If reports are true, it would be a violation of the Logan Act.
“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. “So, I don’t know where—who knows whether that will come about or not, but I have to think that the Harris campaign would like for President Biden to do what presidents do, and that’s to work on that one.”
Woodruff clarified on Wednesday that the anecdote was not based on her original reporting, but rather on an an Axios story last week that cited two U.S. sources as claiming that Trump and Netanyahu had spoken on the phone about cease-fire and Gaza hostage talks. Netanyahu’s office and Trump both separately denied the report.
“I did encourage him to get this over with. You want to get it over with fast. Have victory, get your victory, and get it over with. It has to stop, the killing has to stop,” Trump said at a New Jersey press conference on Thursday, referring to their meeting at Mar-a-Lago last month. But he also criticized cease-fire demands.
Sure, because he is the President, and belongs to ostensibly the “Left-wing party”. Trump can’t send them bombs. Trump can’t protect them from others intervening to stop their genocide.
Trump doesn’t actually have any leverage to move Netanyahu either direction, and anyone who is being honest knows Netanyahu has had no intention of ending this any time soon, so Trump was just telling him to do what he already planned to.
The scandal here has, in reality, nothing to do with Gaza, and everything to do with the US election. Trump attempting to take any action that violates the Logan Act in order to help in the election is an attempt to subvert democracy.
The fact that he chose to violate the Logan Act just to tell someone not to do something they had no plans to, just speaks to his idiocy.
If he is giving a foreign head of state reassurance that US policy will change if he wins, he is also subverting US policy. This is far from a nothingburger.