Ever since the 2016 presidential election between Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, we’ve been getting lectures from Democrats on the sanctity of our election process and how wrong it is for foreign governments to (allegedly) interfere.
The lectures stemmed in part from the Trump/Russia collusion hoax that Democrats and the media perpetuated for over four years without evidence.
Not a week went by without us hearing about it, with Democrat leaders including then-Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) sounding alarm bells about “possible interference” in future elections, including in 2020. “(A) lot of countries are trying to do it. We have to be prepared,” Schumer said in a July 2020 CNN interview. “We have to be guarded. We have to make sure they don’t. There was less of it in 2018 than 2016.”
It’s now the spring of 2024, and a presidential election is fast approaching here in the United States.
But Schumer, who is now the Senate majority leader, has been preoccupied with perceptions among the anti-Israel faction of his party regarding the Israel-Hamas war, so much so that last Thursday, in an extraordinary move, Schumer called for regime change … in Israel on the floor of the Senate.
“As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me: The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after Oct. 7,” Schumer declared. “I believe that holding a new election once the war starts to wind down would give Israelis an opportunity to express their vision for the post-war future.”
It was an especially shocking speech considering Schumer’s status as the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America and also considering his prior statements about how the U.S. must remain guarded and “vigilant” about other countries’ attempts at interfering in our elections.
Perhaps even more shockingly, there was not one word from President Joe Biden on the issue until the next day, when he was asked about it while sitting next to Ireland’s Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in the White House ahead of St. Patrick’s Day festivities.
“Sen. Schumer contacted my senior staff that he was going to make that speech, and I’m not gonna elaborate on the speech,” Biden remarked. “He made a good speech, and I think he expressed a serious concern shared not only by him but by many Americans,” Biden also said.
Biden stopped short of echoing Schumer’s call for new elections in Israel. But his praise of Schumer’s speech was the equivalent of him stepping over that line he’s straddled in publicly showing support for Israel while trying to appease anti-Israel factions in the Democratic party, especially in Michigan, which contains a large population of Arab and Muslim Americans, many of whom oppose the war.
But though Biden has been mum in public about regime change, he has reportedly been working behind the scenes to figure out how to force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out in other ways.
According to a New York Magazine report, “One Israeli expert frequently consulted by American officials says, ‘I have been asked by a serious administration figure what it is that will force the Netanyahu coalition to collapse. They were interested in the mechanics, what can we demand which will collapse his coalition.’”
To be sure, foreign election interference has been a thing going back decades, with the United States doing its part as well.
It’s just that these days they aren’t doing much in the way of trying to hide their efforts at influencing another country’s election, which in the eyes of many Americans maybe wouldn’t have been seen as such a scandal had a) we not been subjected to years of finger-wagging about foreign election interference, and b) Israel not been in the fight of their lives against an existential threat.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
