Sources tell the Washington Free Beacon‘s Adam Kredo that Vice President Joe Biden lobbied foreign leaders whose countries sit on the United Nations Security Council to vote for a resolution that calls for the end of Israeli settlement activity. Here’s an excerpt from the Beacon:
Vice President Joe Biden is denying accusations that he personally lobbied foreign leaders to vote in favor of a hotly contested anti-Israel resolution at the United Nations last week that has brought U.S.-Israel relations to an all time low, according to sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon about the matter. Insiders familiar with the matter said Biden spoke by phone with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to ask that his country vote in favor of the resolution, which was passed by the U.N. Security Council last week when the United States, in a reversal of longstanding policy, did not exercise its veto power to kill the measure. The Obama administration’s decision to allow the resolution to pass drew outrage from a bipartisan range of voices in Congress and the Jewish organizational world…. “Biden lobbied Ukraine and of course administration officials are too cowardly to admit it,” said a senior pro-Israel official who is working with Congressional offices on responding to the resolution. “With everything that’s going on involving Russia, Iran, and Syria, this is how the Obama administration choose to spend its precious diplomatic capital. They decided to twist arms and trade favors for a resolution that cuts off Jews from Jerusalem, a city that is Israel’s capital city according to American law.”
Fourteen of the 15 nations on the Security Council voted for the resolution, which Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a number of American lawmakers called “anti-Israel” and urged the administration to veto it. The United States abstained at last week’s vote.
