel and Eric Posner argued in a New York Times op-ed on Monday, the much-mocked Logan Act
of 1799 remains “a serious criminal statute that bars citizens from
undermining the foreign policy actions of the sitting president.” These
two legal scholars point out that “if Mr. Flynn violated the Logan Act,
then so did the ‘very senior’ official who directed his actions. If that
official is Mr. Kushner, then Mr. Kushner could go to jail.”
Then there is the issue of Middle East policy itself. It wasn’t
outsourced to the Israelis by Trump and Co. only during the transition
or only over settlements. The outsourcing has continued in office.
Tomorrow, Trump is expected to announce
that the United States will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of
Israel — another key Israeli demand that every single previous
president, Republican and Democrat, has resisted. The decision on
Jerusalem is so contentious that it both undermines any chance of reviving the peace process and threatens to cost lives — not just those of Israelis and Palestinians, but of Americans too.
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