to spur employment.58 New York Magazine calls the “alleged” plan “preposterous,” noting that it asks Jordan to “give territory to the Palestinian authority,” and in return, per Ward’s book, “Jordan would get land from Saudi Arabia, and that country would get back two Red Sea islands it gave Egypt to administer in 1950.”59 All told, New York Magazine concludes, the plan “would involve no less than five countries (plus Palestine) coordinating to give aid or renegotiate boundaries in the most politically convoluted region on the planet … [while] not requir[ing] the Netanyahu government—a close ally of Kushner’s—to make any significant concessions.”60 In the balance, the magazine observes, the plan would create “inefficient” desalination plants that produce “1.5 times more unusable brine than potable water.”61 Has America thrown over its principles and its foreign policy—not to mention the decades-long hope of a two-state solution in Israel and the Occupied Territories—for a few strategically ludicrous and likely purposeless desalination plants in Gaza?
Even as America’s newly amateurish foreign policy descends into meltdown, the matter of whether Trump or anyone tied to him poses a national security threat to the U.S. by a preponderance of the evidence due to their communications with Kremlin agents or other foreign nationals remains unresolved. It is unclear, indeed, whether America even understands the dangers that such a widespread compromising of our nation’s governmental apparatuses would pose. In a 2019 filing in the Maria Butina case, the Department of Justice opined about “Russia’s broader scheme to acquire information and establish relationships and communication channels that can be exploited to the Russian Federation’s benefit.… Acquiring information valuable to a foreign power does not necessarily involve collecting classified documents or engaging in cloak-and-dagger activities. Something as basic as the identification of people who have the ability to influence policy in a foreign power’s favor is extremely attractive to those powers. The identification could form the basis of other forms of intelligence operations, or targeting, in the future.”62 According to the DOJ, “Such channels bypass open channels of diplomacy and can be used to win concessions or influence positions that contradict declared official policies articulated by governments.… [These channels and identifications are] of substantial intelligence value to the Russian government, and Russian intelligence services will be able to use this information for years to come in their efforts to spot and assess Americans who may be susceptible to recruitment as foreign intelligence assets.”63
By this metric, the third Russian election-interference operation—one that American media never identifies as such—was a coordinated effort to infiltrate the Republicans’ 2016 presidential campaign in the hope of future Kremlin-friendly policy victories. That that effort was wildly successful during both the pre-election, transition, and post-election periods is now clear. And indeed, this particular threat continues, as the Trump administration periodically drops sanctions on new Russian individuals and companies and promotes within its ranks men and women whose ties to Russian interests either have never been explored or have been ignored. As of May 2019, the Trump administration was considering making Monica Crowley the spokeswoman for Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury Department, even though Crowley has in the past lobbied on behalf of Victor Pinchuk, a Soviet-born Ukrainian businessman whom Mother Jones describes as a man “whose large payments … to prominent Americans, including Donald Trump, and apparent promotion of pro-Russian interests drew scrutiny from special counsel Robert Mueller.”64 Crowley has also worked with Pinchuk on a “peace deal” for the Ukraine—with “peace deal” a euphemism for, as we have learned from the many covert Kremlin operations described in the Mueller Report, Putin’s duplicitous efforts to achieve his primary policy goal: sanctions relief.65
Trump has also brought potential witnesses against him in future criminal or congressional proceedings into his fold. For instance, despite claims by former Trump communications adviser Michael Caputo that Richard Nixon’s son-in-law Ed Cox and Trump were at loggerheads about Trump’s political future in 2013 and 2014—when the evidence suggests that in fact Cox, who is closely connected to both Dimitri Simes’s CNI and Carter Page, ultimately facilitated Trump’s run—in May 2019 Trump will effectively confirm Cox’s importance to his political operation by bringing him aboard his reelection campaign via the Trump Victory Committee.66 As the Hill reports, “The role with Trump’s reelection effort provides a soft landing spot for Cox.”67 Indeed, the Trump Victory Committee has a history of welcoming individuals whose testimony could be damaging to Trump, including, most notably, Elliott Broidy, the committee’s longtime director.68 On a broader scale, Trump has sought to reward those with whom