White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said the State Department attempted to dissuade President Trump from moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
On Friday’s episode of Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s podcast The Verdict, co-hosted by conservative commentator Michael Knowles, Meadows described an effort of bureaucratic resistance to Trump’s campaign promise to designate Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
“One story that I don’t think is out there is, so the State Department pushing back, continuing to push back. I think they gave a list of the pros and cons, and so there was a whole long list of all these cons. Zero pros,” Meadows said.
“You’re kidding me?” Knowles responded. “That’s not that subtle, you know.”
“It literally was you got all these reasons not to do it, and no reasons to do it. And yet, this president stayed true to his campaign promise,” Meadows added.
Meadows, formerly a congressman from North Carolina, resigned from his congressional seat after Trump announced in early March he would become the next White House chief of staff.
“I have long known and worked with Mark, and the relationship is a very good one,” Trump tweeted then.
During the podcast, the group discussed how Meadows gave U.S. senators greater access to the president in efforts to communicate public policy concerns and mitigate bureaucratic resistance to Trump’s policy agenda. Cruz said he called Meadows after Trump planned to hold a meeting with oil executives in April amid the coronavirus pandemic, advocating for independent producers.
“Early on, they were not on the meeting invite list. So, I called Mark and said, ‘Look, this is a real problem, we need to make sure we’ve got an independent producer there.’ Mark not only got it done but said, ‘You need to be there,'” Cruz said.
Cruz said he requested Trump advise Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to monitor the activities of Wall Street companies so independent energy contractors were not discriminated against.
“The president right there said do it. He looked at Dan and said, ‘Make it happen.’ And that made a real, real difference in terms of capital being available and literally saving millions of jobs in this country,” Cruz said.
