By Tim Hume and Nick Miriello Mar 5, 2018
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit with U.S. president and Twitter-pal Donald Trump couldn’t come at a better time for the beleaguered leader, who faces mounting corruption charges that has him fighting for his political life.
The Israeli leader arrived in Washington for a five-day trip where he’s expected to discuss shared concerns like Iran, Syria, and Palestinian peace negotiations with Trump. But the U.S. visit also doubles as a critical political lifeline for Netanyahu, who can play to his strengths abroad while temporarily distancing himself from the mounting pile of corruption probes he faces back home.
In this regard, the trip to America is “fortuitous,” said Shalom Lipner, a nonresident senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings.
“His major ticket has always been, 'I’m the guy who best understands the United States,'” Lipner said. “Thousands of supporters at AIPAC [the annual policy conference] will give him a standing ovation. It doesn’t get much better than that.”
He needs the boost.
Netanyahu has tried to bat away one corruption charge after another for months, but the charges continue to stick. The Israeli police recommended last month that Netanyahu be indicted for fraud, bribery, and breach of trust for actions connected to two of the four corruption probes. Things appeared to get worse for Bibi on Monday, when Israel’s Justice Ministry announced that his former confidant and top media adviser Nir Hefetz had turned state’s witness against him in two of the four corruption cases circling the prime minister’s office.
Hefetz, whose association with Netanyahu dates back to 2009, is suspected of bribery and obstruction of justice in one of the cases against Netanyahu, and is a key figure in other investigations surrounding him. He’s the third, and most significant, of the prime minister’s former confidants to turn against him in the mounting graft investigations.
Netanyahu has taken a defiant, at times Trumpian, approach to the investigations and the 24-7 media coverage that’s trailed it, regularly posting directly to Facebook and Twitter to deny all the “outlandish” charge against him.
Read more
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/evm9k7/heres-a-guide-to-all-the-netanyahu-corruption-scandals?utm_source=vicenewsfb
This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
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