Biden Admin Makes Shocking Confession on How Extreme It Is on Israel

On Wednesday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller was confronted during a press conference over whether the United States was using leverage to rein in Israel’s bombing of Lebanon and Gaza.

BBC News reporter Tom Bateman cited a diary entry from Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1982, where Reagan phoned Israel’s prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, and told him to stop Israel’s shelling of Beirut. Bateman asked Miller if U.S. officials were similarly doing everything they could for a cease-fire.

Miller claimed in his reply that during the current conflict, U.S. intervention had led Israel “to take steps that they were not previously doing” regarding humanitarian access and “the shape of their military operations.”

“I do think it is often simplistic to reduce the … understanding of what’s happening to the bilateral relationship between two countries,” Miller added.

Bateman followed up, noting that Begin stopped bombing Lebanon 20 minutes after Reagan’s phone call. Miller deflected.

“I think we have made clear on a number of occasions with the government of Israel what we believe, and there have been times when our intervention has led to direct action by the government of Israel. There are times when they have disagreements with us,” Miller said. “And by the way, that was true in the Reagan administration too.”

Miller’s comments seem to show an unwillingness by President Biden and his administration to use any kind of leverage—such as the billions of dollars in weapons sales or the billions in foreign aid to Israel—to compel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to curtail Israel’s military actions in Lebanon or Gaza.

In 1982, Reagan’s administration halted cluster-bomb shipments to Israel over their use on civilian areas in Lebanon. Reagan then followed with a phone call to Begin where he used language that would seem unfathomable by any American politician today.

“Here, on our television, night after night, our people are being shown the symbols of this war, and it is a holocaust,” Reagan told the Israeli prime minister, warning that it was endangering the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It had an immediate effect, with the bombing not only stopping but with Begin pleading with Reagan not to harm ties between the two countries.

Biden initially spurned months of calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, and still continues to back Israel in its brutal war that has claimed at least 41.000 Palestinian lives. Now Israel, thanks to a green light from the Biden administration, has expanded the war to Lebanon and killed hundreds of lives just in the past week. Biden can call for an arms embargo against Israel at any time, but as Miller’s comments illustrate, he won’t even touch the idea.

An Arizona judge torched a legal request by Rudy Giuliani in the fixer’s fake elector case Wednesday, ruling that the ex-Trump aide had “not one scintilla” of evidence to question the legitimacy of a grand jury assigned to his lawsuit.

Last month, Giuliani filed a request demanding information about the grand jury, alleging that the group was politically compromised and biased. But the judge overseeing the case, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Bruce Cohen, wasn’t impressed by the conjecture-laden inquiry.

“The underlying claim that formulates the request is based upon pure speculation and abject conjecture,” Cohen wrote. “He alleges not one scintilla of information that would support this claim.”

Further still, Cohen noted that this particular grand jury was not specifically crafted to oversee Giuliani’s case but was rather a sitting grand jury, further shrinking the likelihood that it was arranged specifically to malign Giuliani and his co-defendants.

“There is therefore no reliable information to suggest that the empaneling of this grand jury occurred in contemplation of this case or with a political agenda in mind,” Cohen wrote.

Giuliani was one of nearly two dozen Trump allies indicted for their alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and attorneys Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, and Christina Bobb.

The indictment charged 18 individuals, some of whose names have been redacted, with orchestrating a scheme to use fake electors to flip Arizona’s 2020 election results over to Donald Trump. It also names Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator. All of the indicted individuals face the same slew of charges, which includes counts for conspiracy, forgery, fraudulent schemes and practices, and fraudulent schemes and artifices—the last of which holds a potential sentence of up to five years in prison.

Tim Scott continues to be a laughingstock of the Republican Party with his latest comments.

Joining CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday, Scott made the entire roundtable laugh when he desperately tried to defend Donald Trump’s economic plans.

“Do you agree with all the tariffs?” Joe Kernen asked, referring to Trump’s isolationist economic agenda. “John Deere, 200 percent? Do you think companies that make stuff here should be at 15 percent tax? That’s industrial policy, isn’t it?”

“I believe that President Trump often times talks in the abstract,” the South Carolina senator responded.

CNBC hosts laughed at the ridiculous nonanswer. “What are we supposed to believe then?” asked one journalist.

“Believe his performance,” said Scott. “Believe what we saw from 2017 to 2020.” He then proceeded to stumble over words and throw out numbers about jobs Trump brought home.

“Obviously, that excludes Covid,” said the CNBC host, referring to the devastation the economy and everyday people endured while Trump was president in 2020—as well as its effects on how we compare economic numbers under the Trump and Biden administrations.

While Trump’s team continues to slam Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the economy, as the hosts pointed out, they want economists and pundits to cherry-pick the highlights of Trump’s time as president.

It’s not a surprise that Scott can’t defend Trump’s economic plan. When Scott was running for president last year, he openly criticized Trump’s tariff plan on the campaign trail. “An across-the-board 10 percent [tariff would] increase … the cost of everything,” Scott told The New York Post a year ago. “In the current inflationary environment [that] would not be helpful.”

In reality, experts are warning that Trump’s economic plans, including his new tariff policies, might be even more harmful during a second go-around.

“Despite his ‘make the foreigners pay’ rhetoric, this package of policies does more damage to the US economy than to any other in the world,” wrote independent nonprofit nonpartisan researchers at the Peterson Institute in a report from September.

During a disjointed, low-energy speech on Tuesday evening, just before the vice presidential debate, Donald Trump made time to disrespect service members injured during his presidency.

At a campaign stop in Milwaukee, Trump was asked about Iran’s recent ballistic missile attacks on Israel, following Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Gaza.

“Do you think Israel should retaliate to these missile attacks from Iran? But also do you believe that you should have been tougher on Iran after they had launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 U.S. soldiers injured?” asked a reporter.

“So first of all, ‘injured’—what does ‘injured’ mean? You mean, because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort,” responded Trump.

“There was nobody ever tougher on Iraq,” he continued, confusing the two countries.

Following the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, Iran attacked the Al Asad Airbase in neighboring Iraq, and more than 100 U.S. soldiers were left with brain injury symptoms. Some were evacuated to Germany for medical treatment, and nearly 80 troops received Purple Hearts for injuries related to the Iranian attacks.

This isn’t the first time Trump has disparaged injured U.S. troops—and it likely won’t be the last. His disrespect was so flagrant that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz mentioned it early on in the vice presidential debate, telling the American people that “when Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as ‘headaches.’”

Later on in his Tuesday speech, Trump described the attack as a “very nice thing.”

We’ll see if these comments on soldiers get as much attention as Trump’s “suckers” and “losers” remarks.

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson was the lone state lawmaker who did not approve Governor Roy Cooper’s request to declare Hurricane Helene an emergency and mobilize emergency services ahead of the deadly storm.

As Hurricane Helene approached North Carolina last week, Cooper requested approval from the nine-person Council of State to act under the North Carolina Emergency Management Act, WRAL reported Tuesday.* Within hours, all but one member had responded: Robinson.

Robinson, a Trump-endorsed alleged porn enthusiast and self-declared “Black NAZI” who is currently running for governor, has spent the week since needling Cooper over the state’s emergency response—which Robinson himself apparently helped dampen.

Robinson posted on X Sunday that “the time for politics is over. We are talking about saving people’s lives here.” Then why did he not approve Cooper’s emergency request?

Former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory told WRAL that Robinson’s lack of response to Cooper’s emergency request was “inexcusable in a time of crisis.”

“This is not a time for criticism,” McCrory said. “This is a time for working together as a team and asking how you can help. I’m sure there are people who feel stranded out there, but right now is not the time to start throwing arrows.”

Robinson responded Wednesday to WRAL’s report. “When Hurricane Helene was on its way to North Carolina, Gov. Cooper was too busy hob-knobing with rich folks in New York to care about preparing for the storm,” Robinson wrote on X.

“Now Democrats like Cooper, Josh Stein & Joe Biden want to hide behind bureaucratic resolutions that pass automatically—instead of getting out there and working to help people in dire need. I won’t stand for this,” Robinson wrote. “While they are playing politics, my team and I remain committed to doing all we can to help our neighbors in the wake of this devastating storm.”

So far, Cooper has deployed more than 700 members of North Carolina’s National Guard as part of search and rescue efforts and to deliver pallets of water and food supplies to those affected by widespread flooding and mudslides across the western half of the state, according to WRAL. President Joe Biden has approved Cooper’s request for expedited federal support.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump claimed that the federal government and Cooper were intentionally neglecting residents in Republican areas of North Carolina.

* This article originally misstated the day the WRAL report was published.