White House Watch: The Fake News War on McMaster

One such story, published September 12 at PJMedia.com, is particularly fantastic. The author, David Steinberg, cites multiple administration and outside sources who claim McMaster “yell[ed] at Israeli officials” during a meeting last month at the White House after one of those officials supposedly raised objections to the participation of a Muslim administration official. But it looks as if nearly all of the story’s claims are wrong or unsubstantiated.

Here’s the crux of Steinberg’s story, which he claims occurred during a meeting at the White House during the week of August 27 (emphases in original):

Steinberg then reported that McMaster “dismissed” Israeli concerns about Hezbollah and was “yelling at the Israelis” during the meeting.

Administration officials I spoke with say practically every fact in Steinberg’s story is false, from the date of the meeting to the statements about Ali’s views on Hezbollah. Steinberg himself admitted to me in an email that neither he nor PJ Media contacted anyone at the White House before publishing the story, though he says he has since given administration officials an opportunity to respond to the story’s claims.

Steinberg maintains that the meeting he reported on took place during the week of August 27, which Michael Anton, a spokesman for the NSC and McMaster, says did not take place. Two additional NSC officials I spoke with say there was no meeting between McMaster and Israeli security officials that week. Anton suggested the meeting Steinberg is referring to was actually on August 17, and took place in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House grounds. I asked Steinberg if he could provide the specific date of the meeting he reported on, but I received no response.

Mustafa Javed Ali, the NSC official at the center of Steinberg’s story, is a career counterterrorism professional who works for the FBI, and he has been detailed to the NSC since the spring. According to Anton as well as Victoria Coates, an NSC official who participated in the meeting with the Israeli officials, Ali was not in the August 17 meeting, nor was he invited.

“I transmitted the list of U.S. participants in the meeting to the Israeli Embassy, and was the contact point for their list,” Coates told me. “Javed Ali was not on our list, and was never on our list, as the meeting’s agenda didn’t require his attendance. He wasn’t there, was never intended to be there, wasn’t asked to leave and couldn’t have been asked to leave. Period. It simply didn’t happen.”

A photograph of the participants, tweeted by President Trump’s chief Middle East negotiator Jason Greenblatt, does not include Ali.

Among the article’s claims is that Ali, a Muslim, intervened to stop Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim feminist and public intellectual, from speaking to the NSC. Steinberg tells me he and PJMedia.com “stand by our report that sources claimed Mustafa Javed Ali blocked Ayaan from speaking once this year.” But Anton tells me Ayaan Hirsi Ali did speak to a group at the White House that included NSC staff. Anton and another administration official tell me the extent of Javad Ali’s involvement was when he declined, on behalf of his office, to co-host Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s appearance with the office run by Kevin Harrington, who runs strategic planning at the NSC.

Both American and Israeli officials have denied other claims in Steinberg’s article. Anton and Itai Bar Dov, a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Washington, each told Haaretz last week that McMaster did not yell at the meeting.

“It is flatly wrong to say that either McMaster or Ali has any opposition to the designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist group. Neither has ever questioned that fact for second. In fact, McMaster has tasked the NSC staff with working on ideas for taking a more aggressive approach to Hezbollah,” said Anton. Bar Dov called the article “totally false” and said no Israeli official ever asked anyone to leave the meeting, let alone Ali (who, again, no officials will confirm was at the meeting).

Here was how one administration official who disputed the entire story put it to me: “We’re already in the process of arranging a second meeting with the Israelis because both sides found this one so helpful.”

Anton, who said he frequently implored PJ Media’s managing editor Aaron Hanscom over email to request a correction to the piece, was offered a chance to “send an on-the-record response” to the piece. An editor’s note was attached to the end of Steinberg’s piece noting Anton’s objections.

“We have confidence in David Steinberg’s report, which is based on accounts from several administration sources, by members of non-governmental organizations involved in national security, and by a source within the Israeli government. We have told Mr. Anton that we will publish a comment or article from him, if he would care to submit one,” reads the note in part.

“I have long admired PJ Media,” Anton told me on Monday. “On this case, they blew it in a big way. Not contacting me in advance is inexcusable.”

Anton continued: “I think readers of PJ Media, including readers like me who appreciate the commentary . . . need to approach any ‘reporting’ from the site with a huge amount of skepticism.”

Mueller Watch—The Russia investigation is heating up, and it doesn’t look good for Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. CNN reported Monday that federal investigators wiretapped Manafort’s phones under “secret court orders” both before and after the 2016 presidential election:

The New York Times, meanwhile, has reported that after the FBI raided Manafort’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, in July, prosecutors working for Mueller “told Mr. Manafort they planned to indict him.”

Meanwhile, the family of former national security adviser Mike Flynn has launched a legal defense fund. The retired lieutenant general has become a target of Mueller’s probe. Flynn announced the fund on Twitter.

2018 Watch—Not a good look for Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill: “As McCaskill touts record on seniors, donor and family friend runs troubled nursing homes.”

President Trump will deliver a sweeping foreign policy speech before the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday, calling on U.S. allies to pull their weight in the international fight against terrorism and encouraging the western world to defend its civilizational values. One administration source with knowledge of the speech said its theme will be “sovereignty and the importance of strong nation-states,” and should be seen as the final entry in a trio of Trump foreign affairs addresses that include his speeches in Riyadh and Warsaw earlier this year.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, a senior White House official said the speech would further articulate the philosophy the administration has dubbed “principled realism” and urge U.N. members states to see themselves as a league of sovereign powers rather than “a top-down model of global bureaucracy.”

The nation-state is “the best vehicle, as the president has said before, for the elevation of the human condition,” the official said. “Nation-states that serve the interests of their own citizens have a rational interest in cooperating to confront shared dangers, shared threats, as well as shared opportunities.”

In the speech, President Trump will also solicit international cooperation for thorny diplomatic problems, such as the increasingly combative behavior of North Korea.

“One of the chief regimes that will be singled out in this regard is the regime of North Korea and all of its destabilizing, hostile, and dangerous behavior, as well as, of course, the regime of Iran, and in those two cases, as well as in others, an appeal to other nations to do their part in confronting these threats and understanding that it’s a shared menace,” the official said. “Nations cannot be bystanders to history.”

Health Care Watch—My colleague John McCormack, who has been on top of the rapid movement of a new attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare, heard from Kentucky senator Rand Paul on Monday about why the libertarian Republican is opposing the bill, authored by Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

“My view is it keeps 90 percent of Obamacare and redistributes the proceeds,” Paul said. “It takes money from the Democrat states and gives it to the Republican states.”

What about the pro-life argument for Graham-Cassidy? Anti-abortion groups recently endorsed the bill’s provisions for defunding Planned Parenthood and ending Obamacare funding for abortions. “I don’t vote for any money for abortion, and I’m pro-life. But I also don’t think that every piece of legislation that doesn’t promise to fund abortion is a good piece of legislation,” Paul said.

Paul is so far the only GOP senator to oppose the bill outright, though several others are undeclared. Graham-Cassidy will get a hearing next week in the Senate Finance committee.

Song of the Day—“Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley.