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The White House • April 9, 2020

Voice of America is a global news network funded by American taxpayers. It spends about $200 million each year on its mission to “tell America’s story” and “present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively” to people around the globe. Today, however, VOA too often speaks for America’s adversaries—not its citizens. The Coronavirus pandemic is no exception. Secrecy from the Communist Party of China allowed the deadly virus to spread across the world. Journalists should report the facts, but VOA has instead amplified Beijing’s propaganda. This week, VOA called China’s Wuhan lockdown a successful “model” copied by much of the world—and then tweeted out video of the Communist government’s celebratory light show marking the quarantine’s alleged end. Even worse, while much of the U.S. media takes its lead from China, VOA went one step further: It created graphics with Communist government statistics to compare China’s Coronavirus death toll to America’s. As intelligence experts point out, there is simply no way to verify the accuracy of China’s numbers. The Coronavirus story is just one example of this pattern. Last year, VOA helped highlight the Twitter feed of Iran Foreign Minister Javad Zarif while he was issuing threats against the U.S. and sharing Russian anti-U.S. propaganda videos. “VOA will represent America,” its guiding Charter reads. And for years after its founding during World War II, VOA served that mission by promoting freedom and democracy across the world for audiences who longed for both. Today, VOA is promoting propaganda instead—and your tax dollars are paying for it.

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Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said Kataib Hezbollah is the only such militia group known to have conducted “an indirect fire attack on this scale against U.S. coalition forces in Iraq,” referring to a rocket attack late last year on a military base in Kirkuk that killed a U.S. contractor and nearly led to an all-out war between Washington and Tehran.

Wednesday’s attack came from an improvised truck launcher that fired off 30 Katyusha rockets, 18 of which landed on Camp Taji, a base just north of Baghdad that houses U.S. and coalition forces. None of the incoming rockets was shot down by any air defense system, a U.S. official said.

The U.S. is moving air and ballistic missile defense systems into Iraq to protect against a potential Iranian attack following the escalation in January, McKenzie told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

The U.S. service members who were killed on Wednesday were one soldier and one airman, the official said. Additionally, one coalition member was killed in the attack, and 12 others were wounded.

Following the attack, reports emerged of airstrikes on  Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps positions on Abu Kamal near the border between Iraq and Syria. However, the U.S. official said those strikes were not conducted by the United States. It is possible the Israeli military carried out the strikes.

One former Trump administration official said it is likely Wednesday’s attack was conducted with the “knowledge and support of the IRGC.”

“Although some stated they believed the killing of [Iranian Gen. Qassem] Solemani would prevent further attacks, many more believed it would not and that this is the start of their response,” the former official said.

The Pentagon is likely preparing options to present to the president for a response, ranging from direct attacks against the militia group that carried out the rocket strike, targeting IRGC operatives in Iraq or Syria, and perhaps even direct attacks on Iranian military in Iran. The military may also be considering “covert actions,” which could help reduce the chances of escalation.

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This blacklisting by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force is expected to take place Friday and come after European governments decided to join the U.S., according to American and allied officials.

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This is a major success for President Trump. His naysayers said it would never happen and Trump would ruin the economy.
His critics were wrong.

On Tuesday, the final day of 2019, President Trump announced he will sign Phase One in the China trade deal on January 15th in the new year.

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Brian Hook, the special representative for Iran and one of the longest-serving Trump appointees in the administration, has been a focus of an inspector general investigation alleging he engaged in politically motivated staffing decisions involving a career State Department official who worked closely on the Obama administration’s landmark nuclear deal with Iran and other diplomacy with the Islamic Republic.

Details of the IG report centering on Hook were given to the Daily Beast in September, just as Hook was being considered as the White House’s next national security adviser. The timing of this leak has amplified concerns within and outside the State Department that a cadre of anti-Trump voices in the administration is waging an internal campaign to discredit some of Trump’s long-serving appointees.

The report centers on the experience of one official, Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, who was removed from Hook’s staff when he led the Department of Policy Planning and was given a separate State Department assignment. The IG complaint alleges that Hook improperly targeted her, partly because of her work in the Obama administration on the Iran nuclear deal, which President Donald Trump has since reversed. It is unclear whether the report spans beyond Nowrouzzadeh to allege that politically motivated targeting occurred on a broader scope.

Nowrouzzadeh has been a prominent and public supporter of the Iran deal and has criticized the Trump administration’s moves to get away from the deal and further isolate the Iranian regime. She has written and lectured against Trump’s policies, including in an op-ed titled, “Trump’s Dangerous Shift on Iran.”

Supporters of the president told the Washington Free Beacon that the IG report is part of a broader effort to undermine national security officials who have remained loyal to the president. Ironically, Hook himself was viewed with suspicion—by former national security adviser John Bolton and his allies—as insufficiently loyal for different reasons. Bolton and company frequently complained that Hook was insufficiently hawkish, particularly on Iran.

The conclusions of the department’s internal investigation are beginning to be shared with congressional aides.

Hook’s defenders have expressed frustration with the IG report’s reliance on anonymous sources and tendentious use of evidence. The report downplays, for example, claims that Nowrouzzadeh harbored deep personal and political opposition to the Trump administration’s hardline approach to Iran, omitting her public statements of opposition, sources say.

“It’s the Steele Dossier playbook. Anonymous sources from far inside the Deep State, are laundered to anti-Trump journalists and partisan warriors on the Hill, which are then fed back into the system as evidence,” a GOP congressional staffer told the Free Beacon. “This is how they’ve been targeting Trump since even before he took office, this is how they’re doing it now. It’s also how they did the Ukraine whistleblower report.”

Hook’s defenders also say that political appointees, particularly the director of policy planning, are entitled to handpick their aides, a point that is minimized in the report.

“Policy Planning is an in-house think tank that employs political, career, and military officials,” said one former administration official, who is familiar with the report and would only discuss the matter on background. “The director is allowed to handpick his staff—no one—not career, military, nor political staff is entitled to a job there.”

As director of policy planning, Hook has also continued to employ other career employees.

But the leak has the potential to deepen rifts in the administration between Trump appointees and career staffers.

“This is a terrible example of how the left criminalizes policy differences. Today, the ‘deep state’—what you’d call the national security branch of the permanent administrative state—is so thoroughly uniform in its views on every conceivable issue, deviation from that consensus could only be understood to be criminal, racist, corrupt, or illegal,” said David Reaboi, a GOP political operative and national security expert with close ties to the administration.

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TENEX supplies 20 percent of the nuclear fuel used by the U.S. reactor fleet, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a nuclear power trade association. If the company gets sanctioned for continuing to work in Iran, American utilities would have to turn to one of the other two global enriched uranium suppliers, and prices could skyrocket for fuel.

Of course, it cuts both ways. NEI also says the United States buys about 10 percent of TENEX’s capacity, which would be a hard hit for the company. But it may not come to that. Even if the U.S. allows waivers to expire, TENEX could choose to abandon its work in Iran. And if it doesn’t, sanctions have to go through a potentially months-long legal process before they are imposed. “If utilities have enough advanced notification [that] they won’t be able to receive the Russian fuel, nearly all will be able to mitigate that with inventories or alternate suppliers,” said Nima Ashkeboussi, director of Fuel Cycle Programs at NEI. “But there could be some utilities that are challenged with finding alternate sources of supply.”

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“Turkey will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into Northern Syria. The United States Armed Forces will not support or be involved in the operation, and United States forces, having defeated the ISIS territorial ‘Caliphate,’ will no longer be in the immediate area,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement.

The announcement comes hours after President Trump held a phone call with Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which the two reportedly discussed the conflict and agreed to a meeting in Washington in November.

More than 1,000 U.S. troops are currently deployed in northeastern Syria, where they work closely with Kurdish fighters who have proven to be among Washington’s strongest allies in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Erdogan has repeatedly expressed frustration with Washington’s close alliance with the Kurds along his country’s border with Syria, linking them to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is designated a terrorist organization in Turkey.

The U.S., in an effort to reduce tensions in the region, has been working on establishing a safe zone along the border. But the plans have faltered, and the Turkish president in recent days has warned that Ankara will soon be launching a military operation across the border, as soon as within the next couple of days.

Grisham in her Sunday statement added the U.S. will not be holding any more ISIS fighters, and that “Turkey will now be responsible for all ISIS fighters in the area captured over the past two years in the wake of the defeat of the territorial ‘Caliphate’ by the United States.”

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Western and Arab media sources have published several stories recently about the growing opposition to the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman inside the Al Saud Royal Family. The Crown Prince’s future is to be decided in the next couple of months, so very little time remains for opposition players. After the Yemen War quagmire and the damage done in Abqaiq, some royals will undoubtedly try to weaken MBS position. The main issue currently is that here is no real contender available, as most Saudis are still supportive of MBS. The old guard, such as the brother of King Salman, prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz , are not favored by the young. Still, MBS has to speed up his passion projects as success is everything when it comes to winning power in Riyadh. 

It is not surprising that the recent positive media reports emerging from Saudi Arabia come just before the Davos in the Desert or FII2019 meeting is held. A possible Aramco IPO presentation at FII2019, followed by a 1% listing at the Saudi Tadawul, would put MBS firmly back in the spotlight and weaken any opposition. With the current stalemate in the region, more than 4000 investment funds, sovereign wealth funds and corporations will be sitting in the conference halls of the Ritz, willing to hand over the much needed cash and multibillion projects to solidify MBS’ position.

Open support for MBS will be in place very soon, with Russian president Vladimir Putin expected to head to Riyadh very soon. Putin is openly a big supporter of the crown prince’s strategy and dreams. Russian sovereign wealth fund RDIF and others are flocking to Riyadh’s hotels as further evidence of Russian support. Moscow appears set to capitalize on Washington’s hands off response to the recent attacks in Saudi Arabia, and MBS will be eager to take advantage. Along with USA Maximum Pressure Campaign against Islamic Republic, a closer Saudi-Russian relationship will surely end up choke mullahs more, as the Islamic Republic is heavily dependent on Moscow’s support.

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