“Huma Abedin!” someone shouted.
Friedman moved into attack mode.
Referring to the longtime Clinton aide, who assisted with the 2000 Camp David summit between Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and who has since worked closely with former secretary of state Clinton on a host of Israeli-Palestinian, Middle Eastern and global issues, the lawyer replied: “Huma Abedin. Grew up in Saudi Arabia, close connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.” Someone in the crowd shouted, “And al-Qaeda.” “And al-Qaeda, right,” responded Friedman.
Abedin is Muslim, but she was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and, while the academic careers of her parents took the family to Saudi Arabia, she was educated in British international schools and at George Washington University. Long before Friedman appeared at the Trump rally in Jerusalem, the Washington Post Fact Checker gave claims that Abedin was connected with the Muslim Brotherhood four Pinocchio’s, its lowest-possible rating on the truthfulness scale. When Trump-supporting Wisconsin congressman Sean Duffy tried in August 2016 to make a case about “Huma and her ties to the Muslim Brotherhood,” the PolitiFact website concluded its review of the claim: “We rate his statement False.” As for the even more incendiary suggestion of an al-Qaeda tie, Friedman admitted later that he had no evidence to sustain the claim. But he still didn’t back off entirely, telling an interviewer: “I don’t know one way or another if that’s true.”
Republicans who actually know a thing or two about foreign affairs in general and the Middle East in particular had repeatedly dismissed the attacks on Abedin as absurd. “That kind of assertion certainly doesn’t comport with the Intelligence Committee, and I can say that on the record,” said former House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Rogers. “I have no information in my committee that would indicate that Huma is anything other than an American patriot.” Arizona senator John McCain dismissed the allegations against Abedin as “nothing less than an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable citizen, a dedicated American, and a loyal public servant.”
Donald Trump surrounded himself with a number of fringe figures who peddled fake news and outright fantasy during the 2016 campaign, but David Friedman carved out a special niche for himself. Few members of Trump’s inner circle made so many warrantless claims so aggressively, and so frequently, as Friedman. So when Trump named Friedman as his pick for ambassador to Israel, supporters of Middle East peace and basic common sense in foreign relations were shocked. “Meet David Friedman—Trump’s Most Alarming Nominee?” read the headline of a response from J Street, the Jewish American advocacy group that Israeli author Amos Oz hails for its “pragmatic, humanistic and peace-loving ideas.” Six hundred rabbis and cantors wrote to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, explaining that “the Rabbis of the Talmud are adamant that we are to speak to and about other people—particularly those with whom we disagree—with love and respect. We are taught that shaming a person is tantamount to shedding their blood. Yet Mr. Friedman seems to have no qualms about insulting people with whom he disagrees.” Dozens of Holocaust survivors signed a letter to the committee’s ranking members, in which they expressed “our deep outrage at the cheapening of the worst catastrophe in Jewish history by President Donald Trump’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman.” In particular, they objected to Friedman’s assertion that Jewish supporters of a negotiated peace settlement between Israel and Palestine, and of a two-state solution to the region’s challenges, were “far worse than kapos.”
“Kapos” was the term used for Jews who aided the Nazis during the Holocaust. “To brand one’s political opponents, engaged in legitimate debate in our democracy, as kapos is incredibly offensive. To compare them with Jews who collaborated with Nazis, to suggest that they are in effect willingly and knowingly aiding in the mass extermination of the Jewish people, is slanderous, insulting, irresponsible, cynical and immensely damaging to our people,” explained the letter. “Using this term to describe one’s political opponents actually aids the evil work of Holocaust deniers because it suggests that kapos are an everyday phenomenon that arise in every generation—and not a tragic group of people caught in a uniquely awful dilemma [that occurred in] the extreme borderline conditions in which people, robbed of humanity, were essentially dead while still alive.”
“Friedman’s adoption of this awful term shows he is part and parcel of an organized army of hatred sowing divisions within the Jewish community and within our nation,” wrote the survivors, who finished their letter by bluntly declaring that “he is unfit to represent the United States as our ambassador to Israel.”
Many Israelis were equally unsettled by Trump’s choice to represent the United States in their country. An analysis by a senior writer for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz featured the headline “It’s a good thing ambassador-designate David Friedman will have diplomatic immunity; otherwise he might get arrested for incitement.”
“By Israeli standards, Donald Trump’s designated Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is an extreme right-winger,” the article began. “He might find a place in the settler movement or with [hardliner] Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi Party, but only on its right-wing fringes. He makes [Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu seem like a left-wing defeatist. From where Friedman stands, most Israelis, never mind most American Jews, are more or less traitors.” Another Haaretz writer noted that “David Friedman, who has been named America’s next ambassador to Israel, heads a fundraising organization that has raised tens of millions of dollars for one of the most radical settlements in the West Bank.”
The support for those settlements was particularly troubling to Palestinian officials on the West Bank, and to Palestinian Americans. “Friedman is very open about his pro-settlement stance and his willingness to support the annexation of these settlements into Israel,” explained Kareem El-Hosseiny of the group American Muslims for Palestine, which notes that “Friedman has no diplomatic experience and holds biased views on the Middle East that favor the extremist settler movement.”
The New York Times editorial board said Friedman would be “far more likely to provoke conflict in Israel and the occupied territories, heighten regional tensions and undermine American leadership.”
Five former U.S. ambassadors to Israel who had served under Republican and Democratic presidents—Thomas Pickering (Ronald Reagan), William Harrop (George H. W. Bush), Edward Walker (Bill Clinton), Daniel Kurtzer (George W. Bush) and James Cunningham (George W. Bush and Barack Obama)—writing as Americans “who care deeply about Israel: an American ally, a stronghold of democracy in the Middle East and homeland for the Jewish people,” argued that Friedman was “unqualified for the position.”
“The American ambassador must be dedicated to advancing our country’s longstanding bipartisan goals in the region: strengthening the security of the United States and our ally Israel, and advancing the prospects for peace between Israel and its neighbors, in particular the Palestinians. If Israel is to carry on as a democratic, Jewish nation, respected internationally, we see no alternative to a two-state solution,” they explained. “We are concerned that David Friedman, nominated to serve as U.S. ambassador to Israel, strongly disagrees,” noting Friedman’s past statements dismissing a two-state solution as “an illusory solution in search of a nonexistent problem,” the fact that he has been “active in supporting and financing the settler movement” to build Israeli communities on Palestinian land and his suggestion that it might be acceptable for Israel to occupy the West Bank.
When he appeared before the Foreign Relations Committee, Friedman tried to distance himself from a record of extremism and his own outrageous statements, suggesting that “they’re not reflective of my nature and character.” But, as Yael Patir, the director of the Israeli office of J Street (a group specifically targeted by Friedman), correctly noted on Israeli radio: “He did not apologize. He said ‘I used words I shouldn’t have.’ There’s a difference.”
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br /> The most unnerving thing that Friedman said at his Senate hearing was that serving as ambassador to Israel would be “the fulfillment of my life’s work,” as his life’s work certainly did not seem to be focused on promoting peace, tolerance and cooperation. The day after Friedman testified, the Union for Reform Judaism and more than twenty groups associated with the Reform movement declared: “We have never before opposed the nomination of a U.S. Ambassador. We do so now because of our firm belief that Mr. Friedman is the wrong person for this essential job at this critical time.” The letter from the groups stated that, in addition to lacking the basic qualifications for the position, “Mr. Friedman’s views on key issues suggest he will not be able to play a constructive role. The U.S. Ambassador to Israel has the important responsibility of advising, shaping, and helping implement the President’s foreign policy goals. Indeed, it appears that Mr. Friedman’s extreme views on key issues related to the two-state solution, Israel’s borders, settlements, and the location of the U.S. Embassy are already reflected in the White House.”
The last thing that the United States, Israel, Palestine or the world needs in a Trump administration is an ambassador who reinforces what author and commentator Fareed Zakaria describes as Trump’s “surreal” and “embarrassing” lack of preparation to deal with the Middle East. But instead of embracing insight and guidance from experienced hands at the State Department and in the diplomatic community, this inexperienced president will now be encouraged to handle the most complex and challenging issues “in private as would befit the closest of friends” by a bankruptcy lawyer who, as J Street notes, “has consistently aligned himself with some of the most irresponsible charges and conspiracy theories of the far-right, Islamophobic fringe in this country.”
— 16 —
WITH THE RUSSIANS, TOO?
Wilbur Ross
Secretary of Commerce
“I went home with a waitress the way I always do,” sang Warren Zevon at the opening of his song about international espionage and bad craziness, “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” “How was I to know she was with the Russians, too?”
What a group of persistent senators wanted to know before they voted on whether to confirm Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as secretary of commerce was whether Wilbur Ross was with the Russians, too.
A billionaire investor, number 232 on the 2016 Forbes 400, Ross became known during a long career of purchasing so-called distressed assets as the “King of Bankruptcy.” The vulture capitalist swooped in, scooped up the remains of great manufacturing concerns, made them leaner and sometimes quite a bit meaner (by squeezing health care and pension plans for desperate workers) and then sold them off at a nice profit. It wasn’t pretty. A messy merger Ross organized between two companies he owned, Safety Components International Inc. and International Textile Group Inc., led to a 2014 shareholder lawsuit that claimed Ross breached his fiduciary duty; he ended up paying out $86 million. In 2016, his WL Ross & Co. combine paid a fine of $2.3 million and reimbursed investors almost $12 million in order to clean up a Securities and Exchange Commission probe into charges that his firm failed to disclose transaction costs that were charged to investor funds. After the 2006 explosion at a Sago, West Virginia, mine owned by a firm Ross’s International Coal Group had purchased before the disaster, a former executive of the coal company told the New York Post that “Wilbur had had his executives in there, reporting back to him on a daily basis… He knew the mine was troubled.” The newspaper reported that the executive said: “Ross knew the Sago mine had been shut down for safety violations—but he wouldn’t tolerate long disruptions in production.” Twelve miners died.
Those setbacks did scant damage to Ross’s portfolio. His net worth was $2.9 billion when Trump—whose troubled Atlantic City casino operations had been saved from foreclosure in the 1980s by the aggressive intervention of Ross (then a Rothschild Inc. banker) and Carl Icahn (the investor who Trump named as his “special adviser” on regulatory reform)—tapped the seventy-nine-year-old Ross to serve as the thirty-ninth secretary of commerce of the United States. A Democratic-leaning businessman who had been critical of the free-trade policies that had fallen out of favor with many Democrats and Republicans, Ross was, despite his controversial history and continuing confusion over the many lawsuits he had faced or was facing, not ranked with the most troublesome of Trump picks. And he got high marks for promising that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would under his watch continue to maintain proper standards. “I see no valid reason to keep peer reviewed research from the public. To be clear, by peer review I mean scientific review and not a political filter,” he wrote senators. On January 18, Ross sailed through his Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation confirmation hearing with relative ease, and a little over a week later the committee sent the nomination to the full Senate.
As concerns over Trump administration ties to Russian officials and oligarchs blew up with revelations regarding disgraced National Security advisor Michael Flynn, however, attention turned to a December 2016 McClatchy News Service report that “Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as his commerce secretary, has been the top shareholder in a Cypriot bank with deep Russian ties and investors who made their fortunes under Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
“Cyprus is often used by Russia’s politically connected businessmen. In a March 2013 report, McClatchy detailed how Russians had come to dominate Cyprus as both customers and providers of financial services. Russian depositors and investors took losses that year in Cyprus when the European debt crisis nearly crumbled major banks,” explained McClatchy, which noted that “Ross led a September 2014 rescue of Bank of Cyprus, the largest and most important bank in that island nation off the coast of Turkey. Ross’ investment group took an 18 percent stake in the bank, and he remained the bank’s vice chairman after his nomination by Trump.”
That investment in the Bank of Cyprus put Ross in the orbit of the head of the second-largest investor in the bank: Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, a close associate of Vladimir Putin, and in the dark vortex of Cypriot banking. “Because of its dependence on Russian clients, the banking system in Cyprus remains a money-laundering concern for the U.S. State Department,” noted McClatchy, which highlighted a 2015 State Department report that said bank regulations on the island were “not sufficiently enforced to prevent money laundering.”
McClatchy did not suggest that Ross was involved in money laundering, or other forms of wrongdoing. But the report caught the interest of a group of Democratic senators, as did the news that “as the lead investor in Bank of Cyprus, Ross helped put together the board of directors and tapped as its chairman Josef Ackermann, the retired CEO of Germany’s Deutsche Bank. It was under Ackermann that Deutsche Bank repeatedly ran afoul of U.S. and European regulators.” It was also under Ackermann that Deutsche Bank became a frequent and controversial financial lifeline for Donald Trump’s expanding global empire.
A February 16, 2017, letter from six Democratic members of the Commerce Committee—Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Bill Nelson of Florida, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Tom Udall of New Mexico, and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin—asked Ross to answer questions about the Bank of Cyprus and the influence of Russian oligarchs. They wanted to know “whether there were any ties between current or former bank officials and the Trump Organization or Trump campaign,” “whether anyone with ownership interest in the bank sought to directly or indirectly influence the U.S. election of American policy positions” and whether Ross was “aware of any loans made by the Bank of Cyprus to the Trump Organization, directly or through another financial institution, its directors or officers, or any affiliated individuals or entities.”
These were basic questions that could be easily answered.
Yet, a week passed and the senators got no response.
As the February 27 confirmation vote for Ross approached,
Booker wrote an urgent follow-up letter to the nominee on February 24, explaining that “the Senate has a constitutional duty to give the president our advice and consent on his nominations to the Cabinet. Consistent with that constitutional duty, and prior to your confirmation, the United States Senate and the American public deserve to know the full extent of your connections with Russia and your knowledge of any ties between the Trump Administration, Trump Campaign, or Trump Organization and the Bank of Cyprus. Americans must have confidence that high-level officials in the United States government are not influenced by, or beholden to, any foreign power.”
Booker’s argument was buttressed by the fact that the Commerce Department is a global agency that oversees international trade and trade sanctions and, through its Bureau of Industry and Security, manages a wide range of issues that arise at the intersections of national security and high technology.
Watchdog groups weighed in as the confirmation vote approached. “Until Ross provides public answers about his ties to Putin’s friends, it is clear Senators lack enough information about Ross’ known ties to Russian oligarchs to provide informed ‘consent,’” warned Jeff Hauser, who heads the Revolving Door Project, a Center for Economic and Policy Research initiative to increase scrutiny on executive branch appointments.
Yet, on the appointed day, the Senate convened and rushed through the process of approving Ross. Florida senator Nelson said he had gotten some verbal reassurances from Ross, but Senate minority leader Charles Schumer warned that the failure of the Trump White House to provide written answers to the questions posed by senators was “another example of this administration abandoning transparency and trying to jam their nominees through without making all the relevant information public and available.”
Despite Schumer’s appeal, the chamber voted overwhelmingly to approve Ross, with fifty-one Republican senators joined by twenty Democrats and independent senator Angus King of Maine voting “yes.” Only twenty-five Democrats and independent Bernie Sanders refused their consent.