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During Donald Trump’s presidency, the Republican expressed outrage when U.S. officials interacted with foreign officials without coordinating with his administration. In fact, at one point, Trump talked about charging former Secretary of State John Kerry with a crime.
In 2019, the then-president — who routinely tried to get the Justice Department to prosecute political figures he disliked — insisted that Kerry “should be prosecuted” for violating the Logan Act, adding, “He’s talking to Iran and has had many meetings and many phone calls and he’s telling them what to do. That is total violation of the Logan Act.”
Trump had no idea what he was talking about, but he nevertheless appeared convinced that a former U.S. official interacting with foreign governments was both scandalous and criminal.
It now appears the Republican has changed his mind.
As regular readers know, Trump welcomed British Foreign Secretary David Cameron to Mar-a-Lago in the spring, for example, which came on the heels of the former president also welcoming Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Polish President Andrzej Duda to his glorified country club. Trump has also reportedly had direct recent interactions with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
When The New York Times reported on this in April, it quoted Richard Haass, a former diplomat and the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, saying the meetings are not unusual in the American tradition. The article added, “Mr. Trump would cross a red line, however, with any attempt to influence the words or actions of foreign leaders — for instance, by asking for expressions of support or that they take steps to undermine Mr. Biden’s policies, he said. ‘Then he is carrying out a foreign policy,’ Mr. Haass said, adding, ‘This is all fine in principle. It just depends on the actual content in practice.’”
That paragraph came to mind this week when I saw this report from The New Republic.
Trump has allegedly been talking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to avert a cease-fire deal, fearing that doing so could help Vice President Kamala Harris win in November, according to PBS. “The reporting is that former President Trump is on the phone with the Prime Minister of Israel, urging him not to cut a deal right now, because it’s believed that would help the Harris campaign,” said PBS’s Judy Woodruff Monday night.
To be sure, there’s some ambiguity about the reporting that the veteran journalist referenced. Axios published a report last week, for example, that said the former American president and the Israeli prime minister have privately discussed a possible Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal. The reporting was not independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, and Netanyahu’s office denied its accuracy in a statement soon after.
Woodruff might have been referring to this, or perhaps some other reporting. [Update: See below.]
Either way, if there’s reason to believe Trump has lobbied Netanyahu not to reach a diplomatic agreement, because the GOP nominee is worried about the developments potentially helping the Democratic ticket, that would be a real scandal. (It would also be reminiscent of a controversy from 1968.)
Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
UPDATE (August 21, 2024, 3:56 p.m. ET): Woodruff published a clarification online on Thursday afternoon. It read, "I want to clarify my remarks on the PBS News special on Monday night about the ongoing cease fire talks in the Middle East. As I said, this was not based on my original reporting; I was referring to reports I had read, in Axios and Reuters, about former President Trump having spoken to the Israeli Prime Minister. In the live TV moment, I repeated the story because I hadn’t seen later reporting that both sides denied it. This was a mistake and I apologize for it."