On Again, Off Again. Genesis Of How Freedom Is Lost. Biden And The Saudi's. Iranian Oil Workers Threaten. Salena Writes. Britain To Move?

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US State Department says Iran nuclear talks no longer a focus for White House
Ned Price explains Tehran has ‘made very clear’ its unwillingness to conclude a deal, with US turning its attention to Iranian protesters confronting regime

By Ash Obey

US State Department spokesman Ned Price speaks during a news conference at the State Department, March 10, 2022, in Washington, DC. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/Pool/AFP)

State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters on Wednesday that the Iran nuclear deal was “not our focus right now,” instead vowing to “support” the “bravery and courage” of Iranian protesters.

Asked by a reporter whether the US was still interested in pursuing the nuclear talks, Price responded “That’s not our focus right now. I think it is very clear, the Iranians have made very clear that this is not a deal that they have been prepared to make.”

“A deal certainly does not appear imminent. Iran’s demands are unrealistic; they go well beyond the scope of the JCPOA. Nothing we’ve heard in recent weeks suggests they have changed their position,” Price told the department briefing.

Instead, Price said US focus “is on the remarkable bravery and courage that the Iranian people are exhibiting through their peaceful demonstrations, through their exercise of their universal right to freedom of assembly and to freedom of expression.”

Iranians have taken to the streets following the September death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was in morality police custody following her arrest for not wearing her head covering properly. The Iranian regime denies any responsibility for her death.

Price said the US would focus on “shining a spotlight on what [protesters are] doing and supporting them in the ways we can.”

The 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and six world powers — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the US — gave the Islamic Republic sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program.

The deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, was trashed by the Trump administration in 2018, which then reimposed unilateral economic sanctions against the Islamic republic.

In August, the Biden administration appeared to come close to renewing the deal, but discussions hit a dead end over Iran’s demand that the IAEA halt its probe of unaccounted-for traces of enriched uranium discovered at three sites in Iran.

Iran has denied any nefarious intentions and claims its nuclear program is designed for peaceful purposes, though it has been enriching uranium to levels that international leaders say have no civil use.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report

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This is how freedom is lost. Lefties take a page from the Nazi's and kosher it on a campus

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Report: More than 350 anti-Semitic incidents occurred on US college campuses last school year

The ADL’s Campus Report documented and categorized incidents such as protests and events, BDS resolutions, vandalism, harassment and physical assault.

A total of 359 anti-Semitic incidents took place on U.S. college campuses during the 2021-22 academic year, according to a report released by the Anti-Defamation League on Wednesday.

The ADL’s Campus Report documented instances of accusations or “genocide” and “ethnic genocide” levied against Israel as well as the “ostracizing of Jewish students from campus organizations because of their assumed support for Israel or Zionism.”

Among the incidents, there were 165 protests/actions, 143 anti-Israel events, 20 BDS resolutions and referendums, 11 incidents of vandalism, nine instances of targeted verbal and/or written harassment and one physical assault.

In response to the large number of incidents, the ADL announced that it would be “broadening its educational and programmatic investment on campus, including the launch today of an expanded online resource to support students and combat anti-Semitism on campus.”

According to the ADL, the report exhibits a snapshot of a growing campus radicalism that places opposition to Israel and Zionism as “core elements of collegiate life or as a requirement for full acceptance in the campus community.”

The report provided information about the sources of funding for the student clubs responsible for many of the incidents, including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. While most funds come from student activity fees, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund funds JVP and Westchester Peace Action Coalition sponsors SJP.

There were three major themes and events characterizing campus anti-Semitism last year, according to the report—“Demeaning and ostracizing Zionists and Zionism, including expelling and excluding students from campus groups for expressing any affinity with Zionism or Israel; voicing support for anti-Israel terror and violence; and invoking classic antisemitic tropes and conspiracies in lectures and social media posts,” the ADL stated.

AND:

Berkeley’s Jewish-Free Zones Are Worse Than You Think

By Kenneth L. Marcus 

For all the resistance that Berkeley’s enablers have generated, the facts are undisputed and indisputable. Berkeley Law’s students have institutionalized an ancient ideology of hate, incorporating it into the legal DNA of their major identity groups. In doing so, they have embodied this bigotry in a dangerous new form of silencing and exclusion.

As Berkeley’s administration has conceded, nine Berkeley Law student groups amended their bylaws this academic year to prohibit Zionist speakers. It is important to be perfectly clear about what this means.  An expert on real estate law would not be permitted to impart real estate expertise to any of these groups if they also support the existence of one Jewish state among 22 Arab countries in the Middle East.  An expert in Title IX could not come speak to the women’s law group if they also support the right for Jewish liberation after thousands of years of anti-Jewish persecution and annihilation.  An expert in the legality of gay marriage or gender discrimination employment law could not speak to the LGBTQ+ group.

More than 80% of Jews support the existence of Israel as the Jewish homeland.  They might also strongly object to Israel’s policies on settlements, they might firmly advocate for improved Palestinian rights, but if they so much as support a two-state solution, they would be banned by these groups. Make no mistake, these are Jew-free zones, i.e., platforms or podia forbidden to Jews.

It is absurd to defend this, as Chancellor Christ and Dean Chemerinsky have done, as “less than ten groups out of 100.” Yes, nine is less than ten. These groups, however, represent wide swaths of the law school, including Berkeley Law’s women, Asian and Pacific Islander, African American, LGBTQ, and Middle Eastern student populations. To insinuate that this is less than ten percent, now that is misleading.

Berkeley’s administration rationalizes, rather obscenely, that Jewish students can join these groups as members even if not as speakers. If the first nine rows of the bus are barred to Jews, it shouldn’t matter that Jews get to sit in the back.

The truth, in fact, is the opposite of what Berkeley’s administration maintains. I have understated the case, not overstated it. To begin with, most of these groups incorporated the discriminatory provisions into their constitutions, not only their bylaws. That is to say, they baked anti-Zionism into their most basic charters. It is now as fundamental to their operations as, say, how they select officers.

Worse, they did this to advance the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. They are not only banning pro-Israel speakers. Their new constitutional provision dedicates these groups to “wholly boycotting, sanctioning, and divesting funds from institutions, organizations, companies, and any entity that participates in or is directly/indirectly complicit in the occupation of the Palestinian territories and/or supports the actions of the apartheid state of Israel.”

They are not, however, boycotting only Israel. They are boycotting American Jews.

But it gets even worse.

These nine groups’ constitutions and bylaws now place anti-Zionists in an entirely different position than any other group, no matter how vile.

Consider, for example, Berkeley’s Asian Pacific American Law Student Association. Their constitution tackles no other current controversies. They are clear, however about one issue: they will “not invite speakers that have expressed and continue to hold views … in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.” Their constitution does not ban people who have assaulted Asian Americans, despite the surge in such crimes during COVID. Only people who support Israel are constitutionally banned – and they are banned from addressing any subject, not just Israel.

Berkeley’s Law Students of African Descent have done the same. Their constitution and bylaws do not ban white supremacists, neo-Nazis, or other anti-Black racists. They would not preclude an invitation to David Duke. Like other leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, Duke is a racist. This is not constitutionally disqualifying for Berkeley’s black law student organization, because Duke, like many other white supremacists, shares their view of Zionism.

Berkeley Law’s Queer Caucus is similar. Aside from Zionists, the Queer Caucus does not ban any other category of speaker. They do not, for example, ban homophobic or transphobic speakers. Whoever murdered Ahmad Abu Maria, the gay 25-year old Palestinian, would face no constitutional bar on speaking to Berkeley Law’s Queer Caucus, because they were not Zionists. During his lifetime, Ahmad Abu Maria would probably have been subject to the bar, since he sought asylum in Israel.

The Women of Berkeley Law do not, in their constitution and bylaws, ban sexist, misogynistic, or heterosexist speakers. They do not constitutionally ban rapists, child abusers, or those who engage in any form of sexual misconduct. Just Zionists. If an anti-Zionist misogynist were to sexually assault a Jewish woman under Sather Gate at the university’s entrance, the constitution of the Women of Berkeley Law would not ban the perpetrator from publicly addressing them. The victim, by contrast, would likely be banned.

Daniel Pearl, a Zionist victim of beheading, would have been constitutionally banned during his lifetime from speaking to any of these groups. His anti-Zionist murderers would not have been.

This behavior must be inexplicable to anyone who listens to Berkeley’s administration. It makes no sense if you believe Chancellor Christ’s recent message describing these actions as “nuanced thoughts and feelings” generated by a “crisis in the Middle East.” It is impossible to reconcile with Erwin Chemerinsky’s demonstrably false (not just misleading) claimthat “all some student groups have done is express their strong disagreement with Israel’s policies.”

To understand what is happening at Berkeley we need to grasp two things. First, this is no mere criticism of Israel. It is the newest iteration of an ancient ideology that places the Jew at the center of all evil. Jew-hatred has always been more the criticism of Jews. It is a worldview that explains all of the world’s pain as byproduct of Jewish criminality. This central fact, and only this central fact, can explain the behavior of these law students.

These groups have taken action, not merely expressed viewpoints. Constitutions and bylaws are not opinion pieces, not policy papers, not public fora. They are concise governance documents that establish fundamental rules, such as membership classifications, officers, and voting procedures.

And now, at Berkeley Law, they also bar Israel’s supporters from speaking to these organizations, not only about the Middle East, but about any topic. This includes the great majority of Jews. Chemerinsky concedes that he would be banned, as would 90% of Berkeley’s Jewish law students. No other group is banned in this way. Not rapists. Not axe murderers. Only Zionists are banned.

Second, these law students are pioneers, but not in a good way. They are pioneering a new form of Judeophobia which silences and excludes any Jew who does not adequately condemn the Jewish state.

Just as anti-Semites long excluded Jews from polite society, Berkeley’s future lawyers – many of whom will one day be our legislators, mayors, and judges – are now expelling Jews from progressive spaces.

Just as German Jews during the 19th century had to convert to Christianity to be allowed to participate in civil society and government office, American Jews in the 21st century are being forced to convert to anti-Zionism in order to participate in Berkeley’s civil society organizations, an ignominious process, which if not stopped, will only spread further.

This is an effort to strip all Jews of something basic: the trappings of normality that have secured Jewish safety and security in America.

While this is a story about Berkeley, it is not only a story about Berkeley. Berkeley is not Las Vegas. What happens there does not stay there. What begins there, and succeeds there, spreads elsewhere. And make no mistake: silencing Jews is the way such stories begin, not the way they end.

Some in the Jewish community say that we are too alarmed over this. The real problem is that we are not alarmed enough.

Kenneth L. Marcus is founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. He served as the 11th Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education for Civil Rights.

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Biden Scapegoats the Saudis for an Energy Crisis He Created

By Mohammed Alyahya

Blaming Saudi Arabia, or OPEC+, or Vladimir Putin, for an energy crisis that results from a policy of switching from carbon fuels to “clean energy”—on the basis of what look like utopian assumptions—is disingenuous. Unlike countries such as Japan or China, America can produce far more oil than it consumes. The oil prices U.S. consumers pay are due to choices their leaders made.

In September 2019, the U.S. became a net exporter of crude oil and petroleum products for the first time since such records have been kept. In 2020 America exported still more oil, with investment in domestic pipelines, refineries and extraction technologies and resulting employment all reaching new highs. But in 2021 America began importing much larger amounts of crude oil than it produced. In 2022 the U.S. will again be a net oil importer. In less than two years, investment in the domestic American oil industry has collapsed, U.S. refining capacity has atrophied, and the jobs that investment produced have largely vanished.

The causes of this reversal, which left the U.S. dependent on imported oil at a dangerous geopolitical moment, aren’t a mystery. In the 2020 election, American politicians, from Joe Biden down, ran and won on a set of policies intended to wean the American economy off fossil fuels in favor of so-called clean energy. These policies included bans on fracking, bans on drilling, closing down the Keystone Pipeline and other infrastructure built to serve future energy needs, and subsidizing alternative energy, such as solar, and electric cars.

It is up to American political leaders and voters to weigh the benefits and costs of “clean energy.” In some circumstances, voters might choose policies that perhaps would reduce the country’s gross domestic product through higher fuel prices and other measures to achieve particular goals—such as encouraging people to ride bicycles or take public transportation. It also is the prerogative of elected leaders to pursue policies that promote new domestic industries, even if those policies kill off existing industries. Those policies also might promote new forms of dependence on foreign trade partners like China—the world’s leading and in some cases only source of rare-earth metals that are essential to the solar energy fuel cycle.

Demonizing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for refusing to politicize oil production while the U.S. negotiates an Iran nuclear deal that will fund the programs that let Tehran launch missiles at Saudi oil fields is scapegoating. Scapegoating poisons the democratic process by trying to prevent citizens from properly responding to the results of their own choices. In doing so, politicians short-circuit the self-correcting mechanisms that allow democracy to function. Instead, elected officials make voters endure the negative consequences of bad policy choices by blaming foreign entities for predictable outcomes.

Last week some Washington commentators spouted accusations of Saudi Arabia “siding with Russia” after the OPEC+ announcement of relatively small production cuts. In a statement Thursday, the Saudi foreign minister revealed that the U.S. asked OPEC+ to delay announcing its production cut by a month and said that he rejects such “dictates” from Washington. The figure of two million barrels a day that is often cited is eye-catching but misleading since many OPEC+ states aren’t meeting their current production quotas by a total of about one million barrels a day. The actual OPEC+ cut is therefore around one million. Markets’ lethargic response to the announcement suggests that they are well-supplied and not overreacting.

Nor is the OPEC+ decision to cut production a matter of Saudi national interest alone. The Gulf states say they hope that thanks to the recent cut, OPEC+ will have more spare capacity to respond to market disruptions likely to arise this winter. Those potential disruptions result from U.S. and European Union sanctions on Russian oil as well as instability stemming from Mr. Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons. The spare capacity helps Gulf states keep markets balanced, reducing the chances of global economic catastrophe. Further, price stabilization will create a more favorable environment for sustainable investment in downstream and refining facilities that will foster market stability.

If America wants to prevent another shock in world energy markets, it should begin producing more oil.

Mr. Alyahya is a fellow at the Harvard Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

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Iranian Oil Workers Strike is Most Serious Threat Yet to the Regime

More than 1,000 workers at the Bushehr and Damavand petrochemical plants carried out a threat to go on strike, blocking streets and chanting “death to the dictator,” according to Radio Farda.

Oil worker strikes were pivotal in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which led to the fall of the Shah.

Workers at several oil fields posted videos, threatening, "we will destroy everything we have built" if their demand for an end to violence against the protesters is not met.  Read More

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From Salena Zito, Washington Enquirer:
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PHILADELPHIA — It is just about 7:30 on a Thursday evening. Near Independence Hall , the cars ahead of me stop at a red light. As the traffic signal turns green and the vehicles start moving forward, a gang of young men on dirt bikes and motorcyclists tears through the red light and straight into the direction of the intersection of oncoming vehicles. Some of them encircle the cars trapped in the intersection. Some simply do wheelies. It lasts less than a minute.

It feels like hours. Nothing about the moment screams stability, security, or safety .
But that wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened on that day in Philadelphia.

That same morning, a 45-year-old woman was shot in the head while walking with a friend in West Philadelphia in the 700 block of South 60th Street in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood. When officers arrived, they found a woman laying on the front steps of a home, bleeding heavily from her head.
In the Kensington neighborhood that night, a teenage boy was killed — shot by what appeared to be an army. Officers on the scene collected over 100 pieces of ballistic evidence from a rifle and two handguns. Neighbors cowered in their homes as a bombardment of bullets discharged across Pelthorpe Street during the terrifying gun battle that played out along their tiny street. The violence that night was evident from the daylight shining through the bullet holes in car windows and the police markings of 118 pieces of ballistic evidence they collected at the scene. Police said the 17-year-old victim was the target.

Click for the full story: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/in-pennsylvania-fear-and-uncertainty-are-on-the-ballot

2.) Black community faith leaders in Pennsylvania drive purpose and opportunity: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/black-community-faith-leaders-in-pennsylvania-drive-purpose-and-opportunity

3.) “There is ‘No life’ in Braddock” https://nypost.com/2022/10/11/inside-braddock-pa-dying-town-john-fetterman-claims-he-saved/

4.) Can Oz close the deal? https://nypost.com/2022/10/08/inside-dr-ozs-miracle-comeback-vs-fetterman-in-senate-race/

5.) Battle Royale: Dispatch from the biggest bellwether in the country: https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/insight/2022/10/09/salena-zito-jeremy-shaffer-chris-deluzio-abortion-inflation-crime-congress-election-campaign/stories/202210090040

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Hysteria greets Truss's proposed embassy move

The real objection is that it would signal an end to Britain's capitulation to Arab lies

By Melanie Phillips 

In Britain, it’s diplomatic Groundhog Day all over again.

Prime Minister Liz Truss has said she wants to move the British embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

When former US President Donald Trump similarly proposed moving the American embassy, liberals grabbed for the smelling salts. The outcome of such a move, they predicted, would be Armageddon. The entire Arab world would rise up in fury. The relocation of the embassy would utterly destroy the cause of peace.

None of this occurred. Instead, the precise opposite took place. The embassy was moved in May 2018. In September 2020, the historic Abraham Accords were signed between Israel and the Gulf states, a development that did more to advance the cause of peace between Israel and the Arabs than anything else over the course of the previous century.

Yet Truss’s aspiration has provoked similar hysteria in Britain. While the main representative organisation of British Jews, the Board of Deputies, has said it hopes the embassy move will happen, the foreign policy establishment, along with the usual Israel-bashing suspects and some left-wing British Jews, have all gone into meltdown.

It’s as if the whole experience of the US embassy move — the ludicrously overheated response to Trump’s plan and the actual, rather wonderful aftermath — never happened.

Thus, Labour MP Naz Shah sent a letter to Truss warning that moving the British embassy might become a “catalyst of uncontrollable catastrophic events”. Similarly, the left-wing Jewish group Yachad claimed the move “could spark protests and violence” and the UK would be helping entrench such “violence”. What’s their evidence for such a prediction? There isn’t any.

The British establishment has similarly been clutching its pearls and piously intoning its fears for peace. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has expressed his “concern” about the move “before a negotiated settlement between Palestinians and Israelis has been reached”. Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the country’s most senior Catholic cleric, said that relocating the embassy would be “seriously damaging to any possibility of lasting peace in the region”. Given the unwavering rejectionism, violence and incitement by the Palestinian Arabs, the idea that a peaceful settlement would otherwise be a real option is simply delusional.

But the delusion goes deeper. Many of those crying foul over the plan seem to believe that moving the embassy to Jerusalem would scupper the “two-state solution” and cement Israel’s supposed land-grab of the eastern part of the city.

In The Guardian, H.A. Hellyer of the Royal United Services Institute and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote: “To move the embassy to Jerusalem would be to recognise Israel’s invasion and occupation of east Jerusalem as legitimate.”

This is nonsense. Like the US embassy, the UK equivalent would be situated in the west of the city and utterly irrelevant to the status of eastern Jerusalem.

The real reason for the objection is the foreign policy establishment’s obsessional and misguided belief that Israel isn’t entitled to claim Jerusalem as its capital at all.

This is because, in the 1947 Partition Plan for Palestine embodied in United Nations Resolution 181 which proposed that the land be divided between a state for the Jews and a state for the Arabs, Jerusalem was designated as a corpus separatum under a special international regime to be administered by the UN.

The UK never actually voted for the resolution, choosing instead to abstain. But the idea that this status for Jerusalem is currently authoritative is absurd, because the entire Partition Plan was rejected by the Arabs.

As the international law professor Eugene Kontorovich has written, the key doctrine under international law that determines the borders of a state is uti possidetis juris (“as you possess under law”). According to this principle, Israel’s borders at the moment of independence were the borders of Mandatory Palestine — which included all of Jerusalem as well as Judea and Samaria.

Kontorovich wrote in 2019: “The UN, in its thousands of resolutions to the contrary, flagrantly ignores that principle.” Not only was Resolution 181 a non-binding recommendation, but “having been rejected by the Arabs, it was never implemented and did not in fact result in a partition of the Mandate”.

Perhaps the most startlingly ill-informed response to the proposed embassy move has come from former Conservative Party leader and ex-Foreign Secretary William Hague. He wrote in The Times: “This would be a breach of U.N. Security Council resolutions by one of its permanent members, break a longstanding commitment to work for two states for Israelis and Palestinians and align Britain in foreign affairs with Donald Trump and three small states rather than the whole of the rest of the world.”

This is simply wrong on every count. There is no Security Council resolution preventing the UK or any other country from establishing its embassy in Jerusalem. Doing so would have no effect on creating a Palestinian state, whose capital could still be situated in eastern Jerusalem.

But perhaps most telling — and most dispiriting — was Hague’s gratuitous swipe at Trump.

The US embassy wasn’t Trump’s personal trophy. It was the embassy of the United States, of which he was the president. Moving it to Jerusalem was the policy of the US government.

One might expect Hague, a former foreign secretary, to understand that. Claiming that moving Britain’s embassy would “align with Trump” is the kind of phrase associated with those exhibiting such an obsession with Trump that they somehow deny in their minds that he was ever actually the president.

Few expect that the British embassy will actually be moved. Indeed, given the chaos that has engulfed Truss since she became prime minister, with the financial crisis and collapse in electoral support sparked by her scorched-earth economic policies currently threatening to bring her down before she has her feet properly under the Downing Street table, moving the embassy would hardly seem to be a priority.

If it were to happen, however, it would not only be an enormous boost to Israel. It would also represent a dramatic change in British policy.

Unlike the US, where despite various presidents’ relative coolness towards Israel the Christian heartlands remain solidly supportive, Britain’s attitude towards the Jewish state has always been at best ambiguous and at worst — as in Mandatory Palestine —actively hostile.

Moving the embassy would not only start to reset Britain’s shameful attitude towards Israel. It would also advance the cause of peace.

The only reason this century-old conflict continues is that the Palestinian Arabs have repudiated the two-state solution. They have refused repeated offers of a state of their own, because their goal is not a Palestinian state but the eradication of the Israeli one.

Towards this infernal goal, their principal weapon has been the refusal by Britain and other western countries to recognise the Palestinians’ real agenda, providing them instead with funding, training and diplomatic recognition.

In other words, Britain and the rest of the west have incentivised, rewarded and perpetuated the war against Israel by going along with the morally bankrupt proposition that the Palestinian Arabs are entitled to a state of their own, even though their actual purpose is to use that state as a means to destroy Israel.

By moving the embassy, Truss — who describes herself as a “huge Zionist” — would be signaling an end to the shameful British capitulation to the Palestinians’ lies and blackmail.

That is precisely why there’s been such a reaction. While the average British citizen doesn’t have an opinion about Israel one way or the other, Britain’s elites loathe Israel on a scale that just doesn’t exist in America.

The proposal to move the British embassy has lifted a stone, and we can all see what has crawled out from underneath.

Jewish News Syndicate

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Rabid Democrats are going to regret subpoenaing Trump. It is all political theater and also scheduled on day inflation figures were released

EXCLUSIVE: Former President Donald Trump "loves the idea of testifying" before the House select committee investigating January 6th, a source close to Trump told Fox News Digital just after the panel unanimously voted to subpoena him.

The source said that if Trump complied with the subpoena and testified, he would "talk about how corrupt the election was, how corrupt the committee was, and how Nancy Pelosi did not call up the National Guard that Trump strongly recommended for her to do three days earlier on January 3, 2021."

The source told Fox News Digital that it is unclear at this point if Trump actually will testify before the committee, but stressed that Trump "loves the idea."

The committee — which consists of seven Democrats and two anti-Trump Republicans — voted Thursday to compel Trump to testify about his conduct leading up to and during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital on Thursday, Trump slammed the committee and its investigation as a "witch hunt."

"The committee is a hoax, a sham, a partisan witch hunt which is a continuation of the witch hunt that has gone on since the great day for our country that I came down the golden escalator with our future first lady," Trump said. "They have no case, they have no ratings, so they have to try to do this to get publicity." 

Trump did not comment on whether he would testify before the committee. 

Trump told Fox News Digital that the investigation has been "a partisan witch hunt, together with two Republicans that have been thrown out of the party — one not wanting to run because he couldn’t win; and another losing by a record number of more than 40 points." 

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Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., Chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, speaks to reporters after a closed-door meeting with committee members at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 13, 2022.

Trump was referring to Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who lost her primary earlier this year, and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., who decided not to run for re-election.

Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., gives her opening remarks as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds its first public hearing to reveal the findings of a yearlong investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 9, 2022. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., listens at right.

Trump told Fox News Digital that the committee "never covered the important subject of election fraud, or why Pelosi and the mayor of D.C. did not call up the National Guard — which I strongly recommended." 

"They didn’t cover the reason for January 6 — the largest crowd — it wasn’t set up by me," Trump said. "The committee didn’t cover election fraud, which was massive, and they didn't cover why Pelosi didn’t call the National Guard." 

Lawmakers on the House Committee on Jan. 6 have been investigating the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and allege that Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen stoked the violence as Congress convened to certify the Electoral College votes.

Trump said that he had recommended that Pelosi and the mayor of Washington call up the National Guard on Jan. 6 because he "felt the crowd was going to be far bigger than anyone understood." 

"They didn’t do their job. I believed the crowd was going to be bigger — just my instinct — and they had the chance to call up the National Guard three days before Jan. 6, and if they did, Jan. 6 would have been a very different day," Trump said. "But they didn’t do it."

He added: "They were derelict in their duty. I gave them the authorization and the recommendation to call up the National Guard."

Lawmakers on the House Committee on Jan. 6 have been investigating the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and allege that Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen stoked the violence as Congress convened to certify the Electoral College votes.

Hours before the riot, Trump held a rally in Washington, D.C., in which he encouraged his supporters to protest President Biden's Electoral College certification. Trump told his followers during that speech to protest "peacefully and patriotically," but, in the weeks leading up to the certification, suggested the rally would be "wild."

Violent insurrectionists loyal to President Donald Trump, storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

Trump's spokesman Taylor Budowich tweeted after the vote Thursday that just 26 days before the midterm elections, "instead of using their final days in power to make life for Americans any better, Democrats are doubling and tripling down on their partisan theatrics. Democrats have no solutions and they have no interest in leading our great nation." 

"They are simply bitter, power hungry & desperate," Budowich tweeted. "Pres Trump will not be intimidated by their meritless rhetoric or un-American actions." 

He added: "Trump-endorsed candidates will sweep the Midterms, and America First leadership & solutions will be restored. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

The vote to subpoena Trump came during the committee’s 10th and likely final public hearing before the November midterm elections. Originally, the televised hearing was meant to only showcase new evidence and summarize findings from the committee’s nearly 16-month-long investigation.

"This is a question about accountability to the American people," said committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. "He's required to answer to those millions of Americans whose votes he tried to throw out as part of his scheme to remain in power."

"We are obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion," said Cheney. "Every American is entitled to those answers, so we can act now to protect our republic."

Members of the committee said they had garnered sufficient evidence showing that the former president was the lead instigator of the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

"We must seek the testimony under oath of Jan. 6th's key player," said Cheney.

Trump could fight the subpoena, which likely would tip off a legal fight with just over two months left in the current Congress — a very short time frame for such a major legal dispute. If Republicans take over the House in the midterms, it's not expected they will continue the work of the Jan. 6 committee.

There was an effort by Congress in the 1840s to subpoena former Presidents John Tyler and John Quincy Adams over clandestine intelligence issues. They never provided information.

There was also an effort by the Committee on Un-American Activities to subpoena former President Harry Truman after he was out of office. He ultimately did not comply.

Fox News’ Tyler Olson, Haris Alec, and Chad Pergram contributed to this report.

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America’s Military Faces a ‘Window of Maximum Danger’

Marine turned lawmaker Mike Gallagher warns that the U.S. is far more vulnerable to losing a war than the public recognizes.

By Kate Bachelder OdellFollow

Russia has invaded Ukraine and threatens nuclear war, China is eyeing Taiwan, Iran holds regular military exercises with China and Russia, and North Korea just launched a missile over Japan. If that doesn’t sound ominous enough, Mike Gallagher has worse news: The U.S. is increasingly vulnerable to losing a war, “either by sitting the conflict out or through defeat in combat.”

This is “a window of maximum danger,” says the military veteran and third-term congressman, and most Americans aren’t aware of its gravity as they understandably focus on domestic matters. He’s making it his political mission to change that.

Americans “want to think of ourselves as the force for good in the world, but we’re reluctant to pay the cost for that,” says Mr. Gallagher, 38, a Republican representing northeastern Wisconsin. He has been pressing the case for more military spending since before he first ran for Congress in 2016. “Global engagement is a sound investment for the taxpayer,” Mr. Gallagher said in his first political speech, delivered in 2014, the year after he completed a seven-year stint in the Marines. “Are we prepared to let China and Russia enforce shipping lanes, to let them dominate airspace, space and cyberspace instead of us? Would that make any financial sense for Wisconsin?”

I spent two days with him in September, touring shipyards and businesses in the Badger State and talking about the threats from China and Russia—and from America’s own distraction and complacency—as well as his ideas about how to prevent war and reunite the Republican Party.

Taiwan is a particular preoccupation. What interest do Americans have in protecting this distant island? If the Chinese subdued it, it would heighten their threat to Japan and the Philippines, which the U.S. is bound by treaty to defend. America’s friends would hedge their bets by cozying up to Beijing. More important, by seizing Taiwan’s semiconductor-manufacturing capability, Xi Jinping would “hold the rest of the world economically hostage,” Mr. Gallagher says. “All this stuff that drives people in the Midwest crazy, when Hollywood or Wall Street bows down” to the Chinese Communist Party, “you can 10-X that if Xi takes Taiwan.”

President Biden has more than once said the U.S. military would intervene to defend Taiwan. But these assertions have the feel of verbal stumbles, not clear statements of intent. “To avoid war, you have to convince the other guy you’re willing to go to war,” Mr. Gallagher says, “and I’m not sure we are.” Over time—from Barack Obama’s unenforced “red line” in Syria to Donald Trump’s impulse to withdraw from the world—America has too often taken a dubious approach to world affairs, which Mr. Gallagher summed up in 2014 by inverting Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum: “Speak loudly and carry a small stick.”

The disconnect between rhetoric and reality is most pronounced in the U.S. Navy. Congress wrote the goal of a 355-ship Navy into law in 2017, while China “actually went out and built one.” The U.S. fleet is on track to number fewer than 280 ships by 2027, and Beijing has also “built an anti-navy,” the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, “which is specifically designed to destroy our ships and keep us out of the First Island Chain”—the archipelagos closest to the Chinese mainland, including Japan and Taiwan.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress call for budget increases, but “generic warnings of risk” aren’t persuading the public. Because an aversion to standing armies is part of the “American DNA,” Mr. Gallagher observes, defense spending historically follows “a sine wave,” increasing in wartime and trailing off after combat ends.

One problem is that the Pentagon isn’t articulating its needs to lawmakers. He describes a scene he’d like to see—a “simple conversation” that “has never happened”: “We’re sitting there in front of the map”—the Navy secretary, the chief of naval operations and members of the House Armed Services Committee. The Pentagon officials say: “ ‘OK, here’s what we think the PLA is going to do. Here’s what we’re capable of doing. Here’s what we don’t have, and what we’re asking you for.”

Mr. Gallagher has made a cause of beating up the Biden administration’s buzz phrase “integrated deterrence,” which, charitably defined, means combining diplomatic and military power to dissuade America’s enemies from misbehaving. Mr. Gallagher calls it a “smoke screen to justify cuts to conventional hard power.” The administration has proposed retiring dozens of ships and hundreds of aircraft in the coming years, a strategy to “divest to invest” in new technology, which won’t arrive until the 2030s. “Behind integrated deterrence,” Mr. Gallagher says, is “a series of remarkable assumptions about the ability of technology to make things super easy for us in warfare, which I find to be really naive.”

Mr. Gallagher has been calling for a new “public diplomacy” campaign to make clear why, more than ever, the U.S. needs “a Navy capable of decisive fleet action near our enemy’s home waters.” An example from the past is how the Navy sold the public on the need to build ballistic-missile submarines that could lurk undetected in the oceans and ensure the U.S. could respond to any nuclear attack. Each submarine commissioned from 1959 through 1967 was named after an essential American, from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt, and the subs became known as the “41 for Freedom.” The campaign captured “the popular imagination in a very visceral way,” Mr. Gallagher said in 2018.

Mr. Gallagher also calls for “an aggressive reform effort” that goes beyond bromides about waste, fraud and abuse. One example is increasing the Pentagon’s “tooth-to-tail” ratio, the proportion of combat troops to support personnel. The Office of the Secretary of Defense alone employs 4,000 people by one estimate—almost the size an aircraft-carrier crew (around 5,000). A Marine intelligence officer who deployed twice to Iraq, Mr. Gallagher says months spent looking for a terrorist who was eventually discovered hiding inside a trap compartment “in this ugly green couch” taught him “how things that seemed pretty simple in D.C. get pretty difficult at the point of the spear.”

Maybe, he adds, the military branches don’t “need golf courses”—there are by one estimate more than 140 on U.S. bases world-wide—or, for that matter, to run commissaries: “If there’s one thing the modern free-market economy has figured out, it’s grocery stores.” Congress could trim “all sorts of jobs being done by one-stars that could be done by lieutenant colonels or colonels.” All of this could produce enough money “to really start testing the limits of the shipbuilding industrial base.”

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Another problem is that leftist ideology has “escaped from the lab of higher education and is now infecting other institutions, the military among them.” Only 45% of the public has a “great deal” of confidence in the military, according to an annual poll by the Reagan Institute. That’s down 25 points in three years, and Mr. Gallagher thinks woke ideology is a major reason. Mr. Gallagher thinks the military’s emphasis on “inclusion” at the expense of “war-fighting excellence” may deprive the military of the recruits it most needs. Young people are attracted to the Marines precisely because it’s an exclusive organization with exacting standards not everyone can meet.

At Fincantieri Marinette Marine, north of Green Bay, I touch a piece of what will eventually become the U.S. Navy’s new Constellation-class frigate. The hope is that the Navy has learned from procurement disasters such as the littoral combat ship, and that the frigate will be a cornerstone of a larger fleet. But the frigate isn’t set to arrive in the fleet until the latter half of the 2020s.

If a crisis in Taiwan or elsewhere comes sooner the U.S. would have to fight with the equipment it has, much of it from Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup in the 1980s. America, Mr. Gallagher says, therefore needs a “hedging strategy” to defend Taiwan “within the decade” and prevent an invasion in the first place:

Convert tired old ships into missile barges. Strap antiship missiles onto aircraft that hunt submarines. Buy two years worth of munitions parts in every budget to fill up bomb stocks. If “armed with a sense of urgency, there’s all sorts of things we can do” to “make the PLA think twice about taking over Taiwan,” Mr. Gallagher says. “The only short war for Taiwan is one that China wins.”

One lesson of Ukraine “is that you need to be in the business of arming yourselves and your allies prior to deterrence failing. Because by the time it does, it’s too late.” The savings from failing to arm earlier are “dwarfed by the cost of having to ramp up or get involved in war on someone else’s terms.”

Mr. Gallagher can seem like an intellectual directed-energy weapon, firing off at length about today’s parallels to the early Cold War, a period he studied while earning a doctorate at Georgetown in international relations. Why a doctorate? He invokes the old saying from the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency: The ideal recruit is “a Ph.D. that can win a bar fight.”

Yet bar fighting isn’t Mr. Gallagher’s style, and he may be worth studying for those who want to repair the Republican Party and find a constructive way to manage Donald Trump. Mr. Gallagher called the Jan. 6 riots “banana-republic crap” in a video he taped while trapped in his office, but he didn’t vote to impeach Mr. Trump because it “accomplishes nothing.” He supports more money for tightening the border but opposed Mr. Trump’s diverting military-construction money on the principle that a president was usurping Congress’s appropriation power. Mr. Gallagher has no Democratic opponent for re-election.

“The military crisis,” he adds, is “a microcosm of the broader societal crisis.” The U.S. is “increasingly becoming a healthcare and retirement organization that has guns.” The next president will have to “sail the ship of state through the Scylla of a confrontation with China and the Charybdis of an entitlement crisis.”

And that’s if the confrontation takes that long to materialize. Mr. Gallagher notes that China faces both a “structural economic slowdown” and a “demographic buzzsaw” as its population ages rapidly. So why wait to make a play for Taiwan? “Xi’s gotten away with Hong Kong.” He’s getting away “with genocide in Xinjiang. Oh, and unleashing—not deliberately—but unleashing a virus on the world that has killed six million people. And there’s been no accountability for that. So what would lead you to conclude that Xi is going to be restrained?”

Mr. Gallagher offers this scenario: Taiwan’s next president takes office in May 2024. Suppose the country elects someone “more friendly to independence than anyone in history,” and Mr. Xi concludes that he can’t take Taiwan through “political warfare.” Meanwhile, Americans begin “tearing each other apart” in another nasty presidential campaign.

According to “Navy nerds” who study the region, conditions are especially favorable in October for an amphibious assault. “You could be headed for the mother of all October surprises in 2024,” Mr. Gallagher says. “So with apologies to the Rolling Stones, time is not on our side.”

Mrs. Odell is a member of the Journal’s editorial board and a 2022 Robert Novak Fellow.

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