Did the Obama Administration lie About Netanyahu?By David Bernstein
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/
When John Boehner announced that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had accepted his invitation to address Congress, the Obama Administration reacted strongly. The criticism was not directed primarily at Boehner, who apparently did not inform the White House of the invitation, and may have acted unconstitutionally in delivering it, but against Netanyahu, for breaching diplomatic protocol by accepting the invitation without first notifying the White House.
For example, AP reported that White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest “says typical protocol is that a country’s leader would contact the White House before planning to visit the United States. But Earnest says they didn’t hear about Boehner’s invitation until Wednesday morning, shortly before the speaker announced it publicly.” State Department spokesperson Jan Psaki was a bit more circumspect, stating that “traditionally we would learn about plans of leaders…separately from…the Speaker,” i.e., one assumes, from the leader or his representiative.
Even friends of Israel, like the Post’s Richard Cohen, were appalled. Cohen excoriated Netanyahu for accepting the Boehner’s invitation “without informing the White House,” a sign of Netanyahu’s “impetuousness and contempt” for President Obama.
And that’s the way the story played out in the media, here and in Israel, until the New York Times appended the following correction a few days ago to a January 30 story on the controversy: “An earlier version of this article misstated when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel accepted Speaker John A. Boehner’s invitation to address Congress. He accepted after the administration had been informed of the invitation, not before.”
This correction has circulated in conservative and pro-Israel circles, but doesn’t seem to have led to any followup, or any investigations by those who initially reported the opposite. If the correction is correct, then we have a situation in which the administration was so grossly incompetent that it was circulating false information about Netanyahu from multiple spokespeople, or that it intentionally sought to undermine Netanyahu by lying about his alleged “breach of protocol.” It’s also possible that the administration strongly objected when it was told of the invitation, but Netanyahu accepted anyway, but there has been no indication from the White House that this is the case.
The Netanyahu-Obama flap has been, and continues to be, a big story. Doesn’t the Times, at least, owe us an explanation of how it discovered that Netanyahu had informed the Administration about the visit before accepting the invitation, how they came to run the Administration’s original (and false?) version of the timeline, what this says about possible Administration attempts to (a) interfere in the upcoming Israeli election; and (b) drive a wedge between Netanyahu and the Democrats?
UPDATE: A commenter points out that the Times’s correction doesn’t say the Netanyahu informed the White House of the invitation before he accepted it, just that someone did. So maybe it was Boehner. Let’s say that’s true. Boehner informs the White House that that he’s invited Netanyahu to speak to a joint session of Congress. The president, as far as we know, does not tell either Boehner or Netanyahu that he opposes the visit. So Netanyahu, apparently believing the invitation to be bipartisan (the invitation letter, in fact, said the invitation was “on behalf of the the bipartisan leadership of the US House and US Senate”), and hearing no objection from the White House, accepts the invitation. I’m no expert in diplomatic protocol, and the Israeli side, judging from media reports, seems genuinely surprised that accepting an invitation from the Speaker of the House, known of but not objected to by the presdient, should be deemed a breach of protocol. And it surely seems like this wouldn’t have become a diplomatic incident if the White House didn’t want it to. If lie is to strong a word, why did the White House strongly imply that it blindsided by the announcement of Netanyahu’s speech, when they knew about it before he even accepted the invitation?
The White House seems to think that Netanyahu is in league with the GOP, that he tried to help defeat Obama in 2012 (apparently they feel that if Netanyahu had said the word to Sheldon Adelson, the latter wouldn’t have donated millions to Romney, which seems speculative to say the least, and more likely is fanciful), and that his choice of a former Republican American, Ron Dermer, to be ambassador, showed disrespect for the Democratic president. All that means that the Netanayahu folks should probably be walking on eggshells when dealing with this White House, because anything the Israeli government does is going to be seen in the worst possible light.
David Bernstein is the George Mason University Foundation Professor at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, VA. He is the author of Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform (2011); You Can’t Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws (2003);
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