Boehner confirms what we already knew: Obama hates Bibi

In an interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News on Sunday, Speaker of the House John Boehner explained why he kept news about his invite to Prime Minister Netanyahu a secret until the last possible moment.

Wallace asked Boehner why he told Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer not to preemptively inform the White House about plans for Netanyahu’s Congressional appearance. The Speaker answered with something everyone suspected but no one in the U.S. government admitted publicly: the White House just doesn’t like the Israeli Prime Minister.

“There’s so secret here in Washington about the animosity that this White House has for Prime Minister Netanyahu,” Boehner said, adding that “[we] didn’t want that getting in the way and quashing what I thought was a real opportunity.”

Nevertheless, Boehner told CBS’s 60 Minutes, ‘We gave them a heads up that morning’,” before the public announcement. And, according a New York Times correction to an earlier article, Netanyahu did not agree to speak until the White House was informed of the invitation: “An earlier version of this article misstated when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel accepted Speaker John A. Boehner’s invitation to address Congress,” the correction reported. “He accepted after the administration had been informed of the invitation, not before.”

When asked by Wallace why he invited the Israeli Premier to talk to Congress, Boehner said it an important for the Congress to hear Netanyahu’s perspective.

“The fact is that we had every right to do what we did. … There’s a serious threat facing the world, and radical Islamic terrorists are not going to go away. The President devoted but a few words to it in his State of the Union address. And then when it comes to the threat of Iran having a nuclear weapon, these are important messages that the Congress needs to hear and the American people need to hear. And I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu is the perfect person to deliver the message of how serious this threat is.”

Over the course of the debate about the invitation, the Speaker’s rationale has not changed. But the White House’s reason for its anger has changed.

On Jan. 26, when the speaker was asked why he extended the invitation to Netanyahu, he gave an answer similar to the one he gave Wallace. “There’s nobody in the world who can talk about the threat of radical terrorism — nobody can talk about the threat the Iranians pose, not just to the Middle East and to Israel, but to the entire world – better than Bibi Netanyahu,” he said.

When the Netanyahu invite became public, the White House objection was that it was a breach of diplomatic protocol. It wasn’t until they sat down and developed a strategy to fight the invitation did the White House begin to use the excuse that it was too close to an Israeli election. If this administration truly didn’t want to interfere with the upcoming Israeli Election, they wouldn’t have allowed former Obama strategist Jeremy Bird to work with the groups One Voice and V15 in their bid to replace the Netanyahu government, nor would they have allowed the State Department to donate money to One Voice. 

If the President didn’t want to interfere with the Israeli election, he certainly wouldn’t have allowed the Vice President and the Secretary of State to meet with Netanyahu’s main opponent on Feb. 7 in Germany. As reported by the Jerusalem Post:

“Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke briefly on Saturday in the hallway of the Munich Security Conference with Zionist Union Party head Isaac Herzog, who is Netanyahu’s chief political rival in the March 17 elections.

“An aide to the vice president told the Post that Herzog and Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz [Likud] separately greeted Biden ‘in passing’ at the conference, but that ‘no meetings, formal or informal, were held with either official’.”

The Vice President’s claim that the meeting was “in passing” is belies the truth. When a senior administration figure attends a conference such as the one at Munich, everything is planned down to the second; if the two “met in passing” or if Kerry met with Herzog “in the hallway” it was planned that way to seem informal and to avoid criticism. 

In the end, the Speaker invited Netanyahu to address Congress because the Prime Minister’s message was one he felt the Congress should hear. The message, that negotiations with Iran are approaching dangerous territory, is supported by such bi-partisan opinion leaders as New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, the European Union, and the usually friendly-to-Obama Washington Post editorial board. 

Perhaps the Speaker was correct to withhold White House notification of the Bibi speech until the last moment. After all, the President has done nothing to convince the Congress or the public that his feelings toward the Israeli Prime Minister were anything but hostile. The Netanyahu invite didn’t become a political football until the Administration made it one, and their claims about avoiding interference with the Israeli elections is at best hypocritical.