A pair of State Department fellowship programs championed by former secretary of state Antony Blinken aimed to "enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in the federal workforce." They also sparked an internal "resistance" against U.S. support for Israel, emails obtained by the Free Beacon's Adam Kredo show.
The programs in question, the Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Program and the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Program, "increased the number of Foreign Service generalists from underrepresented groups by 33% and the number of women by 6%," according to a November 2022 edition of the State Department's in-house magazine. But those budding diplomats didn't work to execute the Biden administration's marginal support for Israel. Instead, they worked to end that support altogether.
A year after Blinken touted those programs, a group of fellows sent his top staffers a "dissent memo" that expressed "profound disappointment and anguish" over continued U.S. arms sales to the Jewish state. The fellows alleged that Blinken used their "diverse backgrounds as shields to deflect criticism away from the State Department," adding that they launched a "resistance" against "an immoral course of action."
Blinken's team acknowledged that the disgruntled staffers were "not eligible to submit formal dissents" but passed the memo to Blinken and offered the fellows a meeting with him anyway, according to the emails.
The Trump administration is taking a different approach. "The full-court blitz to pressure the Biden White House into publicly breaking with Israel is generating renewed scrutiny into the fellowship programs as the Trump administration works to root out so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government," writes Kredo. "A senior State Department official told the Free Beacon the agency 'is reviewing these and other fellowship programs to ensure they are consistent with the president's EOs and the secretary's American First foreign policy agenda.'"
The Amica Center for Immigrant Rights is a D.C.-based nonprofit that receives taxpayer funds to provide legal services to illegal aliens. It says its aim is to provide constitutionally protected due process rights for those aliens.
Its Facebook ads say otherwise. The ads, our Chuck Ross reports, solicit donations to "disrupt Trump's deportation machine" and "stop Trump's deportation dystopia." They also include the line "See you in court, Trump," a reference to the lawsuit the center filed blocking an EO that pauses Justice Department funding for some legal service programs for illegal aliens.
It's a bizarre campaign for a group that has received nearly $9 million in federal funds in the last fiscal year. The Amica Center has received that money as a subcontractor for the Acacia Center for Justice, another federally funded left-wing group that says the immigration system is "intentionally designed" to exploit "Black and brown people."
"That could raise concerns in Washington that taxpayer funds are going to an organization that is calling to defy the administration's immigration policies," writes Ross. "The Amica Center claims its services are crucial to providing due process rights to illegal aliens. It offers 'Know Your Rights' counseling to illegal aliens that informs them about their legal options while facing potential deportation.
"But the organization, formerly known as the Capital Area Immigrants' Rights Coalition, goes far beyond offering legal advice to its clients. It also aims to influence federal policy and public perception of immigration issues."
Away from the Beacon, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat down with CBS News's Margaret Brennan to discuss Vice President J.D. Vance's trip to Germany. Three weeks earlier, Brennan went viral for sparring with Vance over an Afghan refugee who planned a terror attack in Oklahoma.
Her interview with Rubio didn't go much better.
Brennan attempted to take Rubio to task over Vance's blistering speech at the Munich Security Conference, during which the vice president accused European leaders of stifling free speech. Those remarks were concerning, Brennan argued, because Nazi Germany "weaponized" free speech to carry out the Holocaust.
"Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide," Brennan said. That's an interesting argument given that Jewish artists were among the first victims of the Nazis, starting in 1933.
Rubio had none of it. "No. I have to disagree with you," he responded before giving Brennan a middle school history lesson. "Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany, they were the sole and only party that governed that country."
Some on the right have argued that Republicans should refrain from giving interviews to mainstream journalists. We hope the Trump administration keeps allowing its top officials to humiliate them.
In other news:
- The 2,000-pound bombs the Biden administration withheld from Israel arrived in the Jewish state over the weekend. Now get to work!
- A short bearded man attempted to own Jerry Seinfeld with a selfie video in which he urged Seinfeld to say, "Free Palestine." The comedian's response: "I don't care about Palestine."
- Democratic insiders are reportedly upset after DNC vice chair David Hogg used a party contact list to solicit donations for his own PAC.
- Four years after Jon Ossoff became Georgia's first Jewish senator—and used a chumash for his swearing-in ceremony—fellow Jewish Dems in the Peach State are so turned off by his anti-Israel votes that they're encouraging Brian Kemp to run against him.