Chuck Schumer Falls in Line with Mike Johnson on Netanyahu

Less than two months after criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu and calling for his ouster, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly now plans to invite the Israeli prime minister to address Congress.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson drafted an invitation to Netanyahu last month and told The Hill Thursday that it was to be extended on behalf of both houses of Congress. But, Johnson said, Schumer has done nothing since then.

“I sent a letter draft, because it’s a bicameral invitation letter, it’s been sitting on Chuck Schumer’s desk. As far as I know he has not co-signed it yet,” Johnson said.

But now, Schumer’s office says, the Senate majority leader has changed his mind.

“He intends to join the invitation; the timing is being worked out,” a spokesperson for Schumer said.

In March, Schumer gave a speech in Congress saying that Netanyahu had “lost his way,” arguing that the Israeli prime minister had allowed his “political survival to take precedence over the best interests” of Israel and criticizing his alliance with the country’s far right.

“Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, preserve Israel’s credibility on the world stage, and work towards a two-state solution,” Schumer said.

Just a week later, though, when Johnson announced he intended to invite Netanyahu to address Congress, Schumer appeared to hedge his bets.

“Israel has no stronger ally than the United States and our relationship transcends any one president or any one Prime Minister. I will always welcome the opportunity for the Prime Minister of Israel to speak to Congress in a bipartisan way,” Schumer said in a statement.

So, what caused Schumer to welcome Netanyahu? It may be that misguided framing and discourse regarding college protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, where Netanyahu and the Israeli military have been accused of war crimes, have changed his outlook. Some Democrats have made outrageous criticisms and claims about the student movement, even going as far to compare them to neo-Nazis. Meanwhile, many Republicans have engaged in grandstanding over the protests to boost their pro-Israel credibility, despite being mocked by the students.

Schumer also was attacked after his March speech by the pro-Israel lobbying organization AIPAC, which still wields considerable influence in Congress. It’s quite telling that Schumer’s speech didn’t mention Congress’s long history of hindering peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians, perhaps demonstrating that nothing was really going to change. It looks like anything that would actually bring a cease-fire to Israel’s war in Gaza and make definite steps toward a Palestinian state, such as ending weapons sales to Israel, isn’t coming from Congress anytime soon.

Yet another Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign worker is in trouble, but this time for a very serious reason: allegedly choking and punching a woman.

Trent Pool, a paid ballot-access consultant on the campaign, was charged Saturday with criminal obstruction of breathing and assault after getting into an argument with a 25-year-old woman at the Soho Grand Hotel in downtown Manhattan at 5 a.m. that day.

Pool “wrapped his hand around her neck making it hard for her to breath[e] and then struck her in the face with a closed fist, causing pain,” Mediaite reported Thursday, citing police. The woman turned down medical attention, and Pool was then arrested.

Pool and his firm Accelevate 2020, which specializes in ballot-access, petition, and general campaign consulting, were brought onto Kennedy’s campaign to help the long-shot independent candidate get onto state election ballots. But perhaps Pool should have been screened before being hired: He was also arrested for fourth-degree assault in Seattle in February.

Last month, Kennedy’s campaign director for New York, Rita Palma, was caught on video telling state Republicans that the real goal was to stop Joe Biden from winning. Palma was also found to have extensive ties to Donald Trump, and may have been present at the Capitol insurrection on January 6. She was later fired by the Kennedy campaign.

Kennedy’s personal record when it comes to women isn’t good, either. He has been called a compulsive womanizer, and it was a major contributing factor in the collapse of his first marriage and suicide of his first wife. But that hasn’t stopped him from apparently managing to endear himself to Trump—until this week.

Despite praising Kennedy extensively in recent months, Trump and his advisers are suddenly worried that Kennedy will take away crucial votes. Kennedy is also facing calls to drop out from his former allies in the environmental movement, who say that he has turned against science and embraced conspiracy theories.

The Gaza solidarity encampments have actually made progress at several universities across the nation, pushing school administrators to meet with student protest leaders to consider divestment away from companies that facilitate the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But Representative Nancy Mace doesn’t see any of that—instead, she insisted that the protesters were just a bunch of “terrorist-loving kids” who “hate our country so much.”

“They should take their terrorist flags, they should go to Gaza in their crop tops and nose rings and see how long they would last, because Hamas would chop off their heads, throw them off the roof of a building, before they ever had the chance to tell them their pronouns,” Mace told Fox News Thursday afternoon.

“I want to know where the adults are on campus, putting a stop to this kind of violence,” the South Carolina lawmaker continued. “They are preventing Jewish students from going to class. They are trashing these college campuses. This is not what America stands for. We stand for freedom and liberty of all people, but this is what Biden, this is what the left and Democrats … created this mess, and they need to own it.”

But the violent police response that Mace seems to be endorsing to break up the protests has already happened at a slew of other institutions, and it didn’t exactly paint the United States as an international bastion of freedom or free speech. Instead, the actions taken by police at Columbia University on Tuesday shocked human rights and press freedom advocates around the globe after authorities ripped apart a peaceful protest, fired a gun inside an administrative building occupied by protesters, and threatened to arrest the dean of one of the country’s top journalism schools for shielding the media’s First Amendment right to cover the event.

Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, police allowed pro-Israel counterprotesters to violently attack an otherwise peaceful encampment set up by UCLA students in support of Gaza.

The international criminal court at The Hague is currently weighing whether to charge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with war crimes, as more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 77,000  injured in the conflict—the majority of whom were women and children, according to data from the Gaza Health Ministry.

The auditing firm for Donald Trump’s social media company Truth Social doesn’t look so clean.

On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged auditor BF Borgers CPA for “massive fraud” that affected more than 1,500 SEC filings. The firm is accused of “deliberate and systemic failures to comply” with federal standards between January 2021 and June 2023, according to an announcement by the SEC.

The accounting group and its owner, Benjamin Borgers, have agreed to pay $14 million in civil penalties and are permanently suspended from practicing as accountants.

“Ben Borgers and his audit firm, BF Borgers, were responsible for one of the largest wholesale failures by gatekeepers in our financial markets,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, in a statement. “As a result of their fraudulent conduct, they not only put investors and markets at risk by causing public companies to incorporate noncompliant audits and reviews into more than 1,500 filings with the Commission, but also undermined trust and confidence in our markets.”

“Because investors rely on the audited financial statements of public companies when making their investment decisions, the accountants and accounting firms that audit those statements play a critical role in our financial markets,” Grewal continued. “Borgers and his firm completely abandoned that role, but thanks to the painstaking work of the SEC staff, Borgers and his sham audit mill have been permanently shut down.”

The SEC order also accuses Borgers of failing to supervise the teams performing the audits and reviews, improperly preparing and maintaining documentation of the audits, and failing to get engagement quality reviews, which the agency notes are a necessary part of issuing an audit report.

The share price of Trump Media & Technology Group, the corporation that owns Truth Social, was down 9 percent after trading began.

The news is the latest blow to the GOP presidential nominee’s floundering social media venture, which went public in late March. Truth Social’s original valuation of $8 billion was expected to buoy Trump’s wallet through more than half a billion dollars in court judgments and legal fees, but the company’s value quickly plummeted after reports emerged that the stock was concocted as a pump-and-dump scheme. Just a few days after hitting the trading floor, Truth Social stock took another hit when two of its major investors were charged with insider trading.

This story has been updated.

After creating a stir by revealing that she killed her pet dog, Kristi Noem has now been caught in a lie claiming to meet world leaders, in new details released from her upcoming book.

In No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward, the South Dakota governor claims she met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during her tenure on the House Armed Services Committee, which lasted from 2013 to 2015, while she served in Congress. She also says she canceled a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron last year.

But, The Dakota Scout reported Thursday, neither of these supposed instances have records or outside sources to back them. Macron’s office told the Scout that there was never a meeting scheduled with Noem, and there are no congressional travel documents that indicate Noem met Kim. In fact, a meeting with the North Korean dictator was news to congressional staffers. 

“It’s bullshit,” said a House Armed Services Committee staff member who worked there during the period in which Noem says she met Kim. According to the Scout, that staff member was one of a dozen who had no knowledge of such a meeting or said Noem never mentioned it. Her book uses that meeting to inflate her leadership skills. 

“Through my tenure on the House Armed Services Committee,” she wrote, “I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders. I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all). Dealing with foreign leaders takes resolve, preparation and determination. My experiences on those many foreign trips made me a better member of Congress and a stronger governor. It allowed me to hone my deal-making skills, which play a crucial role in leadership.”

Noem’s claim to have canceled a meeting with Macron coincided with a trip she made to France, according to her book. 

“While in Paris, I was slated to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron,” Noem wrote. “However, the day before we were to meet he made what I considered a very pro-Hamas and anti-Israel comment to the press. So, I decided to cancel. There is no place for pro-Hamas rhetoric.”

While the Scout confirmed with the French president’s office that a direct invitation was not made to Noem, she could have been scheduled to speak at a political event where Macron was also scheduled. On November 10, Noem spoke at an event on the same day that Macron called for a cease-fire in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. 

Noem’s book is scheduled to be released on May 7. The revelation last month that she killed her pet puppy after it killed livestock led to widespread criticism, even from within the Republican Party. Noem has only doubled down, drawing even more ire. 

The move is said to have hurt her chances of becoming Donald Trump’s running mate, which no doubt stings, given how unpopular Noem already is at home. Several Native tribes in her state have banned her from their land for racist comments.