“The president expressed his support for a ceasefire” during a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, their third publicly disclosed discussion in less than a week, according to an official White House summary known as a “readout.”
“The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is not talking about a ceasefire. We’re focused on the firing,” the military’s chief spokesman, Brig. Gen. Hidai Zilberman, told Israel’s Army Radio Tuesday, Reuters reported.
More than 200 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, according to local health officials, while the Israeli death toll stands at 10.
Pressure in Congress is building to delay the sale and make a more forceful push for a cease-fire, Jacqueline noted today.
White House aides declined to speak on the record to detail why the president, known to love Israel but mistrust Netanyahu, had not publicly called for a cease-fire. But at least three factors appear to have shaped the administration’s diplomacy.
First is the conviction, fueled by Netanyahu’s public remarks, that the politically embattled prime minister will soldier on until he believes he has achieved his objectives, no matter what message is coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Shortly before the White House released its readout, Netanyahu declared he had spoken to his top national security aides and approved new operations, adding “the directive is to continue striking at the terrorist targets.”
And Netanyahu had told CBS’s “Face The Nation” program on Sunday: “We’ll do whatever it takes to restore order and quiet and the security of our people … It’ll take some time. I hope it won’t take long, but it’s not immediate.”
The White House statement notably did not include a timeframe for a cease-fire, much less call for an “immediate” attempt.
A second reason is a desire to avoid treating Israel and Hamas as rough equals on the world stage, reflecting both limited U.S. influence and Israeli distaste for treating what the United States labels a terrorist group as legitimate.
Biden has strenuously avoided drawing any equivalence in his public statements. Monday’s readout underlined the president “reiterated his firm support for Israel’s right to defend itself against indiscriminate rocket attack.”
And it said the two leaders “discussed progress in Israel’s military operations against Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza,” language that has appeared in other public administration comments.
That message also underwent some fine-tuning over the weekend, with White House press secretary Jen Psaki refusing to repeat it on Monday. “We’re not going to give a day-by-day grade,” she told reporters.
A third reason is skepticism that traditional peacemaking, including U.S. pressure, will be effective in defusing the communal aspect of the conflict — violent unrest inside some Israeli cities, not necessarily organized by any groups.
That’s one reason why the administration has reached out so frequently since the latest conflict began to leaders in places like Qatar, Egypt and Jordan — not only to pressure Hamas, but to influence Arab Israelis.
“Our approach is through quiet, intensive diplomacy. And that’s where we feel we can be most effective,” Psaki said.
“The muted tone reflects a decision by the Biden administration that heavy public pressure on Israel is likely to backfire. Multiple U.S. officials are applying some pressure and advice behind the scenes, with the goal of winding down the conflict, ideally within days.”
Biden’s new language on a cease-fire and Psaki’s refusal to endorse Israeli actions as proportionate amount to, as Anne, John and Sean wrote, “a subtle rebuke of the Israeli government.”
But there was a third piece of American rhetoric that also bears noting: A refusal, thus far, to vouch for Israeli intelligence about the building that housed the Associated Press offices.
Netanyahu told “Face The Nation” his government had shared intelligence with the United States showing “an intelligence office” for Hamas operated out of the building, “so it’s a perfectly legitimate target.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during a visit to Copenhagen on Monday, said he had not seen the information and underlined: “I will leave it to others to characterize if any information has been shared and our assessment of that information.”
Psaki told reporters “any intelligence is being handled through intelligence channels,” adding “I don’t have a further readout or confirmation of any of those details from here, nor do I have an assessment of that intelligence that was stated by the prime minister.”
“As a majority of Democratic senators call for a cease-fire in the fighting between Israel and Hamas militants, a group of 20 Republican senators is pushing for a vote this week on a resolution expressing support for Israel,” John Wagner reports.
“For decades, the people of Israel have endured unyielding attacks from terrorist groups, like Hamas, who wish to destroy the Jewish state and its people,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said in a statement. “Now, as thousands of rockets rain down, our resolve to stand with Israel must be stronger than ever. … It’s time for President Biden to stop cowering to the anti-Israel radical left and remind these terrorists and the world of the United States’ strong and unwavering support of the Israeli people.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), among the backers of Scott’s resolution, said this morning that Scott would try to pass it in the Senate this week by unanimous consent.
Lunchtime reads from The Post
- “Facial recognition system used to identify Lafayette Square protester to be halted,” by Justin Jouvenal: “The National Capital Region Facial Recognition Investigative Leads System is ending after a review prompted by a new Virginia law that puts tight restrictions on the use of facial recognition technology by local law enforcement agencies in the state. The law takes effect on July 1. The system is a pilot program of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and was used by more than a dozen law enforcement agencies across D.C., Maryland and Virginia since it was approved in 2017.”
- “Black Lives Matter activists said a man tried to hit them with his car. The suspect turned out to be a judge,” by Lateshia Beachum: “Judge John M. Tyson of Cumberland County … is one of the most high-profile people accused of being aggressive toward protests demanding racial justice and police reform in the wake of worldwide demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd last year.”
- “The end of D.C.’s elite social scene,” by Sally Quinn: “I am convinced that the social lives of Washington players will never go back to what they were before the double blow of Trump and covid. And despite — or perhaps because of — my decades immersed in the social life of this city, I won’t be unhappy to see it radically transformed. Trump and covid may have finished off what was once the traditional Washington A-list, but it was already in trouble long before January 2017. The George W. Bush administration was the last time it really thrived. Things slowed considerably during the Obama years.”
- “In Biden White House, the celebrity staff is a thing of the past,” the New York Times’s Annie Karni reports: “Because of his longevity in politics and underdog personality, combined with the depth of the crises he is facing, President Biden is undoing a longstanding Washington tradition in which staff members enjoy their own refracted fame. Gone are the days when a counselor to the president like Kellyanne Conway was so well-known that she needed her own security detail; when a White House press secretary like Sean Spicer was a recurring character on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ … Biden staff members appear to be trying to set themselves apart from the drama of the Trump administration.”
- “Documents reveal how Trump is spending taxpayer money on his postpresidential offices – from printer toner to Stephen Miller’s salary,” by Insider’s Robin Bravender: “Miller is one of at least 17 people who continued to receive taxpayer-funded salaries while working for Trump’s postpresidential transition office. … Trump’s postpresidential staff is expected to receive about $1.3 million in federal salary and benefits from January 20 to July 21. … Trump routinely boasted about rejecting his publicly funded presidential paycheck and donating his $400,000 annual salary each year that he was in office. Trump likewise could have rejected taxpayer money for his postpresidential operations but chose not to.” Insider also reported that Trump has received $65,600 from a GSA fund that pays for former presidents’ pensions. It’s unclear what he has done with the funds.
- “Biden, Harris incomes dropped in 2020, tax returns show,” by Bloomberg’s Jennifer Epstein: “Biden’s income fell dramatically to $607,336 in 2020 as he dropped lucrative speaking engagements to campaign for the White House, but he still earned enough to pay the higher tax rates he’s proposed for wealthy people. … In 2020, [Vice President] Harris and [second gentleman Doug] Emhoff had a federal adjusted gross income of $1,695,225, most of which came from Emhoff’s work at law firm DLA Piper. … Both Biden and Harris would end up paying higher tax rates under Biden’s American Family Plan based on their incomes this year.”
Biden will travel to Dearborn, Mich., today to visit an electric vehicle plant as he touts his infrastructure plans.
- “The trip to Michigan, a key presidential battleground state, comes as the White House continues to negotiate with lawmakers in both parties over the size and scope of an infrastructure package,” John Wagner reports.
- “On Tuesday, a group of Senate Republicans led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) is expected to present a new proposal during a meeting with several Biden administration officials, including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.”
Biden’s aid programs are helping buttress Kevin McCarthy’s district despite the GOP leader’s complaints about “socialist” spending.
- A Post analysis by Erica Werner, Andrew Van Dam and Yeganeh Torbati found that McCarthy’s “constituents are among those who have benefited most from the very programs he’s decried, with high poverty levels and a younger population creating acute needs for individual and family aid.”
- “An unusually large share of children in McCarthy’s district stand to benefit from the expanded child tax credit included in the American Rescue Plan he opposed — more than 93 percent, the seventh-highest proportion in California.”
- “Even as McCarthy has railed against the extension of enhanced unemployment benefits in the law, his region has been among the slowest in the state to recover from the pandemic-induced economic crisis. The unemployment rate in his region was still at double digits in March,” our colleagues note. “With high levels of poverty in the district, McCarthy’s constituents have also relied heavily on stimulus checks sent out under the American Rescue Plan and earlier coronavirus relief bills.”
Biden plans to take a pair of executive actions aimed at expanding legal services for the poor.
- The president will resurrect two Obama-era initiatives that the White House says withered during the Trump administration, Wagner reports.
- “The White House said Biden would direct Attorney General Merrick Garland to submit a plan within 120 days to expand ‘access to justice.’ The White House said that an Office for Access to Justice established by the Justice Department in March 2010 had been ‘effectively shuttered’ during the Trump administration.”
- “The Biden administration also plans to reestablish a White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable ‘to prioritize civil legal aid and expand access to federal programs,’ the White House said.”
The Biden administration cleared three Guantánamo detainees for release.
- “The approvals raised to nine the number of the 40 detainees currently at the wartime prison who have been approved for transfer to other countries. But it is unclear where the three men will go, or when, in part because the State Department has to make diplomatic and security arrangements with countries to take them,” the New York Times’s Carol Rosenberg reports.
- “Among those who have been granted approval is Saifullah Paracha, 73, of Pakistan, who was captured in Thailand in 2003. In addition to being the oldest of the detainees, he has also been described as among the sickest there. … The other two were identified as Abdul Rabbani, 54, also a citizen of Pakistan, and Uthman Abdul al-Rahim Uthman, 40, a Yemeni. None have been charged with a crime by the United States in the two decades they have been in custody.“
Two Democratic lawmakers are urging the Biden administration to end the practice of searching journalists’ phone records to try to identify their sources.
- Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) wrote to Garland today urging him to end the investigative practice that has occurred in both Republican and Democratic administrations, Devlin Barrett reports.
- “Earlier this month, the Justice Department sent letters to Post reporters Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, and former Post reporter Adam Entous, notifying them that investigators had taken toll records of the calls to and from their home, work, and cellphones from a period of April to July 2017.”
Chris Christie “won’t preclude” a 2024 presidential run.
- The former Republican New Jersey governor told the “Ruthless” podcast he hasn’t ruled out a 2024 bid and that his decision would not be influenced by whether Trump decides to run again, Wagner reports.
- “I certainly won’t preclude it,” Christie said when asked whether he is thinking about running. “I’m also not going to be one of these people who’s going to say, ‘Well, I’ll wait to see what President Trump’s going to do,’ ” he added. “I think if you say you’re deferring to someone, that’s a real sign of both weakness and indecision.”
- In the meantime, Christie said he wants to help lead Republicans “in a productive and smart way” with a focus on “populist-type policies.” “There’s a recklessness to some of the stuff that happened over the last four years, which came back to cost us suburban voters, which cost us the election, in my view, in 2020,” he said.
Democratic Florida Rep. Val Demings will run for Senate against Marco Rubio.
- “For months, Demings mulled which statewide office to pursue, but decided she could do the most good by taking on the two-term senator, according to several Democrats familiar with her thinking,” Politico’s Marc Caputo reports.
- “A top adviser to Demings compared her personal biography to Rubio this way: ‘She’s the daughter of a maid and a janitor who became the first Black woman police chief in Orlando. He’s the son of a maid and a bartender who’s a career politician.’”
Republicans are not sold on the bipartisan Jan. 6 commission.
- “Several Senate Republicans on Monday evening expressed worries about how the commission will be formed, whether it should have a broader scope and if it might hinder the work of congressional committees that are already probing the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol. With the use of the filibuster power, the Senate GOP can demand changes or bottle up the legislation altogether,” Politico’s Burgess Everett, Marianne Levine and Melanie Zanona report.
- “They’re going to have to broaden the inquiry in order to get 60 votes,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). “There’s more things wrong in this country than just [what] happened on January 6th.”
- Speaker Nancy Pelosi scheduled a vote on Wednesday “on a deal forged with Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) establishing a 10-member commission with subpoena power to investigate the Capitol insurrection. Yet House and Senate GOP leaders haven’t signed on. The House is also proceeding with a $2 billion security supplemental bill with uncertain prospects in the Senate.”
- House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has declined to endorse the deal between Pelosi and Katko. “As of now, most House Republicans are expected to vote against it, according to a House GOP source. Democrats, meanwhile, are only expecting a dozen or so Republican defections.”
“I accept the results of the election,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said. “2020 is over to me, I’m ready to march on and hopefully take back the House and the Senate in 2022.”
The controversy over masks is making the CDC rethink its pandemic response.
- “CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is shaking up the agency’s Covid-19 response to consolidate oversight amid mounting criticism over its guidance for vaccinated people,” Politico’s Erin Banco and Adam Cancryn report. “The changes in recent weeks include creating a clear reporting chain from the new director of the agency’s vaccine task force — which helped rewrite rules for mask-wearing — up to Walensky. The head of that task force had originally reported to both CDC and the White House. Walensky has also reshuffled the CDC’s pandemic modeling and data, analytics and visualization task forces.”
- The agency is also dealing with the departure of two longtime leaders, which, combined with Walensky’s reshaping of the pandemic response, “is solidifying the CDC chief’s power, giving her control over some of the most critical policy conversations related to the pandemic.”
Some experts are criticizing the extent of U.S. help in the global vaccine drive.
- “If all goes according to plan, the United States will soon send 80 million doses of Covid vaccines to help countries beleaguered by the coronavirus, President Biden said. But world leaders, experts and advocates warn much more is needed to stop the virus from running rampant in much of the world,” the Times’s Daniel Slotnik and Sheryl Gay Stolberg report.
- “Biden pledged on Monday that 20 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines — the three authorized for use in the United States — would be sent abroad. That’s from a supply of about 400 million to 500 million doses produced each month. In addition, the United States plans to send 60 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine when it is cleared for use by the FDA.”
- “The number of doses needed to vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population is a staggering 11 billion, according to researchers at Duke University. So far only about 1.7 billion have been produced, the analytics firm Airfinity estimated.”
Japanese doctors are calling for the Olympics to be canceled amid a coronavirus surge.
- “The Tokyo 2020 Games start in 66 days, but a major Japanese doctors’ group is calling for the already delayed event to be canceled over fears that the country’s health-care system cannot accommodate the potential medical needs of thousands of international athletes, coaches and media amid a surge of coronavirus cases in the country,” Katerina Ang, Jennifer Hassan and Derek Hawkins report.
Trump’s DOJ tried to unmask the Twitter account that mocked Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) after the congressman failed to force Twitter to reveal the account holder’s identity. “Court filings unsealed this week revealed that in the last months of the Trump presidency, the Justice Department used a grand jury subpoena to demand the identity of whoever was behind @NunesAlt, a Twitter account that criticized Nunes,” Katie Shepherd reports. “In the end, the DOJ’s request was withdrawn after President Biden took office. … The subpoena is the latest turn in a years-long legal beef between Nunes and several Twitter accounts with names like ‘Devin Nunes’ Cow’ and ‘Devin Nunes’ Mom.’ ”
Republican George P. Bush, the Texas Land Commissioner and the son of Jeb Bush, says the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. “I think there was fraud and irregularity, I just don’t think it was in a sum that would have overturned the election result,” he told the Texas Tribune’s Evan Smith. Bush also said the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “disappointing day,” but said he would continue to support Trump if he runs for president in 2024. Bush is eyeing a challenge to Republican Ken Paxton in the GOP primary for Texas attorney general.
And Andrew Giuliani, Rudy Giuliani’s son, launched a bid for New York governor. “On [a new campaign website], Giuliani, 35, touts his work on Trump’s campaign and in the Trump White House as a special assistant to the president on issues including the 2017 tax cuts, an opioid task force and the coronavirus pandemic,” John Wagner reports. “Giuliani vs. Cuomo. Holy smokes. Its Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier,” Giuliani said, referring to a renowned 1971 heavyweight title prizefight. “We can sell tickets at Madison Square Garden.” First, though, he faces a tough GOP primary.
The expanded child tax credit, visualized
The $1.9 trillion coronavirus aid package includes a massive one-year increase to the Child Tax Credit. The expansion could benefit as many as 83 million children and reduce the number of children living in poverty, at least temporarily. Use our calculator to see how much you could receive under the expanded credit.
Biden will tour a Ford electric vehicle center in Dearborn, Mich., at 12:45 p.m. He will deliver remarks there at 1:40 p.m.
The House is poised to pass legislation today aimed at strengthening federal efforts to address hate crimes against Asian Americans.
Stephen Colbert talked about the “sketchy” behavior that led us to both GaetzGate and GatesGate:
Trevor Noah talked about how easy it was for reporters to find Biden’s Venmo account:
