Caroline Glick views parallels between the Marxist-Dems
fabricating allegations against President Trump and Israel’s Left loosely
examining Israeli statute law to render Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a
criminal to question his legitimacy as a Prime Minister. It’s an interesting
read for both Americans and Israelis.
JRH 9/27/19
Your generosity is always appreciated:
**********************
Israel’s flailing
democracy
By Caroline Glick
September 27, 2018
Originally published
at Israel Hayom.
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement Tuesday that
she is opening an official impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump
struck many Israelis as yet another sign that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
and Trump are in the same boat. Both are hounded by legal elites who will stop
at nothing to oust them from office.
There are parallels between the two leaders.
Pelosi’s move followed the leak of a whistleblower complaint
to the US intelligence community’s inspector general. The complainant alleged that
during a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in
July, Trump sought the Ukrainian leader’s assistance in advancing his 2020
reelection prospects. This is arguable.
During the course of the phone call, Trump asked Zelensky to
speak with US Attorney General William Barr about the private cybersecurity
company Crowdstrike. Crowdstrike is the private contractor that was hired by
the Democratic National Committee in the spring of 2016 to investigate the
alleged hack of the DNC’s computer server.
Crowdstrike concluded that the DNC’s server was hacked by
entities related to the Russian government. The DNC never permitted federal
investigators to take possession of the breached server, or receive
Crowdstrike’s full report. Despite the fact that they were never given the
opportunity to verify Crowdstrike’s claims, those claims were the basis of the
US intelligence community’s assertion in December 2016 that the Russian
government hacked the DNC server to interfere in the 2016 election. It was also
a foundation of the claim that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia against
the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.
In his conversation with Zelensky, Trump said, “Our country
has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to
find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say
Crowdstrike…the [DNC] server, they say Ukraine has it…I would like to have the
Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the
bottom of it.”
Trump also talked with Zelensky about Democratic
presidential aspirant, former vice president Joe Biden.
During his tenure in office, Biden was responsible for US
ties with Ukraine. As investigative journalist Peter Schweitzer reported, in
April 2014, Biden’s son Hunter was appointed to the board of Burisma, a
Ukrainian gas company. Over the next 16 months, Bursima paid Hunter Biden $3.1
million. Biden joined the company while Burisma was under criminal probe by
British and Ukrainian investigators.
In a post-vice presidency appearance before the Council on
Foreign Relations, Biden bragged that he had conditioned the provision of $1
billion in US loan guarantees to the Ukrainian government – loan guarantees
that had already been approved by Obama – on the firing of the Ukrainian
prosecutor carrying out the investigation against Burisma. Given the stakes,
the Ukrainian government bowed to his demand. The prosecutor was fired and the
loan guarantees were extended.
Speaking of Biden’s admitted intervention with the Ukrainian
prosecution, Trump said, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden
stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so
whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around
bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it…It sounds
horrible to me.”
Democrats claim that Trump’s discussion with constitutes an
illegal solicitation of foreign assistance for his 2020 campaign for
reelection. Republicans counter that Trump was reasonably trying to understand
what happened to the DNC server in 2016. The story has served as a basis for
claims that his presidency is illegitimate, and continuous investigations of
his campaign.
Leaving aside the weight of the opposing claims, the fact is
that there is nothing unique about Trump’s actions. As Mark Thiessen noted in
the Washington Post, in 2018, three Democratic senators urged the Ukrainian
government to continue investigations into Trump’s alleged collusion with
Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.
National Review noted that during the 2016 campaign, the
Obama administration asked the Ukrainian government to open a criminal probe
against Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. So too, revelations regarding
the origins of the Trump-Russia probe which fomented the nearly two-year
Special Counsel investigation showed that the Obama Justice Department based
wiretap requests against Trump campaign officials on a dossier paid for by the
Clinton campaign and the DNC, and compiled by a former British spy on the basis
of contacts with Russian operatives.
Democrats braying for impeachment have never shown the
slightest interest in investigating the Obama administration’s actions. No
Democratic lawmakers has called to impeach Obama or members of his
administration.
The criminal probes against Netanyahu relate to actions he
took to secure positive media coverage that are similar, if not identical to routine
political behavior. The two major probes against Netanyahu – dubbed Case 2000
and Case 4000 allege that Netanyahu acted criminally when he met with media
owners in bids to secure more positive coverage.
In Case 2000, Netanyahu is accused of having breached the
public faith when he met with Yediot Ahronot publisher Arnon Moses in an effort
to secure positive media coverage. Yediot Ahronot’s coverage of Netanyahu has
been unstintingly negative. In Case 4000, prosecutors allege Netanyahu accepted
a bribe in the form of positive media coverage on Walla news portal from Walla
owner Shaul Alovich. Like Yediot, Walla coverage of Netanyahu has almost
uniformly hostile.
Leading jurists from Prof. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard
University to Prof. Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University agree that the legal
proceedings against Netanyahu are political and based on prejudicial and
selective enforcement of statutes which prosecutors are interpreting
inventively.
As is the case with the allegations related to Trump’s
dealings with Zelensky, the first problem with the probes against Netanyahu is
that his actions were far from unique – although less successful than similar
actions by other politicians.
In just one striking example of the inherent bias of the
charges against Netanyahu consider the behavior of the prosecutors in relation
to Blue and White party co-chairman, and Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid.
While serving as finance minister in 2013 and 2014, Lapid
held regular meetings Mozes. Government ministries controlled by Lapid’s party
colleagues provided millions of shekels in government advertising to Yediot
Ahronot. And Lapid and his Yesh Atid party received unstintingly positive
coverage in Yediot Ahronot.
Lapid has never been investigated for his actions.
Today, post-election wranglings in Israel over governing
coalitions are guided by varied assessments of the likelihood that Attorney
General Avichai Mandelblit will indict Netanyahu. During the campaign leading
up to the April elections, Mandelblit cast legal norms distinguishing politics
from law to the seven winds. He took the unprecedented step of announcing that
pending the outcome of Netanyahu’s pre-indictment hearing, which is scheduled
for next week, he intends to indict the premier on bribery and breach of trust
charges over his dealings with Mozes and Alovich.
Now, as Netanyahu prepares for his pre-indictment hearing,
the prosecution has leaked its intent to indict Netanyahu by mid-November. In
other words, they have no intention to consider Netanyahu’s defense claims. The
outcome is preordained.
For many Israelis, Pelosi’ decision to begin an impeachment
investigation parallels moves by Mandelblit and State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan to
fast track the probes against Netanyahu. But the opposite is the case.
Pelosi’s impeachment bid is a sign that America’s legal
system and indeed its democracy is far healthier than Israel’s.
For nearly two years, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his
partisan investigators spent millions of dollars on a massive, and barely
veiled bid to find a legal excuse to oust Trump from office. But in the end,
they failed. The evidence of collusion between Trump and his campaign and
Russia, simply wasn’t to be found.
Mueller could have kept going. The media wanted him to. The
Democrats wanted him to. But after feeding the media prejudicial leaks against
Trump and aggressively prosecuting Manafort and other Trump officials on
unrelated issues, Mueller ran out of steam. Although in his final report
Mueller tried to provide Democrats with the means to continue the Russia probe
on the political level, he closed down his investigation and went home. US
practice doesn’t permit the indictment of a sitting president. But even if it allowed
for indictments, the materials he had assembled were too weak to justify and
indictment.
In other words, Mueller walked his prosecutors to the brink
of political interference, and then he walked them back. He did not replace
politicians with prosecutors.
Until Mueller submitted his report, Pelosi used his ongoing
probe to fend off pressure from the increasingly powerful radical members of
her Democratic caucus to initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump. Since
then, Pelosi argued, rightly, that impeachment proceedings require a huge
political investment and hold little chance for success. Most Americans oppose
impeaching Trump. The Republicans control the Senate. If the House votes to
impeach Trump, chances of getting the two-thirds majority of Senators required
to convict an impeached president and remove him from office are effectively non-existent.
Unfortunately for Pelosi – the Democratic base, including
the media and the empowered radical faction of her Democratic caucus – have
become deaf to reason. According to a Politico poll, whereas 70 percent of
Democrats support impeachment, only 37 percent of the public does. The likes of
Anastasia Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, like the New York Times and the
Washington Post live in an echo chamber. Members of the echo chamber are so cut
off from those outside it that just as they cannot fathom anyone objecting to
socialism, so they cannot imagine that anyone supports Trump or accepts the
validity of the 2016 election results.
It is hard to know how the impeachment proceedings will play
out. But a likely scenario is that the proceedings will damage Democrats more
than they will damage Trump.
This then brings us back to Israel.
Like Pelosi and her colleagues, Blue and White leaders Benny
Gantz and Lapid and their colleagues on the Left claim that the very fact that
Netanyahu is under investigation renders him illegitimate. They refuse to form
a unity government with Likud unless Netanyahu is first ousted as Likud leader.
But unlike Pelosi, Gantz and Lapid don’t need to make their
claims themselves. Lapid, whose ministers gave preferential treatment to Yediot
through government advertising contracts and received glowing coverage in the
paper, does not have to argue the case for impeaching Netanyahu. He stands
behind the ostensibly “objective” state prosecutions.
Pelosi’s decision to open impeachment proceedings against
Trump despite the great political risk involved going into an election year
indicates that the radical faction of the Democratic party has swallowed the
party. But more importantly, her move is a testament to the abiding power and
fortitude of American democracy. The difference between the situation in
Israel, where the prosecutors happily abuse their legal power for transparently
political aims and the US, where politically motivated prosecutors backed away
from the brink and compelled politicians to take over their political
investigations, is the difference between a flailing democracy and a resilient
democracy.
Blog Editor: Rather than capitulate to Facebook censorship by abandoning
the platform, I choose to post and share until the Leftist censors ban me.
Recently, the Facebook censorship tactic I’ve experienced is a couple of Group
shares then jailed under the false accusation of posting too fast. So I ask
those that read this, to combat censorship by sharing blog and Facebook posts
with your friends or Groups you belong to.
____________________________
About Caroline
B. Glick
Caroline B. Glick is a senior
columnist at Breitbart News and the senior contributing and chief columnist for
The Jerusalem Post. She is also a senior columnist for Maariv. She is the
author of The Israeli Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East,
(Crown 2014) and of Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad (Gefen 2008).
The Israeli Solution was endorsed by leading US policymakers including Vice
President Mike Pence, Senator Ted Cruz and National Security Advisor John
Bolton. Shackled Warrior was endorsed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
former CIA director James Woolsey.
Glick is the adjunct senior
fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in
Washington, DC and directs the Israeli Security Project at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center. She travels frequently throughout the world to brief
policymakers on issues related to Israel’s strategic environment and other
related topics. She lectures widely on strategic and political issues affecting
global security, Israel and the Jewish people, US-Israel relations,
Israel-Diaspora affairs and Israel’s changing strategic landscape.
In 2008 Glick founded Latma,
the Hebrew language satirical media criticism website. She served as editor in
chief of the site until it ceased operations in 2015.
Latma changed the face of
Israel’s social media and revolutionized the Israeli entertainment industry by
bringing an alternative voice to the popular culture. Latma launched “Hakol
Shafit,” a primetime, half hour satirical newscast on Israel television Channel
1. Glick served as the editor in chief of the program.
Glick was born in Houston, TX
and grew up in Chicago, IL. She moved to Israel in 1991, two weeks after
receiving her BA in Political Science from Columbia University. She joined the
Israel Defense Forces that summer and served as an officer for five and a half
years.
From 1994-1996, as an IDF
captain, Ms. Glick served in the Defense Ministry as a core member of Israel’s
negotiating team with the Palestinians.
In 1997 and 1998 Ms. Glick
served as Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu.
From 1998-2000 Ms. Glick
studied at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and received a
Master’s in Public Policy in June 2000. …
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