Washington Free Beacon

TEL AVIV—Israel halted any entry of goods into the Gaza Strip on Sunday, signaling the start of a more aggressive phase of its war to destroy Hamas.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the decision was a response to Hamas’s rejection of a proposal by U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to extend the phase one hostage-ceasefire deal that expired a day earlier. Israel had endorsed the proposal.

“Upon the conclusion of the first stage, and in light of Hamas’s rejection of the Witkoff framework, we decided at last night’s discussion that as of this morning, the entry of goods and supplies into Gaza will be prevented,” Netanyahu said at the start of a cabinet meeting on Sunday. “If Hamas continues to stick to its position and does not release our hostages, there will be additional consequences, which I will not detail here.”

The blockade of Gaza is one of a series of escalatory steps that Israel, backed by President Donald Trump, is prepared to take to bring home the hostages and end Hamas’s control of Gaza, according to several current and former Israeli officials with knowledge of high-level discussions. Israel expects that it will ultimately have to take full military control of Gaza and is developing plans to do so starting in several weeks, the Washington Free Beacon reported on Thursday.

The sources said that Israeli decision-makers expect Hamas to resist disarmament or exile—Israel’s conditions for moving on to phase two of the deal, which would end the war—and instead to fight to the end while holding some of the hostages as human shields and bargaining chips.

Amir Avivi, a former senior Israeli military official who has advised the government and military during the 17-month Gaza war, predicted that Israel’s next steps in Gaza would be heavy airstrikes, followed by ground incursions, and finally a “decisive attack” to conquer the strip.

“It’s very hard to see Hamas simply giving up without further military pressure,” Avivi said. “I think the understanding overall in the military and government leadership is that we are going to full-scale war.”

Hezi Nehama, a former senior Israeli military official who served as a battalion commander in the war and has maintained close ties to the Israeli military’s Southern Command, told the Free Beacon, “Everybody understands that in the end, we will have to fight and to defeat Hamas.”

“And we understand that, unfortunately, some of the hostages—we won’t be able to bring them back,” he said.

Netanyahu said Israel was “not giving up on anyone” among the 59 hostages who remain in Gaza, as many as 24 of them alive, and would “immediately” return to negotiations if Hamas accepted Witkoff’s proposal.

Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a statement on Sunday that Israel’s halt of humanitarian aid to Gaza was an “important step” toward opening “the gates of hell” on Gaza.

“Now we need to open these gates as quickly and fatally as possible to the cruel enemy, until complete victory,” he added. “We stayed in the government to ensure this, and so it will be in Gaza.”

Israel’s Channel 12 reported on Saturday that Southern Command is on high alert and preparing for a return to fighting on short notice. In recent days, Israeli troops have been training to retake the strategically important Netzarim Corridor and other areas of Gaza from which the military withdrew during the ceasefire and for the possible relocation of the civilian population from the north of the strip to humanitarian zones in the south, according to the report.

Two Israeli military divisions have deployed to Israel’s buffer zone inside the borders of Gaza, including the Philadelphi Corridor in the south.

Omer Dostri, a spokesman for Netanyahu, said on X that no aid trucks had been allowed to enter Gaza as of Sunday morning, “nor will they at this stage.” Tzav 9, a grassroots activist group that seeks to block humanitarian aid to Gaza, confirmed in a statement on Sunday that the main crossings into Gaza had been closed to the trucks.

Hamas on Sunday called Israel’s halt to humanitarian aid “a cheap act of extortion, a war crime, and a blatant violation of the agreement.” Egypt, which has served as a key mediator between Israel and Hamas, on Sunday accused Israel of using “starvation as a weapon of war.”

Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar said at a Sunday press conference in Jerusalem that the starvation of Gazans has been “a lie during this whole war,” adding, “We saw when our hostages were released, the terrorists and the crowd looked perfectly fine. The only ones that looked that they were starved were our hostages.”

The surge of humanitarian aid that entered Gaza during the ceasefire will last four to six months, the current and former officials told the Free Beacon, echoing Israeli media reports. Meanwhile, water and electricity have continued flowing to Gaza, Israeli media reported.

Saar also said that the Trump administration “accepts our stance and recognizes it.”

According to Israel, Witkoff proposed a 50-day extension of the first phase of the ceasefire to allow more time for deadlocked negotiations over a potential phase two, which would end the war. Under the plan, which had not previously been publicized, Hamas would release half of the remaining hostages held in Gaza on the first day of the extension and the rest on the final day if a second phase were agreed upon.

The Free Beacon previously reported that incoming Israeli military chief of staff Eyal Zamir, at the direction of Netanyahu and defense minister Israel Katz, has started developing the plan to return to war in Gaza. Initial steps include a cutoff of aid to Gaza, relocation of Gazan civilians to humanitarian zones in the south of the strip, and airstrikes on Hamas targets. The plan then calls for four or five divisions to conquer Gaza in six months or less.

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Like many parents this time of year, my wife and I have begun to look at colleges with our son (there’s a really good book about this). But a lot has changed since we both graduated—for instance, tuition. Take our alma mater, Georgetown University, which cost $23,000 a year in the 1990s. Annual tuition has skyrocketed to $71,000. Georgetown Law is even higher, at close to $76,000 per year. And you don’t even get good professors like Ilya Shapiro!

The good news is Shapiro has chronicled his experiences and the dismal state of our law schools in his new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites. Weekend Beacon contributor Tal Fortgang gives us a review.

“Shapiro had been hired to run a center-right outfit from within Georgetown Law, but sent a questionably worded tweet that his new employer met with a sham investigation and character assassination. (You can read plenty of good coverage of the affair here at the Washington Free Beacon, though Shapiro’s full version is still revelatory.) Other Georgetown professors have also been punished for stating facts that progressives do not like to hear.

“Though law schools still profess to be what they once were—educational institutions that value the pursuit of knowledge—they are actually designed now to produce ideology rather than knowledge. That is why they could not tolerate Shapiro’s presence—nor the presence of heretics like Judge Kyle Duncan, Professor Amy Wax, or even liberals who would engage with conservative Christians—while progressive radicals feel no compunction about spouting their views from cushy faculty and administrative positions.

“Shapiro advances a syllogism so simple it is practically undeniable. Lawyers wield tremendous power across every sector of American society; law schools, especially the highest-ranked, are training students to wield that power immaturely and irresponsibly; therefore, law schools need immediate reform to avert an imminent national disaster.

“What kind of reform could do the trick?

“A demonstrated (not just stated) commitment to free speech, academic freedom, and ideological diversity is Shapiro’s preferred solution. He recommends that law schools adopt the triad of policies developed at his alma mater of University of Chicago to clarify and protect true free speech. ‘It’s not rocket science,’ Shapiro writes repeatedly, notwithstanding students at elite law schools claiming not to know the difference between free speech and censorship. Heckler’s vetoes don’t count; neither do other forms of disruptive conduct that involve speech but prevent others from speaking. Enforce rules governing conduct without fear or favor. Law schools should not weigh in on world events that do not directly touch their campus. And for heaven’s sake, stop cracking down on professors who say offensive things.”

From the classroom to the courtroom, Robert Little reviews Drawn Testimony: My Four Decades as a Courtroom Sketch Artist by Jane Rosenberg.

Rosenberg “went to an arraignment without any sell-on deal in 1980. NBC bought her image, and she began her now 40 years in court art. In her new book Drawn Testimony, she recounts quite a few trials where she sketched from a corner. John Gotti asked her to avoid giving him a second chin. Ghislaine Maxwell turned around and turned the tables, sketching Rosenberg sketching Maxwell. Bill Cosby, Sam Bankman-Fried, even Tom Brady’s deflategate hearing helped fill her sketchbook.”

“The job is both challenging and an opportunity for news readers. The artist gets up at dawn to get an ideal seat, sitting through often dull hearings waiting for the witness some editor wants an image of. The artist has to work silently, usually with acrylic pencils that noiselessly scrape across paper. They bring a huge kit of material. The profession is in decline because every state now allows photography in courts.

“But the opportunity! A sketcher can pull off what Albert Camus called ‘the lie that tells a truth.’ There is no spot in a courtroom where the audience can see the front of a lawyer, the witness, the judge, and the jury all at once. But an artist can slide the personnel together, or merge different moments. Perhaps the judge didn’t form that expression at the exact moment the witness told her tale. But a sketch showing that combination might convey the judge’s reaction to the testimony.”

Weekend Beacon movie critic John Podhoretz had a reaction to watching The Brutalist, which is up for multiple awards at tonight’s Oscars. As usual, he was brutally honest.

“The Brutalist is a failure, even an offensive one, but it’s also kind of magnificent as it goes along. I’ve rarely had a more ambiguous or complex reaction to a work of cinema, and I hope I can get The Brutalist right as I talk about it so that I don’t follow director and cowriter Brady Corbet down the path of misrepresenting my subject.

“Corbet is unapologetically aiming for greatness with his gorgeously rendered portrait of a Holocaust survivor and his journey through a mid-century America that is simultaneously welcoming of his talents and viciously destructive to his soul. There are two ways to look at the story of Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody). One is that Corbet is telling a singular tale about a singular fictional Jew who undergoes a singular set of experiences as he comes into contact with a difficult, complex, highly intelligent, and very rich American Gentile with the very suggestive name of Harrison Lee Van Buren (that’s the key general of the Confederacy and three presidents combined in just one moniker).

“The other is that he is our guide to the America that emerged after World War II, and Corbet is using his journey through 15 years of American life to offer an innovative and profound view of what this country was really like at the moment it assumed leadership not only of the world but as the great patron of the arts and the artistic future after Europe’s destruction in the war.

“If it’s just the story of Toth and Van Buren and their conflicts, and nothing larger, then Corbet is artistically justified in telling the tale as he does. But if this is a movie about America, anti-Semitism, and the depredations of capitalism, then it matters very much that the larger details are correctly and properly rendered. An indictment has to be based on facts and truth. In this regard, The Brutalist is spectacularly—and offensively—false.”

From the archives: Congratulations to Princeton historian and Weekend Beacon contributor Allen C. Guelzo, whose book Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment has been nominated for this year’s Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. James Piereson gave us a review.

“A research fellow at Princeton University and author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President and other books on the Civil War era, Guelzo is our foremost Lincoln scholar and an authority on just about everything he said or wrote. Lincoln, he writes in Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, cast the struggle for the Union as a universal cause with vast implications for future times. Can Americans find inspiration in Lincoln’s life to meet the less daunting challenges they face today? ‘To those who have despaired of the future,’ Guelzo writes, ‘I offer this man’s example.’

“As his title suggests, he finds the example to lie in Lincoln’s faith in the nation’s Founding ideals, in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, in the common sense and good judgment of its citizens, and in their determination to maintain ‘a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.’ He is aware that this kind of faith is in short supply today.”

“Lincoln was aware of the tension between faith and reason, as Guelzo explains, though he did not see a fundamental conflict between them. He distrusted passion in politics, seeing that it devolved into violence and mob rule. It was not an abstract proposition: He had witnessed lynchings and assaults on newspapers due to differences over slavery. ‘The pillars of the temple of liberty,’ he said, are ‘hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.’ His ‘ancient faith’ was hewn from that quarry. It is in everyone’s interest to obey the laws lest the breakdown of law and order should lead to a ‘war of all against all.’ He vowed as a young man always to act on the basis of reason, as far as he could follow it. ‘Let us do nothing through passion and ill temper,’ he advised friends and supporters on the eve of the Civil War. He carried through on that advice. As the war began, Henry Adams wrote to his brother: ‘No man is fit to take hold now who is not cool as death.’ Lincoln, as things turned out, was that man.”

The winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize will be announced early this month.

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If you thought law students hijacking classes for inane exercises in “naming the violence” was bad, just wait. While my law school experience did not involve scandals of national interest, it was punctuated by students attempting to do anything—lecture, agitate, yell—except learn from others.

Here’s one story I’ll never forget, from the same criminal law class where my classmates pestered their uber-progressive professor to say she thought rape was wrong. We were studying the 1971 revolt at Attica state prison in New York, which left 10 prison workers and 33 inmates dead. Prosecutors subsequently chose not to press charges against corrections officers who had allegedly brutalized and possibly murdered some of the rioters. The episode gave a panorama view of the issues we cover in criminal law, such as theories of punishment, prosecutorial discretion, and self-defense.

Who needs to ask difficult questions, though, when you smell an opportunity to signal your progressive bona fides? One of my classmates raised a Zoom hand, but when called on did not ask a question. Instead, she began to read the “Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands” verbatim and in full. While it is mostly very reasonable and sympathetic, the manifesto is quite long. When she finished reading it, my classmate, having worked herself into a feverish state over the several minutes she spent reading, added with a scream that racialized capitalism was responsible for the mistreatment of the inmates. Only a revolution would fix things. Some classmates chimed in over Zoom chat to applaud this act of bravery. The professor thanked the young woman who had interrupted her. The only time Attica came up again for the rest of the course was when we learned about the murder of Kitty Genovese, whose story has wrongly come to stand for the idea that bystanders will fail to intervene if they think others will—because Genovese’s rapist and murderer had participated in the uprising.

That there are one or even a few people who would use their $100,000-per-year legal education (or, more likely, social-justice scholarship) to pontificate rather than think is unremarkable. Every institution has its zealots. What is remarkable is how comfortable my classmate felt interrupting a class to indulge her own solipsistic sense that she had more to tell everyone than the professor would. That comfort was justified, it turned out. Radical students, protected by a vast bureaucracy of ideologues who code left-wing views as desirable DEI and right-wing views as hate speech that are, at best, tolerated begrudgingly, run elite law schools. In fact, that’s mostly what law schools are now: Progressive madrassas where you learn first the doctrines of contracts and torts, and then to denigrate those doctrines as part of systems of oppression set up by straight white men to enrich themselves and subjugate others. Learning the tastes and habits of the radical chic is central to the enterprise.

It doesn’t take a legal mind of Ilya Shapiro’s caliber to diagnose this problem, but given Shapiro’s background in classical liberalism and the inquisition he suffered at the hands of Georgetown Law students and administrators, he is as fit as anyone to do so. (Full disclosure: Shapiro is a colleague of mine at the Manhattan Institute.) In Lawless, Shapiro alternates between his own story of mistreatment at the hands of Georgetown’s “leadership”—not a particularly apt term given its behavior—and general analysis about the radicalization of American law schools.

The two are closely related. Shapiro had been hired to run a center-right outfit from within Georgetown Law, but sent a questionably worded tweet that his new employer met with a sham investigation and character assassination. (You can read plenty of good coverage of the affair here at the Washington Free Beacon, though Shapiro’s full version is still revelatory.) Other Georgetown professors have also been punished for stating facts that progressives do not like to hear.

Though law schools still profess to be what they once were—educational institutions that value the pursuit of knowledge—they are actually designed now to produce ideology rather than knowledge. That is why they could not tolerate Shapiro’s presence—nor the presence of heretics like Judge Kyle Duncan, Professor Amy Wax, or even liberals who would engage with conservative Christians—while progressive radicals feel no compunction about spouting their views from cushy faculty and administrative positions.

Shapiro advances a syllogism so simple it is practically undeniable. Lawyers wield tremendous power across every sector of American society; law schools, especially the highest-ranked, are training students to wield that power immaturely and irresponsibly; therefore, law schools need immediate reform to avert an imminent national disaster.

What kind of reform could do the trick?

A demonstrated (not just stated) commitment to free speech, academic freedom, and ideological diversity is Shapiro’s preferred solution. He recommends that law schools adopt the triad of policies developed at his alma mater of University of Chicago to clarify and protect true free speech. “It’s not rocket science,” Shapiro writes repeatedly, notwithstanding students at elite law schools claiming not to know the difference between free speech and censorship. Heckler’s vetoes don’t count; neither do other forms of disruptive conduct that involve speech but prevent others from speaking. Enforce rules governing conduct without fear or favor. Law schools should not weigh in on world events that do not directly touch their campus. And for heaven’s sake, stop cracking down on professors who say offensive things.

The open campus may be a north star, but law schools are in much more dire conditions than can be fixed by a revolution in free inquiry. As Shapiro repeatedly demonstrates, their problems run deeper than self-censoring conservatives and occasional witch hunts against dissident figures. Free speech norms wouldn’t keep the Georgetown Law administrators, who threw Shapiro to the wolves by defaming him as a racist, from failing up until they landed plum jobs. It doesn’t address the complete capture of my own law school by radical students, who have graduated from interrupting classes and other misdeeds to posting unabashed support for the terrorist group Hamas on social media. (Our former student body president, ousted for sending a post-October-7 anti-Israel message in the student government’s name without permission, was also filmed vandalizing posters of Israeli hostages held in Gaza.)

Just recently, the anti-Israel contingent at Georgetown Law, which could not abide free-speech maximalist Ilya Shapiro, invited as a guest speaker a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who recently completed a stint in prison for her role in murdering a 16-year-old girl. Law schools are plagued by militant moral backwardness. They have been taken over by ideologues advancing an illiberal, intolerant, and often immoral worldview. The cancellations and mobs Shapiro documents are an important symptom, but they are a symptom indeed of a much more serious disease.

Near the end of his book, in suggesting a wide suite of reforms that might move law schools in the right direction, Shapiro correctly takes aim at the diversicrats more responsible than any for law schools’ corruption.

[A]dmissions deans should be evaluated for admitting students with the character to respect norms of free speech and open inquiry. It’s all well and good to screen for academic achievement via GPA and reasoning skills via LSAT—which, along with racial diversity, have long been the primary metrics for law school applicants—but admissions offices, particularly at higher-ranked schools, have been too focused on admitting activists instead of advocates, social-justice warriors instead of scholars.

Amen to that—and then some. Law schools are generally quite small. Yale Law School accepts just a few hundred students per year. Each class comprises not the top LSAT-scorers or Ivy League magna cum laude undergrads, but a carefully calibrated mix of characteristics. The Federalist Society must have its 10 students per year (or, where I went, 5). Affinity groups must have enough Jewish, black, Asian, or gay 1Ls to achieve continuity beyond the three-year cycle. There must even be a few people who signal in their applications that they would be willing to sing and dance as part of “Law Revue” musical theater. All the while each class must average a stellar—yet consistent year-to-year—LSAT score. At top schools, it is no exaggeration to say each admit is hand-picked.

Yet each year without fail, students at elite law schools manage to say and do abhorrent things, often in fairly large groups. Administrators announce their very serious disappointment in those students, who, against all evidence, are deemed to have not lived up to the values of the school and do not represent it. Yet not only are those students not expelled even if they repeatedly break school rules, their ranks seem replenished with each admissions cycle. It is almost as if the schools are selecting for students who will be activists, radicals, and rule-breakers.

Fine, not almost—they are obviously doing exactly that. Elite law schools love activists, celebrate them at every opportunity, and invite applicants to share their proudest activist achievements in personal statements as back entry into schools with otherwise-demanding academic requirements. Perhaps administrators do not expel them or change admissions criteria to filter them out because they see credentialing tomorrow’s radicals as the law school’s highest calling. That cycle is not going to stop itself. It will take government investigations, lawsuits, firings, and probably some more public shamings of the kind that led to leadership changes at Harvard, Penn, and Columbia. When the underbrush of ideological capture is cleared, free and open campuses can emerge without backsliding into the same bad habits.

If and when that does happen, Shapiro will have earned a victory lap. He has alerted Americans to the serious problem of law schools’ corruption, by publicizing his story in all its discomfiting detail and tying it in persuasively to a larger narrative about ideological capture and institutional cowardice.

Lawless is bracing. It presents a useful path forward for law schools that might want to take corrective action before a Trump administration Department of Education forces them to, while laying the groundwork for readers to understand that everywhere else pushback will be fierce and hysterical. Those of us who accept Shapiro’s simple syllogism about law schools’ importance and their flagrant abdication of responsibility have one question left to ponder: Are we prepared, mentally and emotionally, to root out the corruption in our elite-producing institutions even if they try to do to us what they did to him?

Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites
by Ilya Shapiro
Broadside Books, 272 pp., $29.99
Tal Fortgang is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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No doubt there’s a legal thriller about nearly every participant in the courtroom. Lots of noirish books about dogged prosecutors, dashing defense attorneys, a judge with home-life issues. Clint Eastwood just made Juror #2 about a juror who might have actually done the crime.

But as far as I know, there’s no thriller about the sketch artist. The old profession, always dying but never dead, has few remaining professionals: Christine Cornell, who drew me once, is still at it. D.C.’s Bill Hennessey, who frequently drew the Supreme Court of the United States, died last year. The wonderfully named Art Lien is still at it after 50 years. L.A.’s Bill Robles is almost alone using water colors, joined by the mononymic French painter Zziigg.

And then there’s Jane Rosenberg. The New York artist went to an arraignment without any sell-on deal in 1980. NBC bought her image, and she began her now 40 years in court art. In her new book Drawn Testimony, she recounts quite a few trials where she sketched from a corner. John Gotti asked her to avoid giving him a second chin. Ghislaine Maxwell turned around and turned the tables, sketching Rosenberg sketching Maxwell. Bill Cosby, Sam Bankman-Fried, even Tom Brady’s deflategate hearing helped fill her sketchbook.

Drawn Testimony has both a center glossy section with Rosenberg’s drawings, but also black-and-white reproductions on text pages. This is valuable when she makes a particular point about how, say, Harvey Weinstein looked at trial.

The job is both challenging and an opportunity for news readers. The artist gets up at dawn to get an ideal seat, sitting through often dull hearings waiting for the witness some editor wants an image of. The artist has to work silently, usually with acrylic pencils that noiselessly scrape across paper. They bring a huge kit of material. The profession is in decline because every state now allows photography in courts.

But the opportunity! A sketcher can pull off what Albert Camus called “the lie that tells a truth.” There is no spot in a courtroom where the audience can see the front of a lawyer, the witness, the judge, and the jury all at once. But an artist can slide the personnel together, or merge different moments. Perhaps the judge didn’t form that expression at the exact moment the witness told her tale. But a sketch showing that combination might convey the judge’s reaction to the testimony.

The body language—the smirk, the accusatory pointed finger, and defendant on the stand, palms out in denial—make for the dramatic pictures still purchased by television networks and newspapers. New York Times artist Marilyn Church in New York family court in 1993 caught Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, two lawyers, a witness, and the judge, conveying every participant’s countenance at once, shrinking the courtroom into a square. Another artist might choose to show the vastness of a courtroom, making the participants overwhelmed in the architecture.

Federal courts still exclude photography, as do state courts on a case-by-case basis. When a California judge banned cameras from Michael Jackson’s case, Robles capped off a lengthy career that started with the Charles Manson and Patty Hearst trials.

No cameras are allowed in execution chambers, but sketch artists can portray that final event in a criminal proceeding. Trial jurors also remain unphotographable, but the sketch artist can anonymize the jury while showing viewers something a camera can’t.

Even where cameras are permitted, the sketch artist can pull off images unavailable to the shutterbug. Art Lien sketched a Trump impeachment trial. The Senate controls the cameras, so Lien captured a senator falling asleep off camera, and celebrity visitors up in the gallery.

The profession goes back at least to Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), whose line drawings and paintings grace the walls of lawyers worldwide. The courts that later banned photographers once banned artists. Sketch artists in some eras had to draw from memory outside the court.

World War II artist Howard Brodie returned home to the courtroom sketch job, drawing Jack Ruby and Manson. In those days, an entire bench in the front row might be devoted to artists. NFL player and actor Terry Crews started out as a courtroom artist in Flint, Michigan. (During tough times during his football career he sold illustrations to his teammates.)

Rosenburg’s book, like her life, is New York-focused. Readers get a tour through 40 years of Manhattan trials. Mafiosos, the Blind Sheikh, the Central Park Five, Martha Stewart, and Donald Trump all appear with fleshed-out but brief accounts of their trials and verdicts.

The book is part memoir, part history of recent New York trials, and part an explanation of a fascinating, still-living form of art.

Drawn Testimony: My Four Decades as a Courtroom Sketch Artist
by Jane Rosenberg
Hanover Square, 256 pp., $30

Robert Little is a criminal trial lawyer and writer in California

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Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was not the first European leader to cross the pond this week in search of answers from Donald Trump. But Zelensky’s visit, which culminated in a showdown with the president and vice president, was the most consequential.

The Oval Office meeting “revealed the confusion and emotion of the moment,” writes the Hudson Institute’s Mike Watson. “Vance grew incandescent when Zelensky, responding to the vice president’s call for ‘diplomacy,’ rattled off examples of Vladimir Putin’s habit of breaking agreements. Zelensky publicly debated the merits of Trump’s preferred negotiating strategy. And Trump alternated between condemning Zelensky for ‘gambling with World War III,’ Obama for insufficiently standing up to Putin, and the Democrats and media for accusing him of colluding with Russia. Shortly thereafter, Zelensky left the White House without signing the agreed-upon minerals deal.”

Vance is no doubt eager to talk tough to Europeans. But Zelensky lost his composure, and as a result, “the transatlantic partnership is more unsettled now than it has been in decades,” writes Watson.

As one prominent European conservative told me, Europe is facing a major dilemma: It wants to maintain its generous welfare state, transition its energy supply to renewables, and rearm quickly. But it cannot afford to do all three.

Like most of the Western world, Europe dramatically decreased its military spending after the Cold War. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Britain, France, and Germany spent more than 2.5 percent of GDP on defense. By 2014, Britain and Germany had roughly halved their spending as a share of their economy, and the French had cut theirs by a third.

Trump’s public downgrading of Europe—and his Oval Office spat with Zelensky—may have injected some realism into European politics. In January, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte told the European Parliament, “European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health and social security systems, and we need only a small fraction of that money to make defense much stronger.” Several high-ranking Europeans essentially announced they were abandoning the Green Deal this week.

One of the ironies of Europe’s dilemma is that if Europe acts responsibly, the Trump team will be more willing to chip in on Europe’s defense. But to do that, they’ll have to choose which other goals to abandon, fast.

READ MORE: Europe’s Free Ride Comes to an End

Roughly a month ago, the Trump Justice Department pledged to “root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses” through a newly formed task force. Soon, the fine folks at Columbia University will receive a visit from its leaders.

The task force’s head, senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights Leo Terrell, on Thursday notified Columbia and nine other schools “that they may have violated federal law by failing to protect Jewish students and faculty from illegal discrimination,” reports our Jessica Costescu. “Terrell said the multi-agency task force will meet with university leadership, impacted students and staff, local law enforcement, and community members to gather information about incidents” and weigh disciplinary actions.

In addition to Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, UCLA, and UC Berkeley—all bastions of campus radicalism—will receive visits from Terrell and his team. At Columbia, it comes amid an ongoing, high-profile incident of campus anti-Semitism: Student radicals at Columbia and Barnard stormed a campus building and sent a security guard to the hospital just days ago.

Public safety officers quickly called the police, though Barnard leaders declined to allow officers to enter campus. The task force has its work cut out for it.

READ MORE: Trump Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism Announces Visits to Columbia, Nine Other Schools

John Morgan, founder of the prominent national law firm Morgan & Morgan, hosted glitzy fundraisers for Joe Biden and stood by the octogenarian even after his disastrous debate performance. He flew Frank Biden to the presidential inauguration in 2021 on his private jet. And, bizarrely, his firm has worked for red states like Kansas and Iowa on trial cases.

Kansas attorney general Kris Kobach fired Morgan’s firm from such a case in March 2023, saying its performance “was not up to what we expected.” He then made a standard request, asking the firm for all of the records it had compiled while working on the case. Morgan’s firm “stonewalled the request,” citing “products we are not returning in the form of spreadsheets, deficiency notes, and transcripts,” emails obtained by our Chuck Ross show.

“The revelation comes amid a rough patch for the Florida-based Morgan & Morgan, which handles cases ranging from slip and fall accidents to dog bites to environmental cases,” writes Ross. “Last month, a federal judge fined three Morgan & Morgan attorneys for citing fake cases generated by an AI chatbot as part of a personal injury lawsuit against Walmart.

“The ethics concerns and political leanings could raise red flags for other Republican states and municipalities in business with Morgan & Morgan.”

READ MORE: ‘Wildly Unethical’: Biden Donor’s Law Firm Attacked Republican Client, Withheld Legal Docs

Away from the Beacon:

• The Trump State Department approved $3 billion in bombs, weapons, and bulldozers to Israel, citing an “emergency” need that waives congressional review. Buckle up, Hamas.
• The Washington Post has lost more than 75,000 subscribers since Free Beacon Man of the Year Jeff Bezos dared to direct his paper’s opinion section to champion freedom and capitalism. Once they start their righteous editorializing, we have no doubt sensible Americans will find their way back to a once great—and, hopefully, soon to be great again—American newspaper.

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Having been shocked by Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s negotiations with Russia, the great and the good in Europe are descending on Washington to understand what the Trump administration is up to. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, are merely the most well-known figures to cross the pond in the past few days.

Yesterday’s tumultuous Oval Office meeting between presidents Trump and Zelensky revealed the confusion and emotion of the moment. Vance grew incandescent when Zelensky, responding to the vice president’s call for “diplomacy,” rattled off examples of Vladimir Putin’s habit of breaking agreements. Zelensky publicly debated the merits of Trump’s preferred negotiating strategy. And Trump alternated between condemning Zelensky for “gambling with World War III,” Obama for insufficiently standing up to Putin, and the Democrats and media for accusing him of colluding with Russia. Shortly thereafter, Zelensky left the White House without signing the agreed-upon minerals deal.

Many of Trump’s comments to Zelensky apply, in his mind, to all of Europe. “You don’t have the cards. With us, you have the cards.” And despite Ukraine’s bravery, “I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States.” Trump clearly wants a deal, and told Zelensky to return when he is “ready for peace.” Vance, for his part, is eager to talk tough to Europeans. Zelensky lost his composure.

As a result, the transatlantic partnership is more unsettled now than it has been in decades. As one prominent European conservative told me, Europe is facing a major dilemma: It wants to maintain its generous welfare state, transition its energy supply to renewables, and rearm quickly. But it cannot afford to do all three.

Like most of the Western world, Europe dramatically decreased its military spending after the Cold War. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Britain, France, and Germany spent more than 2.5 percent of GDP on defense. By 2014, Britain and Germany had roughly halved their spending as a share of their economy, and the French had cut theirs by a third.

For the West Europeans, this seemed like common sense. Their neighborhood was calm, particularly once the Balkan wars of the 1990s stopped, and many on both sides of the Atlantic hoped that trade and investment would gradually pull Russia into the Western camp. To mainstream Europeans and the American left, this freed up resources for social programs and more ambitious projects, like reversing the rise of the ocean’s tides and healing the planet.

Unfortunately, Russia refused to be wooed and the climate continued to change. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, NATO’s members agreed to spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense by 2024. That number became a major point of contention during Trump’s first term: He insisted that the Europeans honor their agreement and stop enriching Russia through projects like the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and German chancellor Angela Merkel said no. When Russia attacked Ukraine again in 2022, the Europeans woke up to the threat and their defense spending surged by over 30 percent.

Europe’s NATO members should hit their promised spending target in 2025—a year behind schedule—but the Trump team has clearly run out of patience. After decades of mooching off American defense spending, in their view, it is past time for the Europeans to pay for their security. This is not a fringe position in American politics. John F. Kennedy said, “we shall pay any price, bear any burden … to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” but even he pressured the Europeans to spend more on defense.

The tragedy is that the Trump team’s actions may do the most damage to the most responsible Europeans. The Central and Eastern Europeans are much closer to Russia than the Western Europeans, so their security environment has never seemed nearly as warm and cozy. Unsurprisingly, they are also much more willing to invest in defense. Poland’s defense burden is heavier than America’s, which is why Trump said yesterday, “I am very committed to Poland.”

The European Union is notoriously slow and ponderous, so many European states have gotten ahead of it. Britain is boosting its military spending by cutting foreign aid, following close behind Denmark, Latvia, and Lithuania. Macron is contemplating more than doubling the French defense budget, despite France’s huge debt.

That is not enough. Two researchers at the Bruegel think tank estimate that Europe would need to spend about 250 million euros to replace American capabilities. “This is more combat power than currently exists in the French, German, Italian and British land forces combined,” they note. It’s about half the cost of the decarbonizing European Green Deal.

The major laggard is, as usual, Germany. Presumptive chancellor Friedrich Merz is clear about the need. But he cannot form a government without partners, and none of his partners are likely to be of much help on defense issues.

Trump’s public downgrading of Europe—and his Oval Office spat with Zelensky—may have injected some realism into European politics. In January, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte told the European Parliament, “European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health and social security systems, and we need only a small fraction of that money to make defense much stronger.” Several high-ranking Europeans essentially announced they were abandoning the Green Deal this week.

One of the ironies of Europe’s dilemma is that if Europe acts responsibly, the Trump team will be more willing to chip in on Europe’s defense. But to do that, they’ll have to choose which other goals to abandon, fast.

Another is that the Trump team is gambling that Europe is too inconsequential to fear offending. But that may not be the case if they succeed. And America will have fewer friends there, no matter what.

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The Trump administration’s task force to combat anti-Semitism will visit Columbia University and nine other schools that have faced anti-Semitic incidents following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

The task force’s head, senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights Leo Terrell, on Thursday notified the 10 universities that they may have violated federal law by failing to protect Jewish students and faculty from illegal discrimination, according to the Justice Department. Terrell said the multi-agency task force will meet with university leadership, impacted students and staff, local law enforcement, and community members to gather information about incidents. He’ll also consider whether any disciplinary actions are needed.

“The President, Attorney General Pamela Bondi, and the entire Administration are committed to ensuring that no one should feel unsafe or unwelcome on campus because of their religion,” Terrell said. “The Task Force’s mandate is to bring the full force of the federal government to bear in our effort to eradicate Anti-Semitism, particularly in schools. These visits are just one of many steps this Administration is taking to deliver on that commitment.”

The Justice Department launched the task force earlier this month “to root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.” It stems from an executive order President Donald Trump signed in January intended to take “forceful and unprecedented steps to combat anti-Semitism.”

Four of the schools that the task force is visiting—Columbia, the University of California, Berkeley, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota—are also facing investigations from the Department of Education, which launched probes into “widespread antisemitic harassment” at the schools just two weeks into Trump’s second term. A fifth school, Portland State University, is also part of the investigation but isn’t included in the task force’s visits.

Columbia, in particular, has faced ongoing anti-Semitic incidents. On Wednesday, two anti-Semitic student groups—Columbia University Apartheid Divest and Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter—led a mob of student radicals who stormed a campus building at Columbia’s sister school, Barnard College. They clashed with security guards, sending one to the hospital, held a dean captive, covered up security cameras, broke into an office, vandalized walls, and forced class cancellations. The culprits got off scot-free after the administration vowed not to pursue disciplinary action, shielded them from police as they exited the building after occupying it for over six hours, and agreed to continue negotiations the next day in a private meeting.

The student radicals were aiming to pressure the Barnard administration to reverse its decision to expel two students who were involved in another anti-Semitic incident at Columbia. The pair were among a group of pro-Hamas agitators who rushed into an Israeli history class and targeted Jewish students with anti-Semitic flyers.

A week later, anti-Israel student radicals dumped cement into a campus building’s sewage system.

At Berkeley, meanwhile, a violent protest last year erupted over a scheduled speech by an Israeli lawyer, Ran Bar-Yoshafat. During the event, which was canceled due to the violence, mobs of anti-Israel students choked a female student attendee, spit in another’s face, and shouted, “Jew, Jew, Jew.”

During the anti-Israel protests at Northwestern last year, demonstrators defaced the Star of David and chanted that Jews should “go back to Germany,” among other anti-Semitic incidents. Northwestern is also providing free legal defense to a group of anti-Israel radicals who orchestrated a blockade at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, highlighting a perceived inconsistency in addressing discriminatory practices on campus.

At the University of Minnesota, anti-Israel student radicals stormed a campus building in October, used furniture to barricade exit doors, trapped staff inside, and demanded divestment from the Jewish state.

Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles are also among the universities the task force is visiting.

Jewish students at Harvard accused the Ivy League university of becoming a “bastion of anti-Semitism” in a January 2024 lawsuit. The day after Trump’s inauguration, the school settled the lawsuit, agreeing to discipline students who target “Zionists” and adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism. In November, anti-Israel protesters chanted, “Zionists are not welcome here,” outside of Harvard’s Hillel when it hosted a speech by former Israel Defense Forces spokesman Ronen Manelis. The university also refused to cooperate with law enforcement investigating an assault on a Jewish student last September.

At UCLA, the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter vandalized the home of a Jewish University of California regent on Feb. 5. The university has also faced accusations that it was allowing anti-Semitism to run rampant. In August, a federal judge slammed the university for standing by as anti-Israel activists prevented Jewish students from accessing portions of campus.

The task force is also visiting George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, and the University of Southern California.

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CNN host Jake Tapper is preparing to sell a book he wrote about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the “desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration.” Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again comes out in May. That’s 6 months after the election, 11 months after Biden bragged about finally beating Medicare in a debate moderated by Jake Tapper, 15 months after Special Counsel Robert Hur was widely denounced for describing Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” 34 months after the Washington Free Beacon published volume one of “Joe Biden’s Senior Moment of the Week,” and 55 months after Tapper attacked Lara Trump for suggested Biden was experiencing “cognitive decline.”

To most observers who aren’t journalists or professional Democrats, the extent of Biden’s deterioration did not seem like something that was especially well hidden. It was obvious to anyone who watched Biden attempt to speak coherently in public. In August 2023, the Associated Press released a poll that found 69 percent of Democrats thought Biden was too old to “effectively serve” another four years. Nevertheless, most journalists either refused to cover the issue or embarrassed themselves by insisting Biden was sharp as a tack. “I think he’s better than he’s ever been,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said of Biden in March 2024. “I’m about to tell you the truth, and F you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden—intellectually, analytically—is the best Biden ever.” Critics of Biden’s decision to run again on account of his age were assailed for promoting misinformation and right-wing conspiracy theories.

Timing is everything, and this is hardly the first time journalists have waited until after a hotly contested presidential election to publish damning information about prominent Democrats. Trump’s election in 2016, for example, didn’t just end Hillary Clinton’s career in politics. It also precipitated the downfall of two Clinton-affiliated Democrats widely regarded as criminal sex pests: Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein.

The first major reports on Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual predation were published by the New York Times and the New Yorker in October 2017, almost a year after Hillary conceded defeat. It wasn’t exactly a secret that Weinstein, who donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats, preyed on young actresses for decades. The hit comedy series 30 Rock was joking about Weinstein and sexual assault back in 2012. Yet for some reason the scandal remained in the shadows. Ronan Farrow, one of the journalists who finally broke the story in the New Yorker, was working for NBC News at the time, but the network reportedly refused to air his report on Weinstein’s accusers. Farrow claimed that Weinstein successfully lobbied NBC News to quash his reporting by leveraging his connection to the Clintons and by threatening to expose the NBC’s own sexual misconduct scandal involving longtime host Matt Lauer.

One could argue that Trump’s election was the biggest factor that contributed to Weinstein’s demise. If Hillary had won, the media’s desire to expose the Hollywood producer’s crime would likely have been outweighed by their desire to protect an elected Democratic politician from scrutiny. She’d be counting on Weinstein to raise money for her reelection campaign. Farrow, who worked in the Obama State Department, would probably have served in Hillary’s administration instead of clashing with her minions at NBC News. Trump started the #MeToo movement, journalists just played along until Joe Biden was credibly accused of sexual assault in 2020, which ended it.

Journalists congratulated themselves for working in the same profession as a Miami Herald reporter who started digging into Democratic socialite Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal past. The reporting eventually led to Epstein’s arrest in July 2019 and his “suicide” in August. Once again, Trump’s election was what prompted the journalistic investigation, specifically his nomination of Alexander Acosta to serve as labor secretary. A former U.S. attorney, Acosta approved Epstein’s sweetheart plea deal that allowed him to avoid serious charges of sexually abusing a minor. After serving nearly 13 months in a Florida jail, where he was granted “work release” six days a week to commit more crimes, Epstein returned to his Manhattan penthouse in 2009 to host a dinner party with top journalists Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos. Then he just carried on with his sex trafficking operation while funneling millions of dollars to Ivy League universities. Harvard gave Epstein his own office, which he visited frequently after being ordered to register as a sex offender.

The media’s reluctance to report on Epstein’s crimes, which weren’t exactly a secret, was not surprising given the pervert’s close ties to powerful Democrats and media executives. Former president Bill Clinton was a longtime pal who flew with Epstein on his private jet, affectionately known as the “Lolita Express.” Epstein’s criminal associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, was a guest at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding in 2010. Maxwell is currently serving 20 years in federal prison for sex trafficking. Some journalists attempted to report on Epstein’s predatory behavior only to have their stories spiked after Epstein complained to their bosses. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter removed credible allegations of sexual assault from a 2002 profile of Epstein by journalist Vicki Ward.

Bottom line: What in the Actual F— Is Wrong With These People?

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The Georgia Senate introduced a resolution Thursday to investigate twice-failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (D.) and the New Georgia Project, a voting rights group she founded, after the organization admitted to illegally aiding her 2018 campaign.

Senate Resolution 292 would authorize the Special Committee on Investigations to examine Abrams’s ties to the nonprofit, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. In January, the New Georgia Project agreed to pay a record $300,000 fine after it admitted to more than a dozen campaign finance violations, including failing to disclose $4.2 million in campaign contributions and $3.2 million in expenditures. The group made those contributions under the leadership of then-chairman Raphael Warnock, now Georgia’s junior senator.

The resolution, which is expected to pass in the Republican-majority chamber, marks a major escalation in efforts to scrutinize Abrams, who claimed for years that the 2018 race, which she lost to Republican governor Brian Kemp, was “rigged” and “stolen.”

It also directs the committee to investigate a $2 billion federal grant awarded to Power Forward Communities, another nonprofit linked to Abrams. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency revealed earlier this month that the Biden administration had allocated the funds to the green energy organization.

Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones (R.), who leads the State Senate, has vowed to hold Abrams accountable.

“The people of Georgia were defrauded by Stacey Abrams,” Jones said in a statement Friday. “She’s now been forced to admit it and tried to get it to go away.”

“But Georgians want real accountability,” Jones went on. “With these subpoena powers, my office is going to get to the truth. In Georgia, nobody is above the law, even if they were a darling of MSNBC. Anyone who broke the law and stole from taxpayers, including Stacey Abrams, should go to jail.”

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Former president Joe Biden’s aides engaged in “a lot of gaslighting” to obscure the 82-year-old’s cognitive decline from the American public, according to Michael LaRosa, who served as press secretary for former first lady Jill Biden.

“There are some things that are true, like the gaslighting. There was a lot of denial of the polling,” LaRosa told Puck News senior political correspondent Tara Palmeri during a Wednesday panel at American University. Palmeri had asked whether a forthcoming book’s allegations that aides hid Biden’s mental deterioration are true.

“Were you concerned about [Biden] running for reelection in 2024?” Palmeri asked.

“Um, yes,” LaRosa responded, saying that he had “just assumed” Biden wouldn’t run for reelection. LaRosa, who had worked on Biden’s 2020 campaign, left the White House in 2022 and did not work on the reelection campaign.

LaRosa’s remarks add to growing scrutiny of the Biden campaign’s efforts to mislead the public about the former president’s mental fitness. This week, CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson announced the forthcoming book, Original Sin, which is set to offer an “unflinching and explosive” account of Biden’s reelection bid. Biden ran for reelection, the book says, “despite evidence of his serious decline,” with Democrats going to “desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration.”

Biden ultimately withdrew from the 2024 race following a disastrous debate performance. His replacement, Kamala Harris, went on to lose to President Donald Trump.

The former aide said that allegations of a full-scale “cover-up” of Biden’s cognitive decline are “a little harsh” but admitted that Biden’s team engaged in “a lot of gaslighting” to downplay concerns, even attacking New York Times polls that showed Biden behind.

Biden’s staff also tried to keep him away from the press.

“The president’s team was scared to death of impromptu, unscripted, unrehearsed, unpracticed, unchoreographed anything,” LaRosa said.

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