Netanyahu gifts Trump golden pager in nod to Lebanon explosions
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gifted President Donald Trump a golden pager during their meeting at the White House this week, Netanyahu’s office said.
Netanyahu’s office released a photo of the gift Thursday, which references Israel’s deadly explosive attacks in Lebanon and Syria in September that killed dozens of people and injured thousands more.
A plaque presented with the golden pager praised Trump as “our greatest friend and greatest ally.”
Netanyahu also gifted Trump a regular pager during the visit.
After receiving the gift, Trump replied, “that was a great operation,” an Israeli official told ABC News about the gift.
Amid the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria on Sept. 17.
The covert Israeli military operation killed at least 37 people in Lebanon, including at least 12 civilians, and wounded over 2,900 people, according to Lebanese authorities.
The civilian deaths included an 8-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy, according to Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad.
At least 14 were also injured in targeted attacks on Hezbollah members in Syria, according to the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression, which also targeted civilians and led to the deaths of a number of martyrs and the injury of a large number with various wounds,” Hezbollah said in a statement.
The United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon at the time called the operation an “extremely concerning escalation in what is an already unacceptably volatile context,” in a statement released by the U.N. Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary General.
In a release about the gift, Netanyahu’s office said the golden pager “symbolizes the Prime Minister’s decision that led to a turnaround in the war and the starting point for breaking the spirit” of Hezbollah.
“This strategic operation expresses the power, technological superiority and cunning of the State of Israel against its enemies,” the statement added.
(WASHINGTON) — As his time in the White House comes to a close, President Joe Biden has implemented a series of executive orders and rules, trying to cement his policies before Donald Trump returns with the threat of undoing them.
From using provisions in federal law to ban much offshore drilling to commuting the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates, Biden has been determined to accomplish the political goals he set out to do four years ago.
Trump, never one to mince words against his rival, has condemned Biden’s moves, claiming he was hurting his agenda — what he says Americans voted for in November.
“They say we’re going to have a smooth transition. All they do is talk,” the president-elect told reporters Tuesday.
“I’m going to put it back on day one. I’m going to have it revoked on day one. We’ll go immediately if we need to… they try to be sneaky,” he said of Biden’s drilling ban.
Some academic policy experts, however, say Biden’s eleventh-hour decisions are not out of the ordinary, especially when it comes to a change of parties in the White House.
“This is pretty typical. Trump is just complaining about it louder,” Jonathan Hanson, a political scientist and lecturer in statistics at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, told ABC News.
The experts noted that Trump’s claims Biden is tying his hands are far from true as some of Biden’s policies can be overturned and mitigated.
On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced the extension of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for asylum seekers from Venezuela, El Salvador, Sudan, and Ukraine. Over 900,000 current beneficiaries will now have 18-month extensions, according to the order.
TPS is one of the few ways that an administration can protect a large group of migrants without congressional approval, however, it’s also within the DHS secretary’s power to end it. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance have vowed to end the program, which Trump attempted to do back during his first administration.
Biden announced earlier in the week a ban on offshore drilling using provisions in the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to push forward with the proposal. Under the act, the policy change can only be reversed through an act of Congress.
Dan Mallinson, a professor of public policy and administration at Penn State Harrisburg, told ABC News that it’s not unusual for administrations to pore through federal laws and regulations to find loopholes for executive orders that can’t be easily overturned.
“In a lot of cases, the executive order will be overturned even if it takes time, so those administrations will look for every win they can in the lame-duck session,” he said.
Mallinson said that Biden’s announcement this week of two national monuments in California which would preserve 840,000 acres from any federal drilling, was also done with the same kind of meticulous planning. He did note that Trump could change the plan by limiting the size of the monuments, which he did during his first term after similar moves by President Barack Obama.
Trump himself issued several of eleventh-hour orders during the last weeks of his first presidency, including one two days before he left office that would have scaled back punishments for regulations, only for Biden to reverse them in his first months in office.
“On the face of it, it’s pretty standard. Biden is not doing anything unusual compared to other presidents. It’s the normal course of things for decades,” Hanson said.
The experts pointed out that Trump also faced a similar situation in his first administration and undid several executive orders and changed various policies instituted by Obama in his first months of office, including his ban on offshore drilling.
Trump’s reversal of Obama’s order, however, was scaled back after then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a key Trump ally, raised concerns about how it would affect his state. The ban continued for Florida lands.
“It’s not always crystal clear if executive orders or last-minute policy changes will be reversed by the new president,” Mallison said.
The experts said when it comes to Biden’s moves, what was different is the messaging.
The president has been mostly silent during his lame-duck session and pushed on his policy changes with little fanfare, however, Trump has been making more headlines by sounding off on social media, interviews and other media appearances, Mallison noted.
And while Trump may make claims and boast as if he were in office, Biden still has power until Jan. 20, Mallison said.
“Trump is trying to exploit this mentality, which is wrong, that the government has to operate under the president-elect. But the reality is that, constitutionally, Biden is the president now and he can act on his authority,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — The Senate on Thursday will vote on Kash Patel’s controversial nomination to lead the FBI.
If confirmed, Patel will be the 18th Cabinet official approved by lawmakers since President Donald Trump’s inauguration one month ago.
Republicans have rallied around Patel, arguing he would bring reform to the nation’s top law enforcement agency they allege has been corrupted.
“Mr. Patel should be our next FBI director because the FBI has been infected by political bias and weaponized against the American people. Mr. Patel knows it, Mr. Patel exposed it, and Mr. Patel has been targeted for it,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said last week as the committee met to consider his nomination. The panel advanced Patel in a party-line vote.
Democrats, meanwhile, have objected to Patel up until the last minute. Sen. Dick Durbin, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, held a press conference outside FBI headquarters on Thursday morning railing against Patel’s “bizarre political statements” on Jan. 6 to retribution.
He accused Republicans of “willfully ignoring red flags on Mr. Patel,” who he argued has “neither the experience, the judgment or the temperament” to be FBI chief for the next 10 years.
“Mr. Patel will be a political and national security disaster,” Durbin said.
Patel, 44, is a loyalist to the president and worked in a number of roles during Trump’s first administration, including acting deputy director of national intelligence.
Shortly after the November election, Trump indicated he would fire then-FBI Director Christopher Wray and tap Patel to take his place. Wray, first appointed by Trump in 2017, stepped down at the end of the Biden administration.
Patel has been a vocal critic of the FBI for years, and previously said he wanted to clean out the bureau’s headquarters in Washington as part of a mission to dismantle the so-called “deep state.”
He faced pointed questions from Democrats on those comments and more — including support for Jan. 6 rioters and quotes that appeared favorable to the “QAnon” conspiracy movement — during his confirmation hearings last month.
Patel sought to distance from some of his past rhetoric, and told lawmakers he would take “no retributive actions” despite his history of comments about targeting journalists and government employees.
Patel, if confirmed, will take over an agency facing uncertainty and turmoil amid firings and other key changes.
The Justice Department’s sought a list of potentially thousands of FBI employees who worked on Jan. 6 cases, ABC News previously reported, prompting agents to file a lawsuit to block the effort.
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump will meet with Senate Republicans Wednesday to try to get lawmakers “on the same page” on how to advance some of his major policy initiatives after he takes office on Jan. 20.
Trump will meet with Senate leadership and the rank and file after paying his respects to former President Jimmy Carter, who lies in state in the Capitol before his funeral on Thursday.
The president-elect wants to deliver on campaign promises, but how to move them forward has divided congressional Republicans.
Trump has pitched one massive bill that would include several of Trump’s top priorities: Immigration reform and energy production, and extending the tax cuts passed during his first term and other spending cuts. He’s also suggested that the bill should raise the debt ceiling or eliminate it altogether.
With small majorities in each chamber and little to no support expected from Democrats, Republicans plan to push “reconciliation” — a fast-track process limited to spending and revenue legislation that needs only a majority rather than the 60-vote threshold in the Senate needed to pass legislation.
House Speaker Mike Johnson faces resistance to the one-bill approach from fiscal conservatives in his conference. And some Senate Republicans are advocating for two bills — one on border issues and a second to deal with fiscal policy.
One of the key objectives in Wednesday’s meeting will be “how we get on the same page with the House,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso said Tuesday.
Barrasso said the “goal is the same,” whether it’s done with one or two bills, but he said a two-part plan would allow Trump to deliver on some of his promises and allow more time to address tax policy that doesn’t expire until the end of the year.
“It was a suggestion by [Senate Majority Leader] John Thune — this was before Christmas — he said, ‘Let’s get an early win on the border,'” Barrasso, R-Wyo., said. “It was an issue in the election and it is a big issue for the American people and it is a big issue for national security, and we just thought we could get that done in a quicker fashion with a focus on that, on taking the handcuffs off of American energy as well as military strength, and then have the longer time to work on the financial component of this.
“These issues and the urgency of the tax issue doesn’t really come into play until the end of the year to the level that these other issues have the higher urgency right now,” he said.
Trump reiterated his preference for one bill when he spoke to reporters on Tuesday, but said he could live with two.
“Well, I like one big, beautiful bill, and I always have, I always will, he said. But if two is more certain [to pass], it does go a little bit quicker because you can do the immigration stuff early,” he said.
In the House, Johnson said he remains convinced that the one-bill strategy is the “best way to go,” but conversations with Thune are continuing.
“Yes, Leader Thune and I are on exactly the same page with regard to the objectives, and we’re determining right now the final sequence of the play call, so to speak,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “This is not some sort of, I feel like sometimes the media tries to make this an existential threat to the objectives or to what we’re doing with the legislation. It’s not that, this is two chambers deciding the best sequence of events, and we’ll get to a perfect alignment here in the next I think a couple of days.”
Johnson said he hopes to have a bill ready by the first week in April, but it remains to be seen if he can get fiscal conservatives in his conference, who have long opposed all-in-one bills like the one Johnson is proposing, on board.
The speaker pushed back on Tuesday about the one-bill approach being a kitchen sink approach.
“This is not an omnibus spending bill, but appropriation,” Johnson said. “This is reducing spending, which is an objective we talked about. I’ll keep reiterating this: that just because the debt limit is raised, to give stability the bond markets and to send a message around the world that we will pay the nation’s debt. We are doggedly determined to decrease the size of scope of government and to limit spending, cut spending so you can you’ll see both of those things happen simultaneously.”
Johnson also intends to handle the debt limit in the reconciliation bill — without Democratic support.
“That way, as the Republican Party, the party in charge of both chambers, we again get to determine the details of that. If it runs through the regular order, regular process… then you have to have both parties negotiating. And we feel like we are in better stead to do it ourselves,” he said Tuesday.
But it remains to be seen whether Johnson can sell the fiscal conservatives in his conference on that idea. They nearly derailed the short-term government funding bill to avert a shutdown last month after Trump demanded that it dealt with the debt ceiling.
After his meeting with senators, Trump will meet with groups of House Republicans at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida this weekend.
“He’s bringing in big groups of House Republicans to Mar-a-Lago over the weekend three days in a row to meet with and talk with all of our team members about what’s ahead of us and the challenges and how we can accomplish all this together,” Johnson said, though the speaker is not expected to attend.
