Why Was Israel Trying to Spy on Trump?

From POLITICO comes a rather damning story about our supposed “greatest ally” spying on President Trump’s White House, and more:

“The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.”

Apparently the Israelis were using fake cellphone towers to intercept calls and texts.

“The miniature surveillance devices, colloquially known as “StingRays,” mimic regular cell towers to fool cellphones into giving them their locations and identity information. Formally called international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use.

The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates — though it’s not clear whether the Israeli efforts were successful.”

We should definitely assume they were.

“But unlike most other occasions when flagrant incidents of foreign spying have been discovered on American soil, the Trump administration did not rebuke the Israeli government, and there were no consequences for Israel’s behavior, one of the former officials said.”

If this were the Russians, we would never hear the end of it from the media. The media would probably be trying to provoke full-on shooting and bombing warfare.

But this story was barely a blip on the major media’s radar.

For his part, Trump refuses to believe the report:

“After this story was published, Trump told reporters that he would find it “hard to believe” that the Israelis had placed the devices.

“I don’t think the Israelis were spying on us,” Trump said. “My relationship with Israel has been great…Anything is possible but I don’t believe it.”

It’s quite possible this story was fabricated by anti-Israel intelligence community officials in an effort to get Trump to turn against Israel. That’ll never happen because Trump has a major hard-on for Israel, but it’s at least possible that this is what happened.

After all, why would Israel do anything to poison the relationship with the man who ripped up the Iran deal and moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem?

So it’s possible this story is made-up.

But if not–if the story of Israel trying to spy on the Trump White House is true–then it it definitely begs some very uncomfortable questions.

For example, if Israel is so grateful for everything we do for them–and again, Trump has done a lot for them, as have all past presidents dating back to 1948–then why would they need to spy on him?

Why would our “greatest ally” need to spy on us?

Well, perhaps, Israel is not actually our greatest ally, and instead only pretends to be in order to use us for foreign aid and to fight their Middle Eastern wars for them.

Maybe this is much-ado about nothing. It’s likely that we spy on the Israelis and every other supposed ally of ours, like Britain, France and Germany. Remember the story from several years back about how Obama personally approved wiretaps on the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel?

Still, I think the story just goes to show you that you can never be completely trusting with any other country out there–even your ostensible “greatest allies.”

Trump needs to stop being so trusting with the Israelis. They may have a very powerful lobby in Washington, but that shouldn’t matter to the guy who is so rich he doesn’t have to listen to any lobbyists. After all, wasn’t that part of the inherent appeal of Trump from the start?

Israel acts in its own interests. Our interests are not always theirs, and vice versa. It’s time we started putting our own first–even ahead of Israel’s.