How Biden Officials Secretly Greenlit Israel’s Attack on Lebanon

Despite President Biden’s public comments stating the opposite, the U.S. government actually backed Israel’s attacks and bombing of Lebanon.

Citing Israeli and U.S. officials, Politico reported Monday that White House officials told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to bomb Hezbollah targets, despite the fact that publicly, Biden was urging a cease-fire.

Specifically, presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, told Israeli officials that the U.S. supported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy to launch military attacks on Lebanon in order to convince Hezbollah to engage in diplomatic talks.

The U.S. government wasn’t united in this stance, however. Some officials in the State Department, the Department of Defense, and in the intelligence establishment warned Israel’s move could pull the U.S. further into another war in the Middle East. 

Israeli officials told their U.S. counterparts in mid-September of the change in military strategy, but didn’t mention any specifics. McGurk and Hochstein, while reportedly urging caution, replied that it was a good time to attack Lebanon as Hezbollah had suffered losses in previous months.

The report contradicts what the administration has said publicly. Biden was asked Monday if he was comfortable with an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, and replied, “I am comfortable with them stopping. We should have a cease-fire now.”

But, cease-fire talks are seemingly in limbo as Israel continues to bomb Lebanon, killing more than 700 people since September 23, including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday. Israeli officials dropped multiple U.S.-provided 2,000-pound bombs on residential buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs to kill Nasrallah. The U.S. government, led by Biden, appears unwilling to use its military support of Israel as leverage to stop the latest conflict, much as it refused to do in Gaza.

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance already has a major setback in his Tuesday matchup against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: Nobody seems to like him.

Favorability ratings aggregated by CNN political analyst Harry Enten indicate that the country’s opinion of Vance is appallingly low, at -11 percentage points, lower than any other politician currently in the race for the White House.

That makes Vance the least liked vice presidential pick in modern U.S. history at this point in the race—that is, before he’s even had a proper face-off against his opponent. He’s also the second vice presidential pick with a net negative favorability, preceded only by Dan Quale in 1988, who actually had a stronger position than Vance before his first debate with a -3 percent favorability rating.

Walz, meanwhile, is soaring. The “Midwestern Dad” ranked head and shoulders above the favorability ratings of everyone else in the race, including Vice President Kamala Harris, with a +4 percent favorability rating.

Enten’s analysis also suggested that 72 percent of polled Americans believed that Walz has the upper hand in Tuesday night’s debate, making Vance an aggressive underdog with just 28 percent of the country thinking he stands a chance of winning.

Vance’s aggressive rhetoric, baseless conspiracies, and just plain weird comments have rubbed Americans the wrong way in the months since he was selected to be Donald Trump’s right-hand man. The Republican vice presidential pick has ardently defended his position that childless adults should not hold positions of power as they don’t have a “direct stake” in the future of the country, and derided Democratic Party leaders as “childless cat ladies.”

He also invented a lie about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has sparked at least 33 bomb threats to the sleepy city, forcing it to evacuate and temporarily shutter several of its schools, colleges, festivals, and a significant portion of its government facilities, including City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Ohio License Bureau, the Springfield Academy of Excellence, and Fulton Elementary School.

And Vance’s more general appearances out in public have done everything but humanize him to the country’s voting class. In August, the MAGA Republican’s quick stop for some glazed donuts in a Georgia shop ended up going viral when it became clear that the visit—and his general abrasiveness—was making a couple of people behind the counter painfully uncomfortable.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is really hoping to get his five-count federal corruption indictment thrown out.

Adams’s lawyer Alex Spiro filed a motion Tuesday seeking sanctions against the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, alleging that it had leaked sensitive grand jury materials to the press.

In the filing, Spiro wrote that the government had been facilitating a slow drip of information to the media, so that by the time Adams’s damning federal corruption indictment was unsealed on Friday, “most of the details of the indictment and evidence underpinning the government’s case (weak as it is) had already been widely reported in the national and local press.”

Spiro cited The New York Times, which reported Thursday evening that Adams had been indicted and announced that additional details would be released the next day. Spiro argued that only the prosecution would have been “privy to the government’s plan to announce additional details the next day,” and so it was “therefore clear that the prosecution team is behind the leak.”

Spiro requested an evidentiary hearing to “develop the record as to the scope of the prosecution team’s misconduct and the appropriate remedy, including dismissal of the indictment.”

At a press conference on Monday, Spiro claimed that the prosecution team had committed a “grave breach of the public’s trust” for leaking information.

Adams is accused of unlawfully receiving $10 million in public funds as part of a slew of public corruption charges, including one count of wire fraud, two counts of solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national, and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery, and to receive campaign contributions by foreign nationals.

Adams has also been charged with one count of bribery, which his lawyer is also desperate to see tossed from his case. Spiro argued that the types of gratuities the federal government alleged Adams took don’t actually count as bribes at all.

After a contributor to Project 2025 was outed for his gay porn past, he has finally addressed the controversy.

Last week, online sleuths uncovered 2014 adult film videos of Corey DeAngelis, a right-wing school privatization advocate affiliated with the American Federation for Children and the Cato Institute. And after more than a week of silence, DeAngelis has finally said his mistakes make him an expert in protecting childrens from “transgender ideology.”

“As an activist for parental rights and school choice, my passion is personal,” DeAngelis wrote on X on Monday. “I was a victim of poor decisions and poor influences. I have turned that experience into the fuel that fires me to save young people from being put in the same position I was put in and to help parents protect their children.”

DeAngelis didn’t specifically mention what “poor decisions” he was referring to, but he was allegedly featured in gay adult films under the name “Seth Rose” a decade ago. His past was discovered by a gay porn blog, according to HuffPost, and his apology Monday was praised by fellow conservatives.

He is listed as a contributor to Project 2025 on behalf of the Betsy DeVos–backed American Federation for Children. The federation has since stripped references to him from their website and placed DeAngelis on leave.

The Human Rights Campaign warned that Project 2025 would “take a wrecking ball” to LGBTQ rights. The plan calls for Donald Trump to imprison teachers or librarians who allow students to read LGBTQ materials  and register them as sex offenders. Further, it defines pornography as intertwined with the queer and trans community.

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed.

As Melissa Gire Grant wrote for The New Republic, the intended enemies of Project 2025’s war on pornography are not abusers or the patriarchy but teachers and LGBTQ Americans. And as a school-choice culture warrior, DeAngelis made a living portraying public schools as sites of left-wing indoctrination.

“DeAngelis’ connections to the longtime anti-LGBTQ group Heritage Foundation and his co-authorship of Heritage’s fascist, dangerous blueprint Project 2025, are further proof that he is willing to sell out student safety to anti-LGBTQ extremists,” GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis told The Advocate. “Targeting any student makes every student and school less safe.”

President Biden isn’t happy with Donald Trump’s lies about him ignoring the plight of hurricane victims.

Speaking to reporters Monday night along with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, who was present via teleconference, Biden sharply responded to a question from one reporter who noted that Trump accused the pair of ignoring the state.

“He’s lying, and the governor told him he was lying,” Biden said. “I don’t know why he does this, and the reason I get so angry about it, I don’t care what he says about me, but I care what he communicates to the people that are in need. He implies that we’re not doing everything possible. We are. We are.”

Another question concerned whether Biden wished he had spent the weekend in Washington instead of Delaware, and if he wished in retrospect that there were more resources available for the hurricane response.

“Come on, stop with the game will you? [Delaware is] 90 miles from here, I was on the phone the whole time,” Biden responded, noting that the question was not of more resources but how to get the resources there amid the devastation.

“It’s hard to get it from point A to point B. It’s hard to get it [there] if some of these roads are wiped out. Communities are wiped out. There’s no ability to land, there’s no ability to get trucks through. There’s no ability to get a whole range of things through,” Biden said. “If I sound frustrated, I am.”

Biden is rightfully angry over the conspiracy theories egged on by Trump about Hurricane Helene that the president and Cooper are neglecting people in Republican areas. These theories have been debunked by Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp, but of course the former president has doubled down.

Meanwhile, it appears that four years in the White House dealing with natural disasters didn’t teach Trump anything about how hurricanes are forecast and how preparations are made. Perhaps Trump should leave relief efforts to the adults who are actually trying to help the victims instead of pushing his self-serving agenda.