Trump and Netanyahu’s Axis of Evil
While the U.S. press remains focused on how Russia targeted the 2016 presidential election, Israel's hacking of American democracy has gone unreported -- until now. Veteran national security reporter James Bamford reveals in a cover story in the April 3-10 issue of The Nation that the Israeli government under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu deflected pressure from the Obama administration and European Union to negotiate a settlement with Palestinians during the 2016 presidential race and instead secretly aided the Trump campaign, tipping off the Republican candidate about the massive theft of Hillary Clinton's and her campaign's emails and otherwise swaying voters.
The Bamford expose has received little attention in the press. The New York Times is more interested in the Biden administration's apparent duplicitous relationship with the shadowy Israeli spyware firm, the NSO Group. But, as Bamford notes, with Trump running again for the White House and Netanyahu again (still) in power, the 2024 election could once more be vulnerable to foreign tampering. With its web of private and official intelligence operators, Israel has become one of the world's main exporters of electronic sabotage -- countless democratic governments and electoral campaigns have fallen victim to its secret subversion. After Trump won the Electoral College vote in 2016, he soon demonstrated that he was “a radical Zionist" -- in the enthusiastic words of his operative Roger Stone -- by recognizing the divided city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and otherwise rejecting the Palestinian cause.
Read The Nation article. Here is one of its eye-popping grafs:
The night before the June 2016 meeting (between Netanyahu and President Obama's Secretary of State John Kerry), Netanyahu and Kerry met for dinner at Rome's Pierluigi, a popular seafood restaurant in Piazza de Ricci, a block from the Tiber River. "What's your plan for the Palestinians?" Kerry asked as the Israeli prime minister began chain-smoking a batch of thick Cuban cigars. "What do you want to happen now?" Netanyahu offered a vague response involving a regional initiative, but Kerry wasn't buying it. "You have no path of return to direct talks with the Palestinians or a channel of talks with the Arab countries. You've hit the glass ceiling. What's your plan?" Kerry asked again. But Netanyahu may well have had one: to use his secret agent, who was perhaps sitting with them at that very table, to help put Donald Trump in the White House.
Thick as thieves: Trump and Netanyahu