Demetrius Haley is one of five former Memphis police officers charged with murder in the death of Tyre Nichols.

Memphis Police Department via AP

• Former Memphis officer Demetrius Haley came under fire two years before beating Tyre Nichols.
• In Feb. 2021, Haley was on the scene when another officer ripped a woman from her car.
• Despite seeing the officer dislocating the woman’s shoulder, he didn’t write a use of force report.

Years before beating Tyre Nichols, then-Memphis police officer Demetrius Haley was on the scene of another brutal incident where a woman was ripped from her car by a fellow officer who didn’t approve of her laughing, according to police disciplinary records obtained by Insider.

On February 21, 2021, Haley assisted three other Memphis officers in a shooting investigation. One of the four officers approached Kadejah Townes, who was running into a Walgreens to get a Redbox movie to watch with her aunt.

The officer asked Jones if she had seen or heard shooting and the woman said she hadn’t, Townes reported to the department.

After Townes returned to the car where her aunt had been waiting, another officer, Alexis Brown, approached again, this time demanding that she get out of the car and give her ID.

“Ya’ll over here laughing, I need to see ID,” Brown said, according to the complaint. “As a matter of fact, get out of the car.”

Townes said she refused to get out of the car because she hadn’t done anything, but that Brown reached through the window, unlocked the door, and pulled her out. 

Haley then assisted in putting Townes in handcuffs and placing her in a cruiser. He later told department investigators he didn’t know what she was being arrested for.

Haley said he had mentioned the women were laughing before Brown approached the car, but he “didn’t think anything of the occupants laughing because it’s not illegal to laugh.”

The officers then transported Townes and her aunt to jail, but several of their family members followed the cruiser, according to the report.

At one point, Brown pulled the cruiser over and drew her gun at Townes’ brother, who had been following them, and issued him a citation for interfering with police, according to the report.

Townes was booked on disorderly conduct and her aunt was released and driven home. 

After Townes made a complaint of excessive use of force to the Memphis Police Department, a hearing was held on the misconduct. 

The allegations against Brown were sustained and she ultimately resigned. 

Haley, though, only received a written reprimand for failing to write up a use of force report. 

Haley — who joined the department in August 2020 and was a member of the now-disbanded SCORPION unit — is one of the five officers charged with the murder of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols.

Haley — along with Tadarrius Bean, Justin Smith, Emmitt Martin III, and Desmond Mills Jr — pulled Nichols over less than 100 yards from his mother’s home on Jan. 7 and beat him so severely he died in the hospital three days later. 

Nichols’ death prompted national protests against police brutality and led to the disbandment of the SCORPION unit.

Within 20 days, the five officers were charged with murder. Two other officers have been on paid administrative leave. 

In addition to the use of force incident, Haley’s disciplinary records include a traffic violation in which he struck a stop sign with his cruiser.

After that incident, his superior jumped to his defense.

At a hearing on the incident, Haley’s supervisor, identified only as Lt. Flagg, said that he was one of “her best officers” and that he was hard working.

“She stated the department needs several more officers like Haley,” the January 2021 hearing report says.

Insider’s attempt to reach Townes was unsuccessful Thursday. 

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has voiced support for a stock trade ban on a number of occasions, but has yet to get into specifics.

Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

• House Democrats pushing for a stock trade ban in Congress got burned by Pelosi last year.
• In a letter exclusively shared with Insider, they’re now pushing McCarthy to pick up where she left off.
• The GOP House Speaker has spoken favorably of a ban in the last year, but hasn’t gotten specific.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is facing new calls to pass legislation to ban members of Congress from trading stocks.

In a letter sent to McCarthy on Thursday and obtained by Insider, a group of eight House Democrats called on McCarthy to bring a bill to the floor “as soon as possible,” requesting his response by February 10.

The group — composed of Democratic lawmakers who led stock trade ban bills during the previous Congress — also outlined their criteria for a bill that they would support, such as including spouses and dependent children in the ban, ensuring that blind trusts are “truly blind,” and omitting “gimmicks, carveouts, or exemptions.”

It comes after that same group of Democrats got burned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in September; Democratic leadership hastily scheduled a vote on legislation that contained a significant loophole and was written without the group’s input, only to call off the effort at the last minute.

McCarthy has previously expressed support for banning lawmakers from trading stocks, and the letter points specifically to comments he made in July in which he said Republicans would “come back with a proposal to change the current behavior.”

The speaker recently reiterated that sentiment on a podcast appearance with Donald Trump Jr. 

“I think there is a problem, you got to built trust in this institution,” said McCarthy. “I’m really looking at this — I want to do it on a bipartisan basis.”

“As you now set the House floor agenda for the 118th Congress as Speaker of the House, we respectfully request you act on your promise,” reads the letter, which was led by Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois.

Other signatories of the letter included Democratic Reps. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, Angie Craig of Minnesota, Andy Kim of New Jersey, Katie Porter of California, Joe Neguse of Colorado, Jared Golden of Maine, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

Since the new Congress kicked off, lawmakers have been re-introducing bills to ban stock trading by members of Congress, arguing that members of Congress should not be allowed to profit off of information they receive as public servants or their ability to influence legislation.

Spanberger re-introduced the bipartisan TRUST in Congress Act last month, while Craig put forward her more expansive HUMBLE Act.

Over the last year, Insider’s “Conflicted Congress” project has identified dozens of members of Congress who have violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act — whose enforcement is woefully lacking — by failing to disclose their stock trades on time.

 

Hunter Biden is exploiting his family’s ties to the attorney general of Delaware to push her office to investigate the computer shop owner who first brought his abandoned laptop to light.

In a letter Wednesday, Biden attorney Abbe Lowell urged Delaware attorney general Kathy Jennings to investigate John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of a Delaware computer repair shop who turned Biden’s laptop over to the FBI in 2019. Lowell claims Isaac’s handling of the laptop “resulted in the exposure, exploitation, and manipulation of Mr. Biden’s private and personal information.” He said it warrants “a full investigation” and “may merit prosecution.”

“It is not a common thing for a private person and his counsel to seek someone else being investigated, but the actions and motives here require it,” Lowell wrote to Jennings.

Biden’s aggressive new legal strategy could pose conflict of interest issues should the attorney general take up the probe. Jennings had served under the president’s late son, Beau Biden, when he was Delaware attorney general. She touted an endorsement from President Joe Biden during her 2018 campaign.

“I’ve known Joe, Jill, and the Biden family for most of my life. Joe is one of the kindest and most genuine people I’ve ever known,” Jennings wrote in an April 2019 Facebook post, which also included a picture of her sandwiched between Joe and Jill Biden.

One of Jennings’s top deputies, Alexander Mackler, is even closer to the Biden family. He served as deputy counsel to then-Vice President Biden until 2016. He is also on close personal terms with Hunter Biden, exchanging hundreds of emails with the first son and his business associates over the years, according to Hunter’s laptop.

“Love you brother,” he wrote to Hunter Biden in Oct. 2018.

Both Jennings and Mackler have maintained their connections to the president. Jennings visited the White House on Nov. 8, 2021, according to White House visitor logs. Mackler has visited four times, meeting with top Biden adviser Steve Ricchetti on March 28, 2022. He visited Biden in the White House residence on April 11, 2022, visitor logs show.

Hunter Biden is sending out the letters as his allies in Washington, D.C., have ramped up their fight against Republican investigations of his business dealings. Biden sent a similar letter to the Justice Department requesting an investigation into Mac Isaac. The Justice Department is investigating Hunter Biden over his taxes, foreign business dealings, and other issues.

Hunter Biden hired Mac Isaac to fix his computer in April 2019. After Biden failed to retrieve the device, Isaac gave it to the FBI. He later gave a copy of the computer hard drive to several Trump allies, who in turn have shared documents with journalists.

Lowell alleges that Isaac did not have permission to access the laptop and that he violated numerous laws by disseminating it. He is also calling for criminal investigations of former president Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Garrett Ziegler, a former Trump White House aide who operates a nonprofit group, Marco Polo, that has published the contents of Biden’s laptop online.

While Biden takes an aggressive tone in the letter, he all but admits that he left the computer for repairs at Isaac’s shop. Biden had not previously confirmed that the laptop is his or that he left it at Isaac’s store. He has instead suggested that someone—including the Russians—may have stolen or hacked his computer.

“There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me,” Biden said in 2021. “It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the—that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me.”

In October 2020, Joe Biden’s campaign suggested that the laptop may have been stolen or hacked. Fifty former intelligence officials, many allied with Joe Biden, claimed in an infamous open letter that the release of the laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian operation. Facebook and Twitter censored stories about laptop emails out of concern that the laptop was hacked.

Hunter has ample incentive to cast doubt on how the laptop became public.

Emails, text messages, and photos from the device provide deep insight into both Hunter’s foreign business dealings and his descent into drug and sex addiction. The Washington Free Beacon has published numerous stories about his business activity in China and Ukraine, as well as efforts to lobby the Obama-Biden administration on behalf of his foreign clients. Other records from the laptop show that Hunter Biden had access to properties where Joe Biden stored classified documents after his stint as vice president.

Jennings’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The post Friends in High Places: Hunter Biden Pressures Delaware AG to Investigate Computer Store Owner appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Anti-Semitic Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) broke down on the House floor Thursday as Republicans voted to remove fellow “Squad” member Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“I am so sorry, sis, that our country is failing you today,” Talib said through tears. “The GOP is now doing what it is best at, weaponizing hate against a black, beautiful, Muslim woman.”

Led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), congressional Republicans voted to remove Omar from the committee over her frequent anti-Semitic comments, including a 2012 remark that “Israel has hypnotized the world.” Every House Democrat voted against Omar’s removal.

Rep. Rashida Talib tells Omar “our country is failing you today” by potentially removing her from the Foreign Affairs Committee

Talib has a breakdown and begins sobbing and yelling pic.twitter.com/RpaH7fapyw

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 2, 2023

In 2019, Omar said lawmakers only support Israel because of funding from pro-Israel groups.

“It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” the Democrat tweeted.

The resolution for Omar’s removal was introduced by Republican Rep. Max Miller (Ohio).

Omar “has disqualified herself from serving on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, a panel that is viewed by nations around the world as speaking for Congress on matters of international importance and national security,” the resolution said.

Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), meanwhile, said Republicans removed Omar from the committee over her race.

“One of the disgusting legacies after 9/11 has been the targeting and racism against Muslim Americans … and incitement of violence against women of color,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

The post ‘Squad’ Member Rashida Tlaib Breaks Down in Tears as Republicans Vote To Demote Ilhan Omar appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

A few hours before their colleague was shot on Jan. 6, 2023, teachers at Richneck Elementary in Newport News, Va., warned administrators three times that a six-year-old black student with an “acute disability” was threatening his classmates with a gun.

The first time, an administrator dismissed the report, telling a concerned teacher the student couldn’t be carrying a weapon because he had “little pockets.” The second time, an administrator waved away threats made to another student. And the third, an administrator said to “wait the situation out because the school day was almost over,” according to an attorney now representing Abigail Zwerner, the 25-year-old teacher who was later shot by her student.

The administrators—including Principal Briana Foster Newton and Assistant Principal Ebony Parker, who both left the school in the wake of the shooting—were obligated to take each of these threats seriously and report them to local law enforcement. But they never did.

Their inaction may have its roots in an Obama-era policy fostered in Virginia by former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe. In 2014, the Obama Education Department threatened to launch civil rights investigations into districts that disproportionately disciplined black or disabled students, pressuring public schools to adopt many policies that reduced disciplinary measures.

According to Max Eden, an education research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the move meant that schools were deemed “successful” to the degree their administrators kept disciplinary levels down.

“It should be shocking that they would ignore those warnings,” he said of the Richneck Elementary administrators. “But after a certain point, when you are judged on the basis of warnings like that not being recorded, not abiding by a measure that would lead to it being recorded actually makes perfect sense.”

In Virginia, McAuliffe made it a “high priority” of his administration “to reduce student referrals to law enforcement, reduce suspensions and expulsions, [and] address the disparate impact these practices have on African Americans and students with disabilities,” as part of his “Classrooms not Courtrooms” initiative.

He found support in groups like the Legal Aid Justice Center, which has unsuccessfully tried to remove police from schools in Virginia. The group also pushed state Democrats to reduce all racial disparities in school discipline, authoring many reports on the subject.  It did not respond to a request for comment.

From 2015 to 2020, Virginia Democrats wrote and passed a number of bills discouraging schools from disciplining students, which were signed into law by McAuliffe and his successor, former governor Ralph Northam (D.). These bills directed the Virginia Board of Education to find “alternatives to suspension and expulsion” and made it illegal to charge students with disorderly conduct. In 2020, Northam removed a requirement for education officials to inform law enforcement of all misdemeanor offenses that occurred on school grounds.

Sometime between 2019 and 2021, Newport News Public Schools added a provision to the “Mandatory Reporting” section of its handbook. Rather than alert law enforcement about “the illegal carrying of a firearm or a weapon onto school property,” principals are now directed to refer threats up to a districtwide disciplinary office, which then has to “confirm that the incident rises to the standard outlined in state law prior to contacting law enforcement.”

Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R.) has since signed bills into law that partially roll back the Democrats’ school safety bills, and the Trump administration rescinded Obama’s changes to school discipline. But under President Joe Biden, the Education Department is trying to bring these policies back.

As part of the president’s “equity” agenda, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in July 2022 sent a letter that threatened to launch further civil rights investigations if school districts discriminate in their discipline of black and disabled students.

According to Eden, the Obama-era policies that Biden and Cardona want to resurrect were what enabled Parkland, Fla., school shooter Nikolas Cruz. School officials were aware of the danger Cruz posed years before the shooting. He threatened his classmates and was suspended once for an assault while attending Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Police were not notified of the assault, and more minor incidents were often not reported.

Former Broward County Schools superintendent Robert Runcie was indicted in 2021 for lying to a grand jury about details surrounding the Parkland shooting and is now being investigated over whether his district underreported incidents of student misbehavior. A close ally of former secretary of education Arne Duncan, Runcie helped shape the Obama-era school discipline rules.

Newport News superintendent George Parker does not seem poised to reevaluate his disciplinary philosophy in light of the shooting. In a letter posted a little more than a week after the incident, Parker boasted that disciplinary infractions were down across the district in the 2021-22 school year. He highlighted “a 3.6 percent reduction in the referral rate for Black or African-American students and a 1.3 percent reduction for students with a disability.”

A spokeswoman for Newport News Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment.

A review of the Richneck principal’s social media presence shows that she too supported the movement to decrease racial disciplinary disparities. Newton, who has since been relieved of duty but not fired, retweeted a post on the importance of being “antiracist educators” and spoke about how “systemic racism” affects “our society at every level.”

Not everyone shares these educators’ affinity for equity. At a school board meeting weeks after the shooting, a teacher at an elementary school just minutes from Richneck blamed the district’s focus on accreditation and funding over safety for enabling the violence.

“Ask any teacher in this school division why discipline incidents declined. Infraction numbers are down because incidents aren’t always officially reported,” she said. “It was just a matter of time before something like this happened.”

The post How the Left’s ‘Equity’ Obsession Enabled a Virginia School Shooting appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

By Taylor Redd, Norman Eisen, Colby Galliher

Next week President Biden will give his annual State of the Union address. The address will take place against the backdrop of an ongoing special counsel investigation. Although Biden’s document mishandling is unlikely to lead to charges, (it is more like former Vice President Mike Pence’s situation and unlike former President Donald Trump’s) it raises the question—how will he treat it? Other presidents have delivered the State of the Union address against background controversies. In predicting what to expect in Biden’s speech next week, a look at how Presidents Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Richard Nixon dealt with their own (far more serious) controversies is instructive.

At the time of his 2019 State of the Union address, Trump faced a looming investigation by the House Oversight Committee, which was looking into his tax returns, and an ongoing one by special counsel Robert Mueller, who was probing Trump’s alleged dealings with Russia during the 2016 election. During the 1999 State of the Union, Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial, prompted by his alleged perjury before a grand jury and obstruction of justice (in an effort to conceal his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky), was well underway. By the time of his 1974 State of the Union address, Richard Nixon was navigating the wake of the Saturday Night Massacre of October 1973 and had been at the center of a Senate committee and a special counsel investigation for months.

All three former presidents referenced their respective controversies during their speeches, though in different ways. Clinton took the lightest touch. He did not address his political adversaries’ efforts directly. Rather, he alluded at the end of his remarks to overlooking “controversy” in favor of “a new dawn for America.” Trump was more overt, lamenting “ridiculous partisan investigations,” seemingly in reference to the House and Mueller probes. Nixon, whose problems were the most severe, dealt with them at the most length. He dedicated multiple paragraphs to dismissing “the so-called Watergate affair” and asserted that he would not be going anywhere.

To the extent history guides what Biden should and will do, it counsels the Clinton approach. That was and continues to be regarded as a political triumph. Trumps was met with mixed reviews. Nixon’s dismissal of Watergate aged poorly with the impeachment proceeding and his subsequent resignation. Biden, like Clinton, should use this year’s State of the Union address primarily as a means of promoting policy, avoiding Trump’s angry tone and Nixon’s extended treatment of the investigation.

Indeed, Biden could go Clinton one better by using the documents controversy as a springboard for policy promotion. Document mishandling will not stop with Biden (or Pence or Trump) unless the rules are changed. One of the authors of this blog, Eisen, served as a drafter of Executive Order 13526, which governs the current classification regime, and has recently written about several reforms to it. They include requiring that the National Archives review documents and other items that presidents and vice presidents take with them when they leave office. Steps should be put in place to ensure that no documents belonging to the government—classified or not—remain in those locations or get mixed in with personal belongings at term’s end.

How will Biden handle this controversy? The most likely prospect is that classified documents are not mentioned at all, since his controversy hardly rises to the level of his predecessors. But he should consider taking at least the Clinton approach, keeping any reference to the controversy short and to the point. And for extra credit, he should consider offering a policy solution to the classified document handling problem that his situation, and that of Pence and Trump, demonstrates exists.

Congressional Democrats showed an unusually unified front in support of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., as she faced attacks from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. As leader of the Republican-controlled House, McCarthy succeeded Thursday in his attempts to strip Omar from her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where she has been a vocal critic of the war-industrial complex and human rights abuses in which the U.S. has been either a primary actor or a sponsor.

On Thursday, the House voted on party lines to remove Omar from the committee by a vote of 218 to 211. Despite congressional Democrats’ unity, members of the party bear part of the blame for validating McCarthy’s broadsides against Omar in the first place.

McCarthy and his colleagues’ attacks on Omar go back to 2019, in her first month in Congress, when he called on Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., then the House speaker, to remove Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee. McCarthy cited the Minnesota representative’s criticisms of Israel’s human rights abuses and her support for the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement, a Palestinian civil society movement working to build international opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

At the time, Rep. Lee Zeldin, who was most recently New York’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, tweeted that he was disappointed that Omar had also been appointed to a Foreign Affairs subcommittee on oversight and accused her of harboring “anti-Semitic & anti-Israel hate.”

Shortly afterward, Democrats began to affirm the message from Republicans in their public remarks and congressional letters, laying the groundwork that would set the stage for their most recent salvo: McCarthy’s bid to remove Omar from her committee assignments.

Some Democrats, even voting against McCarthy’s motion, reportedly continued to justify his actions and rehash old allegations against Omar. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said the vote was about political revenge but that Omar had “clearly made mistakes” and used “anti-Semitic tropes.”

“When Democrats were in control of the House, they were often attacking her for the same exact thing and throwing her under the bus when Republicans started criticizing her,” said Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action. “They have created an environment that shows that they are willing to attack and throw under the bus any member of their own party who calls for Palestinian human rights.”

“They have created an environment that shows that they are willing to attack and throw under the bus any member of their own party who calls for Palestinian human rights.”

Miller, who said she is relieved that Democrats are now supporting Omar, noted that this fight isn’t happening in a vacuum. The progressive Jewish American group put out a statement Wednesday connecting the attacks on Omar to attacks on progressives everywhere.

The GOP, Miller said, is using its power to attack progressives: “And specifically progressive women of color, because they are effective progressives who are speaking out for Palestinian rights.”

The effort to remove Omar based on her criticisms of Israel also comes at a time when Israeli politics are making an unprecedented lurch to the far right and the Jewish state is ramping up its attacks on Palestinians; more than 30 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces so far this year.

“This circus is happening while the Israeli government is escalating an entirely new phase of state violence against Palestinians,” Miller said. “If you actually look at what the Israeli government is doing right now, the mask is off completely.”

.@SpeakerMcCarthy’s efforts to remove Rep. @Ilhan from the Foreign Affairs Committee is part of the perverse backroom deals he made with the Freedom Caucus to secure his gavel.

We won’t stand for white supremacist efforts to use Islamophobia & racism to silence her.

— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@RepCori) February 1, 2023

The Democratic pile-on against Omar came just four years ago.

Just over a month after Omar took office as one of the first Muslim women ever elected to Congress, in February 2019, House Democrats swiftly condemned her for a tweet criticizing the relationship between members of Congress and the pro-Israel lobby flagship, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

“It’s all about the Benjamins, baby,” Omar wrote. She clarified that she was referring to AIPAC specifically and later apologized for the tweet.

The next day, conservative New Jersey Democrat Rep. Josh Gottheimer and then-Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., wrote a searing letter to House Democratic leadership that did not mention Omar by name but noted their concern about antisemitic rhetoric in “reckless statements like those yesterday.” They called on the caucus to not “remain silent in the face of hateful speech or actions” and to “take swift action” to address the issue “by reiterating our rejection of anti-Semitism and our continued support for the State of Israel.”

In a statement the same day, House Democratic leaders including Pelosi; Majority Leader Steny Hoyer; D-Md.; Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C.; Assistant Speaker Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M.; Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.; and Caucus Vice Chair Katherine Clark, D-Mass., said, “Omar’s use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters is deeply offensive.”

The House voted on a resolution two days later to condemn antisemitism — a rebuke of Omar — after tacking the measure onto an unrelated resolution on the Saudi war in Yemen.

The next month, after Omar again raised criticism of the pro-Israel lobby in remarks at a coffee shop in Washington, the House took yet another vote to condemn antisemitism along with Islamophobia and racism in general.

While McCarthy, building off Democrats’ attacks, is going after Omar for purported biases, the GOP has long been home to several members who have espoused or defended explicit antisemitism and white nationalism, including Reps. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., and Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and former Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa. McCarthy’s focus instead has been on Omar.

While McCarthy’s campaign against Omar revolves around antisemitism allegations, Washington insiders said the long-running flap was really about her criticisms of Israel and the power of the pro-Israel lobby on Capitol Hill.

“As I think most people know and just don’t care to say publicly, both parties have an Israel lobby problem,” said one senior congressional Democratic aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal. “They can’t figure out where they actually stand on this issue.” The aide added, “They don’t know how to talk about it.”

“As I think most people know and just don’t care to say publicly, both parties have an Israel lobby problem.”

Upon her arrival, Omar bucked the consensus in Congress and became one of a few members who was willing to issue strong criticisms of human rights abuses in Israel and Palestine — as well as the pro-Israel lobby. “It’s almost like that person who comes into your classroom and tells you everything you’re learning is wrong,” the congressional aide said. “I think that’s how a lot of Democratic members felt when they had to engage with her. They did not know how to deal with a person saying, ‘You know what, the United States is not meeting the moment.’”

In the meantime, Washington was spending its time battling over whether to kick Omar off of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, when Omar herself has directly experienced the impacts of war and U.S. foreign policy, said Miller, of Jewish Voice for Peace Actions. That conundrum, she said, is “the perfect example of everything that is broken with the way that Washington, D.C., approaches how we look at foreign policy.”

“We will see in generations what she’s actually done for this place as we find new leaders,” the senior Democratic aide said. “It is without question an old, old problem that Democrats in Congress are late to the party on Israel.”

The post How Democrats Paved the Way for Kevin McCarthy’s Attack on Ilhan Omar appeared first on The Intercept.

(JTA) — Russian missile fire damaged an 113-year-old synagogue in the city of Huliaipole, Ukraine, last weekend.

An unconfirmed photo of the synagogue on Twitter shows a massive hole in the building’s exterior; the state of the interior is unclear.

🤬💥Оккупационные войска ударили по синагоге в Гуляйполе

Это здание постройки 1909 года регулярно страдает от российских обстрелов. pic.twitter.com/6x9FlRXRr3

— Serg (@NHunter007) January 31, 2023

“On behalf of the Jewish community of Ukraine, I strongly condemn the Russian bombardment of the Synagogue in the city of Huliaipole,” said Moshe Reuven Azman, a Ukrainian chief rabbi affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, according to Ynet. “It is common knowledge that holy sites are off-limits during an armed conflict. It’s an understanding the Russians chose to violate. I expect world leaders to condemn this act.”

In the late 1800s, Huliaipol was home to more than 1,000 Jews, over 10% of its population. By 1939, that number was less than 600, according to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance authority and museum.

Since the onset of the Russian invasion last February, Huliaipole has seen fierce fighting, as it is located in the center of the contested Zaporizhia oblast. In 2021, its overall population was around 12,000 but that number dipped to as low as 2,000 by March 2022.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Russian missiles reportedly damage a historic synagogue in southeastern Ukraine appeared first on The Forward.