Runnin' On Auto ... Pen

Before we get to the autopen business, a few updates.

Yesterday I quoted John Mearsheimer to the effect that Netanyahu’s criminal policies—genocide and ethnic cleansing—enjoy wide, even overwhelming, support in Israel. I would add that those criminal policies enjoy similar support among Jewish Nationalists everywhere. Now, a few commenters have attempted to challenge me on this, so this is worth noting:

History Speaks @History__Speaks

Horrifying: A new poll of Israeli Jews conducted by Penn State U reveals overwhelming (82%) support for ethnic cleansing of Gazans, & solid-majority (56%) support for ethnic cleansing of Israeli Arabs. Nearly half (47%) support killing all Gazans in cities captured by IDF.

4:54 PM · May 22, 2025

Noga Tarnopolsky נגה טרנופולסקי نوغا ترنوبولسكي

@NTarnopolsky

#New: Nissim Vaturi, deputy Knesset Speaker for the ruling @Likud_Party, is calling for women and children to be separated off on Gaza and for the men to be 𝒆𝒙𝒆𝒄𝒖𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝒆𝒏 𝒎𝒂𝒔𝒔𝒆.

Last edited11:31 AM · May 22, 2025

To be fair, that kind of talk is not confined to Israel. For example, Randy Fine—who represents the 6th Congressional District of Florida recently spoke in these measured terms:

MenchOsint @MenchOsint

American-Israeli Randy Fine is calling to nuke Gaza on Fox.

“We nuked the Japanese twice to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this culture and it needs to be defeated.”

4:00 PM · May 22, 2025

Meanwhile:

Barak Ravid @BarakRavid

Israel is making preparations to swiftly strike Iran's nuclear facilities if talks between the U.S. and Iran collapse, according to two Israeli sources. My story on @axios adding details to @jimsciutto @KatieBoLillis @NatashaBertrand reporting.

Israel preparing to strike Iran fast if Trump's nuclear talks break down

4:26 PM · May 21, 2025

As I’ve maintained repeatedly, Israel possesses no credible ability to strike Iran on its own—short of a full scale nuclear attack. It needs the US to help/join in. That’s why Iran yesterday stated that an Israeli attack would be treated as a US attack—a totally reasonable position, in light of the US proxy war on Russia. This is also why Trump’s anti-Iran rhetoric—the threats of devastating war—is so deeply irresponsible when taken in conjunction with the genocidal Jewish Nationalist mentality and the question of who actually runs America.

And that leads us to the issue of the autopen during the Biden years.

Yesterday Sundance ran a brief post,

Ed Martin Discusses the Autopen Review and Biden Gatekeepers, Naming the White House Officials Who Managed the Pardon List

In that post is a Youtube cued to the key part of Ed Martin’s discussion with Mark Halperin on this whole issue. I’ve done an edited partial transcript:

I was in the office as US attorney for about 5 days when I wrote to a number of senior Biden officials in the White House saying, 'What did you know about Joe Biden's competence and the pardons?' And I got some responses, so I've been looking at this for a while. ... The Biden pardons are unprecedented--the ones right before Christmas that he did. People forget this. I think it's a couple thousand pardons that were done. Did he know about that, did he really understand? Look, the pardon power is plenary, but the guy has to be competent to do it. ... the autopen's completely, obviously, legal--if you're competent. There must be a trail that shows who was in charge of the autopen. I know this exists. I worked for a governor. We had a system for an autopen to be able to use it.

So right now we have unprecedented conduct--the pardons--unprecedented admissions--the books [official records] as well as the staffers. I had a whistleblower in my office 10 days ago--senior, senior, Democrat--saying, "Look, it was these three people that controlled access [to Biden], and they were making money off of it." I don't know if I believe it yet but, the point is, I think we have to get to the bottom of it for the American people and to protect the process, and that's what we're doing. ... It may not be criminal but it certainly should be a scandal of the First Order--maybe in human history or maybe American history. I sound like the president there, but in American history to have this kind of conduct

... can you characterize who the whistleblower was?

Biden campaign, 2020 campaign, at the highest levels.

And who are the three people they said were doing this?

... the gatekeepers were [Ron] Klain and Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer. Those three were really dominant characters in the White House--Ricchetti a little bit and obviously Jill, but I think that was the three. But I was with this person and I said, "What about Susan Rice, what about some of these others?" And they said, "No. These were the ones."

Now, as it happens, I’ve written about these people in the past, in a slightly different context—questions of war and peace, rather than pardons—but it’s all related to the question of who runs America. And I don’t think for a moment that these three are the ones who are ultimately in charge. Before I get to that longer piece, here are links to relevant posts from the past that also serve as background for all this:

How Empires Work ... For A While

Empire Of Hate

Very Brief Follow Up On Jack The Protector

Follow-up On Who's In Charge?

I’m sure there are additional posts in the archives that are relevant, but that’ll do for now.

Now I’ll get really lazy and simply paste in the post that I referred to above:

Mark Twain: Everyone Talks About The Lobby ...

Or maybe I got that wrong. Whatever. Everyone these days is talking about who actually runs America, so it seems a natural to talk about The Lobby.

Let’s start with this article, that quotes extensively from Semafor:

The tales of pervasive senility are not new or lost on conservatives; we’ve seen Joe and know he’s half-dead. But an article in Semafor from an unnamed source from a “scared” Biden aide paints a picture that is unsettling about the inner workings of the White House, which in some ways is a Nixonian throwback regarding secrecy (via Semafor):

Midday on the Fourth of July, I received a call from a government official with regular access to the West Wing, who said they had reached a breaking point and wanted to sound the alarm.

The person insisted on careful ground rules: No details on the specific policy area they’d work on, no gender, age, or sexual orientation. Their credibility basically depends on my vouching that they’re a serious person, which I can do — though I should also say this person has nothing to say about the president’s physical condition, and was limited to their own experience outside Biden’s tight inner circle.

Here is the assertion this person would like to get across: It’s unclear even to some inside the West Wing policy process which policy issues reach the president, and how. Major decisions go into an opaque circle that includes White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients (who talks to the president regularly) and return concluded. (The big exception to this pattern, they said, is foreign policy.)

This pattern had already been a topic of discussion, and curiosity, among the high-powered aides who work in and around the White House. The rituals of paperflow are technical, but they say they’re surprised by the lack of briefings to the president, and of readouts from consultations with the president and worry about the possibility of decisions “being made without him.”

…

Of course, the White House denied what this source told Semafor, but even Ben Smith, who penned the piece, said that Biden’s command and decision-making processes have been questioned since the president’s disastrous debate. There’s deep skepticism that age hasn’t changed anything about Biden’s decision-making process, but there's no solid evidence that Jill is in charge, though who knows?

“My source’s call — as they say, from inside the building — is a mark of why the panic inside the Democratic Party is running so deep right now,” wrote Smith. “Even inside the West Wing, not everyone is sure.”

How did Jeff Zients—who previously was best known as a bagel impresario—become the guy who runs the White House and, therefore, pretty much runs America? Well, it turns out that it’s kind of a traditional thing—just as Congressmen and Senators have AIPAC keepers so, too, do presidents. The Times of Israel explains:

Biden announces appointment of Jeff Zients to replace Ron Klain as chief of staff

Ex-director of White House’s COVID response and initial investor in DC Jew-ish deli ‘Call Your Mother’ becomes second successive member of Tribe to fill senior post

He will be the sixth Jewish American to serve as White House chief of staff, joining Klain, Rahm Emanuel and Jack Lew from the Obama administration, Joshua Bolten from George W. Bush’s administration and Ken Duberstein from the Regan [sic] administration, according to The Forward.

…

Zients succeeds Klain, a longtime fixture in Biden’s political orbit ...

“I’m confident that Jeff will continue Ron’s example …

“I respect him enormously,” Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who spoke regularly with Zients during his stint as COVID-19 response coordinator …

Normally, this kinda stuff flies under the radar—only people like Walt and Mearsheimer talk about it in public. But, of course, these are not normal times—America is up to its neck or above in genocide on behalf of Israel and its supporters:

White House grapples with internal divisions on Israel-Gaza

The Hamas attacks and Israeli reaction have roiled the Biden team like no other issue during his presidency

Who does the grappling?

Earlier this month, a group of about 20 distressed White House staffers requested a meeting with President Biden’s top advisers, as Israel’s war in Gaza entered its sixth week.

The diverse group of staffers had three main issues they wanted to discuss with White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, senior adviser Anita Dunn and deputy national security adviser Jon Finer: They wanted to know the administration’s strategy for curbing the number of civilian deaths, the message it plans to send on the conflict and its postwar vision for the region.

The staffers may have been diverse—not so much the top advisers. Finer seems to be Jake Sullivan’s keeper.

Zients, Dunn and Finer listened respectfully, but some participants felt they fell back on familiar talking points, said a White House official familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private exchange. The administration had to be careful not to criticize Israel in public so it could influence its leaders in private, the advisers said. U.S. officials were pushing Israel to minimize civilian casualties. And the president and his top aides were advocating for a two-state solution once the conflict was over.

Ah, the old “influence ‘em in private” wheeze. Because, well, just because. We can’t talk about that.

Lest anyone suspect I’m slanting things by quoting US, UK, and Israeli sources, here’s Press TV’s take on this administration:

Zionist Jews in Biden administration calling the shots on Israeli war on Gaza

The Zionist Jewishness of Biden's cabinet was pointed out recently by The Forward, a progressive media for a Jewish American audience, as well as the Israeli right-wing newspaper Times of Israel.

Being a Jew should not be seen as a problem, ...

There are also non-Jewish Zionists whose support is motivated by Christian Zionism or belonging to pro-Israel lobbies, a common case in the ranks of the Republican Party.

The problem lies in the fact that everyone in the Biden administration is a radical Zionist who will uncompromisingly justify Israeli war crimes, with slight disagreements over relatively minor issues, such as illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

In the American mainstream media, voting in the UN Security Council and supporting the genocidal destruction of Gaza is treated as common sense and a natural course of action.

…

Biden made no secret of his Zionist inclinations, uttering the words "I am a Zionist". And he has proved it through numerous pro-Israeli activities in his decades-long political career.

One of them is the placement of Jewish Zionists in top positions in his administration, which at the beginning of 2021 evoked a popular joke on social networks that the West Wing would have a “minyan.”

The Hebrew term “minyan” means the minimum number of males (10) required to constitute a representative "community of Israel" for liturgical purposes.

Biden's initial lineup includes Anthony Blinken as Secretary of State, Merrick Garland as Attorney General, Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence, Ronald Klain as White House Chief of Staff, Rachel Levine as Assistant Secretary for Health, Alejandro Mayorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security, and Janet Yellen as Secretary of the Treasury.

One level down are David Cohen as Deputy CIA Director, Eric Lander as science and technology adviser, Ann Neuberger as Deputy National Security Adviser, and Wendy Sherman as Deputy Secretary of State.

In the meantime, Victoria Nuland took the position of Undersecretary of State for political affairs, Ed Siskel as White House counsel, and Klain was replaced by Jeff Zients as chief of staff.

Others appointed by Biden include Daniel Shapiro as a special liaison to Israel on Iran, Ned Price as spokesman for the Department of State, Jennifer Klein as executive director of the White House Gender Policy Council, as well as a large number of ambassadors.

The Zionist envoys include Michael Adler, David Cohen, Rahm Emanuel, Eric Garcetti, Mark Gitenstein, Amy Gutmann, Jonathan Kaplan, Yael Lempert, Alan Leventhal, Randi Levine, Jack Lew, Jack Markell, Constance Milstein, Marc Nathanson, Marc Ostfield, David Pressman, Daniel Rosenblum, and Marc Stanley, among others.

…

Blinken, the top American diplomat, comes from a Zionist family. His grandfather Maurice was one of the early American Zionists and the founder of the American Palestine Institute, in the years before the declaration of the Zionist entity.

...

He was a close confidant of the Israeli ambassador to the US Ron Dermer who could call him in the middle of the night for pro-Israeli services, such as lobbying hard to have Israel's Iron Dome air military system financed with American taxpayer money.

…

As for Mayorkas, even the Israeli media boasted of his strong family ties to Tel Aviv and praised him for the data-sharing pact between the United States and the Zionist regime.

Even greater Zionist credit for intelligence sharing goes to CIA deputy chief David Cohen, whose career under Obama focused on sanctioning Israel's enemies.

Thus, it is no surprise that Americans are bankrolling the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza while harping about ceasefire and aid airdrops to hoodwink the international community.

I know. Talk, talk, talk. Gada, gada, gada.