June 21: WaPo vs. WaPo

No one* is above the law (*exceptions apply); Mellon goes bananas; Pentagon doesn't know how much it's given to Chinese biolabs

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The Big Story

We hear from people older than us that The Washington Post used to be a great paper. We’ll take their word for it, because most of what we can remember of the paper’s coverage over the past eight years is conspiratorial race politics, Obama-faction domestic influence operations (Russiagate, Khashoggi, etc.), deranged Israel-Gaza coverage, and whatever this is:

Still, over the past several months, it’s become clear that Washington Post management—and owner Jeff Bezos—realize there’s a problem and are at least trying to do something to fix it. As Post CEO Will Lewis told the newsroom earlier this month, in an email announcing the exit of then Executive Editor Sally Buzbee, the paper saw its audience halve in recent years, and it lost $77 million last year. Which would seem—to us, at least—like a pretty good reason to make a change. 

Lewis’ original plan was to keep Buzbee on in a diminished role while bringing in two of his old colleagues at the London Telegraph: Matt Murray, who would run the newsroom through the election, and Rob Winnett, who would take over at the end of the year. Buzbee, according to reporting by Puck’s Dylan Byers, initially agreed to the plan, then backed out at the eleventh hour. But she didn’t just back out; she began leaking dirty laundry about Winnett, Lewis, and Murray to The New York Times and in the process sparked a full-blown newsroom revolt among Post staffers who objected to (a) being led by “white men”; (b) being led by white men from the unethical right-wing Rupert Murdoch tabloid press; and (c) the implication, hanging over the whole affair, that Bezos might not be willing to set $75-$100 million on fire annually to keep them in jobs writing Hamas fanfiction. 

The result was what we can only describe as an information campaign by current Post staffers against current and incoming Post management, waged in the pages of the Post (as well as in friendly outlets such as the Times and The Daily Beast). On Sunday, the Post published a 3,000-word, triple-bylined investigative hit on Winnett—the incoming editor—highlighting Winnett’s somewhat murky ties to a source and self-described “thief,” who, in classic British tabloid style, claimed to have engaged in various forms of illegal and quasi-legal subterfuge to obtain scoops, including by stealing a copy of Tony Blair’s memoir. The source’s “claims,” the article noted, “raise questions about Winnett’s journalistic record months before he is set to assume a top position at The Post.” Winnett declined to comment. 

Winnett also declined to take the job. On Friday, he announced, understandably enough, that he’d be staying in London to continue working at the (quite profitable) Telegraph, rather than relocating to Washington to run a (quite unprofitable) paper full of people who hate him. Murray and Lewis appear to have survived, with Bezos’ backing. But the whole saga, as Byers notes, “had the spirit of peak #MeToo, when journalists had the unique power to end executives’ careers with a piece of reporting—an era, too, when the fog of the overarching scandal became all-consuming.”

An era, too, when ideologically intoxicated reporters and editors, many of them with an extremely blinkered idea of how the world works, took it upon themselves to declare that the purpose of journalism was to provide readers with “moral clarity”—as that moral clarity appeared to 27-year-olds a few years out of Yale. The result—predictable to us but apparently not to them—was a collapse in Americans’ trust in media. Since 2021, some institutions, such as the Times, have been waging a valiant campaign to undo some of the damage by attempting to wrest control from the millennial-activist cadres who enjoyed the run of the place from 2016 to 2020. Bezos and Lewis appear to be trying to do the same at the Post, but if the Winnett scandal is any indication, they’re going to have a hell of a time.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Mama mia! The White House’s slow-walking of weapons deliveries to Israel is what’s known in the business as an “Italian strike.” Michael Doran explains.

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The Rest

→Remember “no one is above the law”? That was the big talking point to justify Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution—and conviction—of Donald Trump on 34 felony counts for categorizing a payment to his lawyer as a legal expense (which, absent Bragg’s “novel” legal theory, would have been a misdemeanor past the statute of limitations). For instance, here was the sitting president on the day of the conviction:

On Thursday, however, Bragg’s stern and impartial commitment to the rule of law appeared to waver, as he dismissed trespassing charges against 30 people arrested for illegally occupying Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall in April. In addition to pointing to the defendants’ lack of criminal histories, a prosecutor argued that Bragg’s office “lacked evidence to land convictions” because the occupiers had worn masks and covered surveillance cameras, according to Jessica Costescu of The Washington Free Beacon, who attended the hearing. Following the withdrawal of the charges against them, several of the protesters held an impromptu press conference outside the courthouse, where one masked young man announced, “We resist the pigs, the police in the U.S. This is standing with Palestinian resistance.”

→Chart of the Day: 

That’s from a Friday article in The Wall Street Journal, “Billionaires Pony Up Huge Donations for Trump, Biden.” Trump’s campaign reported fundraising receipts of $75.4 million in May, vs. $37.7 million for President Biden’s campaign—the first time this year that Trump outraised Biden. Most of Trump’s haul comes from a single donation by Tim Mellon, the heir to Andrew Mellon’s banking fortune, who donated $50 million to Trump’s super PAC the day after the former president’s conviction in Manhattan (Mellon has also given $25 million to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s PAC). On the Democratic side, the largest single donor in May was former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who gave $19 million to a pro-Biden PAC. 

→The White House has continued to savage Benjamin Netanyahu for accusing it of withholding arms from Israel, stating Thursday that Netanyahu’s video was “deeply disappointing” and that “there’s no other country that’s done more or will continue to do more than the United States to help Israel.” Yesterday, we shared an excerpt from Sen. Tom Cotton’s letter, explaining why the White House line is bogus—namely, that the administration abuses a congressional notification requirement for weapons shipments, allowing it to tell the Israelis that the weapons are “in process” while refusing to deliver them. In a Friday interview with Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman, Netanyahu confirmed Cotton’s account. Netanyahu said that several months ago, the Israelis had begun to notice “significant problems” with the “diminution of supply” of U.S.-made weapons and ammunition. According to Bibi, “I raised this issue with Secretary Blinken,” who said that “everything is in process.” Netanyahu added that he only aired the problem in public after “months of quiet conversations that did not solve the problem.”

→Post of the Day: 

Look, we’re not saying that the Pentagon has been funding loosely regulated Chinese Frankenstein experiments designed to engineer Ebola into pandemic capability, okay? We’re just saying that the Pentagon can’t rule it out. 

→Serge Klarsfeld, the Romanian French Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter whose investigative work led to the arrest and conviction of Klaus Barbie (among others), has endorsed Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in the French parliamentary elections to be held next Tuesday. “The National Rally supports Jews, supports the state of Israel,” Klarsfeld said on French television earlier this week, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. “When there is an anti-Jewish party and a pro-Jewish party, I will vote for the pro-Jewish party.” The National Rally (formerly known as the National Front), of course, has a checkered history with Jews; the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was convicted of Holocaust denial, and its co-founder, Pierre Bousquet, served in the Charlemagne division of the Waffen-SS. But the warming of French Jews toward the party speaks not only of Marine Le Pen’s aggressive efforts to woo Jewish voters and purge antisemites, but also of the state of the French left, which, under Jean-Luc Melenchon and his party France Unbowed, has courted the French Muslim vote by pairing vituperative attacks on Israel with an indulgent attitude toward Islamism and a defense of Muslim immigration. The latter issue, in particular, was highlighted by a story that dominated French headlines this week: Police announced the arrest of two boys of Muslim immigrant background as suspects in the gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Help for Would-Be Parents, by Jamie Betesh Carter

When my husband and I were dealing with fertility issues, we didn’t find much support from the Jewish community. That may be changing.

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Biden's Italian Strike

The ongoing U.S. policy of slow-walking munitions deliveries to Israel isn’t about Rafah

By Michael Doran

No sooner had Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the Biden administration on Tuesday of withholding arms shipments for Israel than American officials depicted him as delusional. “We … do not know what he’s talking about,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre explained to reporters. Yes, she said, the Biden administration is withholding one single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs, out of fear that they might be used in densely populated Gaza, but “there are … no other pauses or holds in place.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking in Europe after having met with Netanyahu in Israel, repeated the claims of Jean-Pierre almost verbatim. Besides the 2,000-pound bombs, he explained, “everything else is moving as it normally would move.”

But this assertion of normalcy is easily refuted. Last month, Politico reported that an order by Israel for Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs)—converter kits that turn “dumb” bombs into “smart” bombs—“came up for license in December 2023, and the administration has been sitting on it ever since.” The JDAMs, Politico further reported, are but one of “multiple” sales that the State Department “is reviewing.”

President Biden and his team are asking us to believe that when they arbitrarily place an arms shipment bound for Israel “under review,” they are following routine procedures rather than denying weapons to Israel. Europeans call the tactic of slowing or stopping work by meticulously adhering to rules and regulations an “Italian strike.”

It is hard to imagine a legal and bureaucratic process that invites this tactic more readily than American foreign military sales. The laws and policies governing sales require defense industries, the State Department, the Defense Department, and Congress to work closely with one another. If you ask representatives of any allied country about their experiences of the foreign military sales machinery, for the next two hours they will tell you tales of bureaucratic absurdity worthy of Kafka. The process is so convoluted that President Biden can place a transaction on hold simply by leaving it to rot in an interagency labyrinth of mandated reviews, verifications, and notifications.

Nevertheless, when Biden deems a transaction to be a national security priority, he has the power to free it from the labyrinth. His office has the authority to force cooperation on the Departments of State and Defense, as well as to mediate between the executive and legislative branches. Israel, of course, is popular on Capitol Hill. Legislators, therefore, will place no obstacles in the way of delivering weapons to it in a timely fashion. During this war, however, Congress has yet to find a trusted interlocutor in the White House. “The administration is very much trying to keep Congress in the dark on a lot of their decision-making,” an aide on Capitol Hill told Politico.

The beauty of the Italian strike is that it offers its leaders plausible deniability. Some military sales to Israel have proceeded without delay; some have slowed but not stopped; still others have been halted altogether. Transactions that were once stopped have started again. Biden and his team point to the restarting of stalled initiatives as proof of noninterference by the White House. Each new instance of stoppage that comes to light they attribute to this or that regulation. As Netanyahu and his defenders complain, the administration depicts them as delusional.

This gaslighting has successfully hidden the true nature of Biden’s policy from the public eye. To be sure, some press outlets, such as Politico, have poked holes in the administration’s cover story, but they have failed to recognize the Italian strike for what it is: namely, a coherent policy hiding behind the appearance of incoherence. Even while treating some of the details of the cover story with skepticism, the press has almost uniformly accepted the general framing of the administration, which presents the disagreements between Washington and Jerusalem as a fight over the Rafah campaign and how best to prevent civilian deaths.

“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett in early May, referring to 2,000-pound bombs. “I made it clear that if [the Israelis] go into Rafah … I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with … the cities.” But a close examination of the timeline reveals that the Italian strike began no later than last December, many months before the fight over Israel’s Rafah campaign had ever begun. What accounts for the early application of pressure?

For some clues to the answer, we might look to the Israeli delegation, headed by the director general of Israel’s Defense Ministry, Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir, who traveled quietly to Washington in January to meet top administration officials and executives of defense industries. The trip received very little press coverage. Only the Israeli news outlet Walla reported on the trip, and the story was lost amidst the dramatic news from Gaza. Zamir, Walla reported, had two main goals: to shorten the time it takes to produce and supply weapons for the IDF and to increase “the scope of aid.” In other words, Zamir came shopping for more weapons, more kinds of weapons, and for a faster delivery of them.

The Americans responded by calling the Italian strike. The Biden team, according to Walla, disappointed Zamir and sent him away, saying “they would study the issue, but that no answer would be given before the [American] elections so as not to allow political considerations to influence the administration’s decisions.” The rationale was transparently bogus, but the message was clear enough. The Biden administration intended to keep the Israelis on a short leash. Why?

The Americans were undoubtedly seeking to counter the thinking that had brought the Israeli delegation to Washington in the first place. Gen. Zamir made clear to the Biden team that he had come shopping not for weapons to prosecute war in Gaza, but out of concerns, according to Walla’s report, about “the ongoing tensions with Hezbollah along the northern border and with other Iranian proxy forces across the Middle East.”

Hezbollah represents the most formidable direct military threat that Israel faces. A full-scale conflict with it will burn up an enormous amount of equipment and ammunition in a very short period, and it risks drawing Iran more directly into the war. The Israelis came to Washington to stock up, to be ready for the conflict should it erupt. The Americans, by contrast, seek to restrain them. The purpose of the Italian strike is to force the Israelis into dependence on the United States, to deny them the ability to make long-term plans—namely, plans regarding Hezbollah and Iran.

To the extent that the administration even admits it is withholding arms, it justifies its actions by expressing concern over civilian deaths in Gaza. The Biden administration sees a gauzy humanitarianism as a defensible explanation, before the American public, for its policy of restraining Israel. Almost all press outlets in the United States depicted Netanyahu’s protest over the withholding of weapons as the latest move in the fight over Rafah, but his video statement referenced Iran, not Gaza. “Israel, America’s closest ally,” he said, is “fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies.”

The administration has little hope that the American people will understand why it is preventing Israel from defending itself against attacks from Hezbollah and Iran. Publicly, therefore, it has drawn the line in the sand in Rafah and screamed about civilian deaths. Privately, however, it has its eyes locked like a laser on the Lebanese-Israeli border. If a full-scale war kicks off in the north, the Obama-Biden policy of achieving “equilibrium” in the Middle East by integrating Iran and its proxies into the regional order comes crashing down.