By Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS)—Whenever the name of an otherwise obscure official starts popping up in mainstream media reports that consistently paint him in an unfavorable light, savvy observers need to ask themselves why.
Is the individual a genuine problem whose bad behavior warrants this kind of scrutiny? Or rather, is there some other agenda at play? Is the official being targeted because of misconduct? Or is it because they are an obstacle to policies favored by establishment groupthink? Or are they connected to person(s) that the establishment dislikes and wishes to tarnish by a bogus case of guilt by association?
In the case of David Milstein, a senior advisor to U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, the answer appears to be a combination of heresy against groupthink and personal connections. And though the impact of a tsunami of coverage of a heretofore largely unknown person will likely have a permanent impact on his career in public service, it isn’t hard to understand why he’s got a target on his back. And it has nothing to do with misconduct of any kind.
Milstein has committed a grave offense, but his sin is not against the law, nor does it damage the interests of the United States. He’s guilty of opposing the efforts of those who want to blow up the relationship between Israel and the Trump administration that he serves. Add to that his refusal to go along with establishment thinking.
That especially concerns the consensus among liberal-minded foreign-service officers about Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria, and the “settler-violence” narrative that the Israeli left and their American allies (not to mention others who oppose the Jewish’s state’s existence altogether) have embraced. Which is to say, a lot of people inside the U.S. State Department and some who work in the U.S. embassy to Israel, along with their friends in the liberal media, want to discredit both the “settlers”—the hundreds of thousands of Jews who live in the heart of the Jewish homeland—and the government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Milstein hasn’t been playing ball, and they want him to pay for that.
He is being attacked as a proxy for two people the liberals in the foreign-policy establishment despise. One is Huckabee. The other is Fox News host Mark Levin, a prominent conservative voice and a friend of President Donald Trump. Milstein is his stepson.
It has created a perfect storm of factors that his critics hope will lead to his firing, if not something even worse.
This is deeply unfair to Milstein. There’s more at stake, however, than just his position and reputation, or even that of Huckabee and Levin.
This story is important not just because what’s happening to him is wrong, but because it illustrates how elites in the federal government and their allies in the press operate to silence and even criminalize dissent. Whether in or out of power, they believe that their opponents are illegitimate and that they must be not just stopped, but destroyed.
It’s not just that Milstein deserves to continue serving his country untainted by the kind of smears that have been tossed in his direction. It’s that the Trump administration cannot allow its political opponents, both inside and outside the government, to dictate policy or personnel in a manner designed to promote the sabotage of American interests and the U.S.-Israel alliance.
What has Milstein supposedly done?
Three weeks ago on Yom Kippur, Milstein first became the focus of mainstream media attention when Politico published an anonymously sourced hit piece aimed at alleging he was soliciting cash from members of the public. While the article presented the incident as an open-and-shut case of corrupt behavior, it also conceded that no laws were broken. Yet the point of the piece was that what he had done warranted the pulling of Milstein’s security clearance since he had become in the words of a quote from an unnamed person, a “walking counter-intel red flag.”
For all the huffing and puffing in the article about outrageous and supposedly dangerous conduct, there wasn’t all that much to it. As Levin revealed in a post on social media, the solicitation of money was a mistaken email about wedding gifts.
It turns out that Milstein was getting married and was responding to queries about where he and his bride were registered for gifts that friends and family could give them, as is customary.
The couple wasn’t registered at any store, so he suggested in an email apparently intended only for family and close friends that they could, as is also customary for weddings, give a cash gift. But he blundered and sent this missive to a broader list that likely included some embassy colleagues. This was then shared with Politico as evidence of a solicitation to accept bribes that would be both corrupt and subject Milstein to blackmail.
The story also tried to connect Milstein to convicted spy Jonathan Pollard because he had recently met with Huckabee.
The ambassador vouched for Milstein in his own post on X and made it clear that the staffer had nothing to do with Pollard’s visit to personally thank him for past courtesies, as well as dismissing the notion that it was in any way a secret.
If you think that this tale is pretty thin evidence of misconduct, then you’d be right. As federal corruption stories go, it’s less than a nothing burger, and despite the flurry of attention it created on social media from administration critics and foes of its pro-Israel policies, that’s as far as it went. After all, Milstein is someone who few outside of the world of conservative politics and pro-Israel advocacy have ever heard of until very recently; even within that rather limited universe, most people probably only had a vague sense of who he was. He has worked as a staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and one of Huckabee’s predecessors in Jerusalem, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.
Still, the significant fact about this story was its origins from within the State Department and the U.S. Embassy to Israel. That was further explained three weeks later when The New York Times published a bombshell report that not only led its homepage but also landed on the front page of its print edition.