During a nearly two-and-a-half-hour interview with Tucker Carlson, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee defended meeting with American traitor Jonathan Pollard, who spied for Israel while a Navy intelligence officer and landed in prison for 30 years.
The New York Times revealed the meeting in November and called it “secret,” which Huckabee denied to Carlson, claiming that he meets with people all the time.
Huckabee also defended the historical and theological claim that present day Israel is the Israel of the Bible, as have GOP U.S. Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Huckabee said the Bible would justify Israel’s seizing territory in the Middle East from the Euphrates River in Iraq to the Nile in Egypt.
Secret Meeting
The genesis of the Pollard discussion was the revelation in the Times.
The meeting was secret, the Times reported, and for good reason. No other American envoy thought meeting with Pollard was a good idea.
“The highly unusual meeting caught some U.S. officials by surprise, and appeared to be a sharp break with years of precedent for American diplomats,” the newspaper disclosed:
The New York Times learned of the meeting from three U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. When The Times asked Mr. Pollard about the meeting, he confirmed it.
The meeting was not on Huckabee’s schedule, which “alarmed” the CIA station chief.
And the top U.S. spy in Israel isn’t the only American official that Huckabee kept in the dark, the Times continued:
The White House was not aware of the meeting in advance, according to a White House official and two people briefed on the matter. The White House official also said that senior officials there were alarmed when they learned it had taken place.
Pollard’s Crimes
Previous diplomats wouldn’t meet with Pollard for good reason. The secrets he gave to Israel included, as Carlson told Huckabee, military plans that Israel gave to the Soviet Union to secure the emigration of Jews.
“Between 1984 and 1985, Mr. Pollard gave a range of classified documents to Israel,” the Times recalled:
Caspar Weinberger, the secretary of defense when Mr. Pollard was arrested in 1985, wrote that Mr. Pollard had handed over so many documents that they could fill a space 6 feet by 6 feet by 10 feet. His actions, Mr. Weinberger said, compromised U.S. intelligence sources and risked endangering American forces deployed around the world.
“The defendant has substantially harmed the United States,” he wrote.
Among other information, Pollard delivered a 10-volume manual of the National Security Agency’s signals intelligence to Israel, as Seymour Hersh explained in The New Yorker in 1999.
Sentenced to life in prison, Pollard was paroled in 2015. He landed in Israel on December 30, 2020, with his second wife in tow.
Apparently, though Pollard was an American, his real loyalty was never in doubt. Since then, he has encouraged American Jews who work in the military or intelligence fields to maintain double loyalty and steal secrets for Israel, Carlson averred. Carlson grilled Huckabee on his pushing for Pollard’s release from prison.
Meeting “Not as Big a Deal”
Pollard “did something that was terribly wrong,” Huckabee said:
He sold secrets, he shouldn’t have done it. … I think what he did was despicable. I’m not defending anything about what he did.
Still, a former CIA director and senators on the Foreign Relations Committee said Pollard should be released and allowed to go to Israel, Huckabee observed. And the meeting with Pollard, the ambassador said, “was not as big a deal, that I had this, basically, courtesy meeting. He wanted to thank me for being nice to him when his wife died. That’s pretty much the story.”
Carlson pressed Huckabee, noting that Pollard was the “greatest traitor in modern American history,” and, again, that the former governor of Arkansas pushed for Pollard’s release. As well, Carlson noted, Pollard has advocated that American Jews spy for Israel.
“You see why the U.S. ambassador hosting a convicted betrayer of his own country, who’s encouraging Americans to continue to betray their country, would seem shocking,” Carlson said.
“You make it sound like I’m hosting a meeting,” Huckabee said:
I simply met with him. I meet with people all the time. … He was able to come to the U.S. embassy to have a meeting at his request. I did. And frankly, I don’t regret it.
“It Would Be Fine If They Took It All”
As he did during his testy exchange with Cruz, Carlson pressed Huckabee on the meaning of Genesis 15:18: “To thy seed will I give this land, from the river of Egypt even to the great river Euphrates.”
That would include the “entire Middle East,” including Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, Carlson said. In other words, whole countries.
“It would be a big piece of land,” Huckabee agreed:
But here’s the point. … This particular area that we’re talking about now, Israel, is a land that God gave through Abraham to a people that he chose. It was a people, a place, and a purpose. We can look at it that way.
Carlson insisted that Huckabee explain what “land” he meant. “Does Israel have the right to that land? Because you’re appealing to Genesis, you’re saying that’s the original deed?” Carlson asked.
Huckabee: “It would be fine if they took it all.”
Carlson also asked Huckabee about U.S. aid to Israel, America’s wars on Israel’s behalf, and whether the Iraq War was a result of the 9/11 terror attacks, or, instead, a war to vanquish one of Israel’s enemies.
