United States President Obama has long had a strained relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the two nations being historically close allies. Obama’s reasoning has been straightforward: Netanyahu is a corrupt warmonger. He has intentionally made his region unstable for his own political gain. Republicans have fired back by accusing Obama of simply being anti-Israel. But wiretaps now show that at least some republicans in congress had an entirely different reason for siding with Netanyahu: he was bribing them to change their votes on key issues.
In an explosive revelation, wiretaps uncovered by the Wall Street Journal reveal that Benjamin Netanyahu reached out to republican congressmen who had been considering voting in favor of the Iran peace deal, asking what they wanted in return for voting against the deal. In the end, not a single republican voted for the deal, meaning that Netanyahu’s bribes succeeded in swaying the ones who had been on the fence. That means that not only is Netanyahu actively working to undermine the sanctity of the United States government, the republican congressmen involved may have committed treason under the Espionage Act.
Screenshot from WSJ
While it’s not uncommon for members of congress to offer each other political favors in exchange for votes on various bills, it’s an entirely different legal matter when those offers come from a foreign head of state. Not only were they caught accepting favors from Netanyahu in exchange for votes on the Iran deal, they also received confidential details of the Iran negotiations directly from Netanyahu himself. Republicans have long criticized the Obama administration for its wiretapping of Netanyahu, but now we know why: they didn’t want the details of their own wrongdoing to be discovered in the process. The Wall Street Journal has more on the story.
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