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Home > Michael Flynn's Indictment Exposes Trump Team's Collusion With
Israel, Not Russia
Michael Flynn's Indictment Exposes Trump Team's Collusion With Israel, Not
Russia
By Max Blumenthal [1] / AlterNet [2]
December 5, 2017, 1:33 PM GMT
When Congress authorized Robert Mueller and his team of lawyers to
investigate "links and/or coordination between the Russian government and
individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,"
opponents of the president sensed that sooner or later, hard evidence of
Trump's collusion with the Russian government would emerge.
Seven months later, after three indictments that did little, if anything, to
confirm the grand collusion narrative, Mueller had former National Security
Council advisor Michael Flynn dragged before a federal court for lying to
the FBI. The Russia probe had finally netted a big fish.
As the details of the Flynn indictment seeped out into the press, however,
the bombshell was revealed as another dud. To the dismay of many Trump
opponents, nothing in Flynn's rap sheet demonstrated collusion with Russia.
Instead, the indictment undermined the Russiagate narrative while
implicating another, much more inconvenient foreign power in a plot to
meddle in American politics.
According to plea agreement Flynn signed with Mueller, Flynn admitted to
lying to the FBI about a phone call he placed to the Russian ambassador to
the US, Sergei Kislyak, during the transition period between the election
and inauguration - not during the campaign. Flynn's first order of business
with the Russian diplomat was to beseech him not to retaliate for sanctions
imposed by Obama on Russia for still-unproven [3] allegations that Russian
intelligence agencies hacked the Democratic National Committee. In other
words, Flynn was caught trying to influence Russia, not the other way
around.
The only area where Flynn proposed any form of coordination with Russia was
in defeating ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria. The Trump administration's attempts
to collaborate with its Russian counterparts in Syria have been the target
of relentless sabotage from an opportunistic media and Obama era national
security officials who considered the catastrophic semi-covert operation to
arm Syrian insurgents a part of their legacy. Thanks to stifling Cold War
atmosphere these elements have cultivated in Washington, the US has been
reduced to an impotent bystander while Russia, Iran, and Turkey have joined
together to impose an end [4] to the proxy war that has ravaged Syria for
the past five years.
To be sure, Flynn indictment did contain a stunning revelation of collusion
between Team Trump and a foreign state. But it was not the country that the
national media has obsessed over for the past year.
Flynn was found by the FBI to have lobbied Kislyak to exercise Russia's veto
against the passage of a United Nations security council resolution
condemning the growth of Israel's illegal settlements. And he did so under
orders from Jared Kushner, the presidential son-in-law and Middle East
fixer, who was himself acting on behalf of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu.
Thanks to Flynn's indictment, we now know that the Israeli prime minister
was able to transform the Trump administration into his own personal vehicle
for undermining Obama's lone effort to hold Israel accountable at the UN. A
clearer example of a foreign power colluding with an American political
operation against a sitting president has seldom, if ever, been exposed in
such glaring fashion.
Kushner's deep ties to the Israeli right-wing and ethical breaches
The day after Kushner was revealed as Flynn's taskmaster, a team of
researchers from the Democratic Super PAC American Bridge found that the
presidential son-in-law had failed to disclose [5] his role as a co-director
of his family's Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation during the years when
his family's charity funded the Israeli enterprise of illegal settlements.
The embarrassing omission barely scratched the surface of Kushner's decades
long relationship with Israel's Likud-led government.
During the 1990's, a teenaged Jared Kushner was forced to vacate [6] his own
bedroom so Netanyahu had a place to stay when he was in New York City for
business. Since at least 2006, the Kushners have donated [7] at least
$315,000 to the Friends of the IDF, the American fundraising arm of the
Israeli military, and tens of thousands of dollars to illegal Israeli
settlements in the occupied West Bank, from Beit El to Gush Etzion.
The Kushner family foundation has even donated to the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva,
a West Bank-based Jewish religious institution that has served for a base of
radical settler terror attacks against Palestinian villagers. The yeshiva
has been led by a pair of rabbis who produced a genocidal tract that the
Israeli newspaper Maariv described [8] as "230 pages on the laws concerning
the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the
question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew."
To orchestrate his futile attempt to scuttle a diplomatic imperative of the
Obama administration, Netanyahu drew on these deep ties to the Kusher
family. There are troubling indications that his intelligence agencies
shared material that it gathered by spying on the US with Kushner and the
Trump transitional team.
Eli Lake, a neoconservative columnist for Bloomberg who frequently relies on
sources from both Trump and Netanyahu's inner circles, reported [9] that
Israel's "envoys shared their own intelligence about the Obama
administration's lobbying efforts to get member states to support the [UN]
resolution with the Trump transition team."
The subtext here was clear: Israel, a country that surveilled [10] American
diplomats during Iran deal negotiations in 2015 and which is notorious for
its espionage across the West, had spied on the Obama administration during
the lead-up to the UN vote and shared its "intelligence" with the Trump
team. Once again, collusion has seldom been demonstrated as clearly or
disturbingly as this.
A Clinton mega-donor defends Kushner's collusion
So why isn't this angle of the Flynn indictment getting more attention? An
easy explanation could be deduced from the stunning spectacle [11] that
unfolded this December 2 at the Brookings Institution, where the fresh-faced
Kushner engaged in a "keynote conversation" with Israeli-American oligarch
Haim Saban.
"You've been in the news the last few days, to say the least. But you've
been in the news about an issue that I personally want to thank you for,
because you and your team were taking steps to try and get the United
Nations Security Council to not go along with what ended up being an
abstention by the US," Saban remarked to Kushner. "As far as I know there
was nothing illegal there but I think that this crowd and myself want to
thank you for making that effort."
Kushner nervously scanned the room, mumbled "thank you" to his host and
forced an uncomfortable smile.
Saban's political background lent special significance to his robust defense
of Trump's son-in-law. Having earned his fortune in television and the
Israeli telecom industry, he has become one of the Democratic Party's most
generous individual donors. Saban's millions funded the construction of
Democratic National Committee's headquarters and filled the campaign coffers
of Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 2012, as a reward for Saban's handsome Super
PAC donations to Obama, the president nominated [12] the billionaire's wife
- a former Playboy "Disco Queens" [13] model and children's fashion designer
with no diplomatic experience - as special US representative to the United
Nations general assembly.
The spectacle of a top Democratic Party money man defending one of the Trump
administration's most influential figures was clearly intended to establish
a patina of bipartisan normalcy around Kushner's collusion with the
Netanyahu government. Saban's effort to protect the presidential son-in-law
was supplemented by an op-ed in the Jewish Daily Forward headlined, [14]
"Jared Kushner Was Right To 'Collude' With Russia - Because He Did It For
Israel."
While the Israel lobby ran interference for Kushner, the favorite pundits of
the liberal anti-Trump "Resistance" minimized the role of Israel in the
Flynn saga. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, who has devoted [15] more content this
year to Russia than to any other topic, appeared to entirely avoid the issue
of Kushner's collusion with Israel.
There is simply too much at stake for too many to allow any disruption in
the preset narrative. From the journalist pack that followed the trail of
Russiagate down a conspiracy infested rabbit hole to the Clintonites seeking
excuses for their mind-boggling campaign failures to the Cold Warriors
exploiting the panic over Russian meddling to drive an unprecedented arms
build-up, the narrative must go on, regardless of the facts.
Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and
the award-winning author of Goliath [16], Republican Gomorrah [17], and The
51 Day War [18]. He is the co-host of the podcast, Moderate Rebels [19].
Follow him on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal [20].
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [21]
[22]
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Source URL:
https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/flynn-indictment-exposes-collusion
-israel
Links:
[1] https://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] https://thebaffler.com/salvos/from-russia-with-panic-levine
[4]
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/22/iranian-and-turkish-leaders-ar
rive-in-russia-for-syria-talks-with-putin
[5]
http://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-disclosure-form-west-bank-settlements-
israel-white-house-729290
[6]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/11/us/politics/jared-kushner-israel.html
[7] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.757068
[8]
https://www.alternet.org/story/148016/how_to_kill_goyim_and_influence_people
%3A_israeli_rabbis_defend_book%27s_shocking_religious_defense_of_killing_non
-jews_%28with_video%29
[9]
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-01/kushner-is-said-to-have-o
rdered-flynn-to-contact-russia
[10] https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-spied-on-iran-talks-1427164201
[11]
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-lobby-billionaire-p
raises-kushner-collusion-netanyahu
[12]
https://www.politico.com/blogs/politico44/2012/09/obama-nominates-mega-donor
-haim-sabans-wife-to-un-post-136113
[13] http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/6457/morphed
[14] http://www.apple.com/
[15]
https://theintercept.com/2017/04/12/msnbcs-rachel-maddow-sees-a-russia-conne
ction-lurking-around-every-corner/
[16]
http://www.amazon.com/Goliath-Life-Loathing-Greater-Israel/dp/1568586345
[17] http://republicangomorrah.com/
[18] https://www.amazon.com/51-Day-War-Ruin-Resistance/dp/156858511X
[19] http://moderaterebelsradio.com/
[20] http://twitter.com/maxblumenthal
[21] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=Typo on Michael Flynn's
Indictment Exposes Trump Team's Collusion With Israel, Not Russia
[22] https://www.alternet.org/
[23] https://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
