Amos J. Hochstein

In the most recent post, Tom Luongo Explains, I referred to another post that was published about a week ago, With Ukraine Lost, What's The Latest Neocon Strategery? That post made a brief reference to “an Israeli citizen masquerading as an America diplomat.” The reference was to Amos J. Hochstein, whose progress through life makes an interesting study. The reason I took an interest in Hochstein recently was because he recently took a trip to Beirut and then on to Israel. Hochstein’s current title is Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Adviser for Energy and Investment. However, it appears that his trip was part of the US effort to tamp down tensions on Israel’s northern border and, beyond that, with Iran.

One might expect someone who undertook such a delicate mission to have some impressive credentials, and Hochstein does—even you don’t look at his years before arriving in the US from Israel to take up sensitive positions, beginning on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. For example, you might expect to learn from standard sources that he graduated from a college or university. If you expected that, you’d be disappointed. Consider this paragraph at Wikipedia:

Hochstein was born in Israel, the child of American Jewish immigrants.^[13][14] He began working as a foreign policy adviser to Democratic Party members of the U.S. government House Foreign Affairs Committee from 1994 to January 2001.^[15][16][14] He identifies as a Modern Orthodox Jew.^[17] He is married to Julie Rae Ringel; they have four children together^[18] and live in Washington D.C. His wife works for the Georgetown University Continuing Education School in the executive leadership coaching program.^[19] A dual U.S.-Israeli national, Hochstein served in the Israeli Defense Forces.^[20]

Born in Israel, began working as a foreign policy adviser to Democratic Party members of the U.S. government House Foreign Affairs Committee—Boom! We can flesh that out a little bit. He was 21 when he left the IDF, where he is reported to have been a tank crewman. After a few months, reportedly, at a Tel Aviv PR firm he migrated to his fast track career in DC. He was hired by DemRep  Sam Gejdenson (whose background suggests that he is Jewish). The chairman of the committee at the time was Lee Hamilton, who later distinguished himself by writing a letter to Obama urging commutation of Jonathan Pollard.

Here’s the short version of his CV from Wikipedia—the entry has more details. Note that for all his consulting on energy matters, we learn zero about his qualifications to advise anybody about such matters—one supposes that his qualifications are his connections:

Amos J. Hochstein[1] (born January 4, 1973) is an American-Israeli businessman, diplomat, and lobbyist.[2]

Currently the Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Adviser for Energy and Investment under U.S. President Joe Biden,[3]

he has worked in the U.S. Congress, has testified before congressional panels[2] and

has served in the Barack Obama administration under Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry.

He was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in 2011 and as Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs.

In 2015, President Barack Obama nominated Hochstein to be the Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources but the Senate did not act on the nomination.

While at the State Department, Hochstein worked as a close advisor to Vice-President Biden.[4] He served in the administration from 2011 to 2017.[5]

In March 2017, he joined Tellurian, a private Houston-based LNG company, where he served as Senior Vice President Marketing until his departure in September 2020.[6]

He serves on the boards of the Atlantic Council and U.S.-India Business Council.

Hochstein is a former member of the supervisory board of Ukrainian Naftogaz, from which he resigned in October 2020[7] by writing an opinion piece[8] that highlighted the return of sabotage in the form of corrupt forces.

On August 10, 2021, United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that he is appointing Hochstein as the Senior Advisor for Energy Security, and he was subsequently appointed Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security.[9][10][11]

He currently also leads Biden's Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment.[12]

You’ll notice that once he finished his stint at the House, he pretty much joins whatever his gig is right at the top. Still no mention of education credentials. Senior VP of Marketing at an LNG company? Sweet! Where did he learn about marketing? Or was it his connections that were his credentials.

He does a lot of Special Envoy stuff for State, so here’s his bio there:

Amos J. Hochstein is the Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security. He previously served as the Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State for Global Energy Security. He began his tenure with the State Department in 2011, when he was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Diplomacy. From 2014 to 2017 he served as Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs and led the Bureau of Energy Resources. Hochstein has served in a variety of roles in the private sector and Capitol Hill. He was the Senior Policy Advisor to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives and also worked as an advisor to Senators Chris Dodd (CT) and Mark Warner (VA). Throughout his career, he has been a counselor for domestic and international energy companies, assisting in assessing potential new markets, the development of alternative sources of power, and the best strategies to bring them to market. Hochstein has served on the board of the Atlantic Council and as a Non-resident Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center.

Senior this, senior that—nice titles, but where are the creds? On the board of the Atlantic Council, non-resident fellow at Harvard. Nice gigs, but how do you get them? Never got a law degree, business degree, foreign affairs degrees—not that anyone is telling us, anyway. We don’t even know what HS he went to in Jerusalem.

Anyway, it turns out that I’m not the only one checking up on Tel Aviv’s Man in Washington.

This week, it was reported that President Joe Biden, lacking an even minimally competent Secretary of State, has sent White House senior adviser Amos Hochstein for consultations with senior Israeli officials in the hope of heading off a war between Israel and Lebanon.

The choice of Hochstein for such a delicate diplomatic task ought to have raised eyebrows in Washington, not least because of the unusual background of Mr. Biden’s personal envoy.

Born and raised in Jerusalem, Amos J. Hochstein is an Israeli-US national who served in the Israeli Defense Forces in the early 1990s. After service in the IDF, he appears to have been employed briefly at a Tel Aviv PR agency before moving to Washington and commencing his ascent to the highest reaches of the US government, beginning with a staff position for Congressman Sam Gejdenson and then as Staff Director of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.  According to the Lebanese news platform L’Orient, as a congressional staffer in the 1990s, Hochstein “met with an Iraqi Foreign Ministry official to discuss a plan to resettle Palestinians in Iraq in return for sanctions relief.” This background, little noted in the American press, is more than a bit germane to Hochstein’s current policy portfolio.

…

Yet there are a number of things in Mr. Hochstein’s background that should have raised the eyebrows of the US counterintelligence, to say nothing of the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security which oversees the granting of security clearances in the Department.

Where was the man billed as “Biden’s favorite energy guy” educated? Does he have a college degree or an advanced degree in energy policy? If so, no one will say. When reached for comment, the State Department, where Hochstein worked for over 6 years, refused to answer and referred me to the White House. While one biographical sketch mentions Hochstein’s ownership interests in two DC area restaurants and a movie theater, nothing with regard to his education are to be found in the public record.

How did a young Israeli with no experience in American politics land such coveted positions on Capitol Hill at such a young age?

Down the years, Hochstein seems to have had his fingers in any numbers of shadowy operations over the past several years starting with a well remunerative board seat on the Ukrainian state oil and gas giant Naftogaz.

It was reported early on in the Biden administration that Hochstein was the president’s choice to lead the administration’s efforts to kill the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Given Hochstein’s ties to Ukrainian oil and gas interests, the conflict of interest seems all too apparent.

Leaving that specific question of propriety aside, the question still remains: How could someone of Hochstein’s (opaque) background possibly be viewed as an honest broker in the Middle East?

Spoiler alert: He isn’t.

America—what a country!

Hey, by the way, since I referred to Jonathan Pollard, one of the most damaging spies in US history, maybe I should include something about his reception in our close ally Israel. Yeah, he got a hero’s welcome—from Wikipedia:

Pollard and his wife, Esther, finally arrived in Israel on December 30, 2020, on a private jet owned by US billionaire Sheldon Adelson. They were greeted on arrival by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who handed Pollard his Israeli documentation.^[13][14] Israeli Intelligence Minister Eli Cohen said that Pollard would be granted a government stipend equivalent to the pensions granted to former Mossad and Shin Bet agents.^[200] …

Pollard was honored by Mayor of Jerusalem Moshe Lion at a Jerusalem Day gala in 2021. Pollard gave the keynote address to the gala, in which he accused the U.S. government of anti-Semitism, called the U.S State Department and the United Nations enemies of Israel, and referred to the Biden administration as "Amalek."^[204][205] In Jewish tradition, the 613 commandments mandates that Amalekites must be killed.^[206]

Pollard turned down an offer to stand for the Knesset on the Otzma Yehudit party's electoral slate in the 2022 Israeli legislative election, saying that he had "suffered enough".^[207]

…

Beit Yonatan, an Israeli-owned apartment building in Silwan, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, is named after Pollard.^[215]

…

In 1995, a play called Pollard (alternatively titled Pollard's Trial) debuted at the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv.^[217] It was performed at the Knesset in 2011.^[218] 

Enough.