The New York Times reports that U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s senior adviser, David Milstein, suppressed an embassy report and obstructed efforts by our elected representatives in Congress to obtain information. That in itself is a scandal—but it’s the gravity of the information in question that makes this story rise to the level of demanding immediate and formal accountability to American citizens.
In March, U.S. senators wrote to Huckabee demanding answers about American citizens killed in the West Bank since January 2022. Among them were the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and Amer Rabee, who was just 14 years old. The senators said no one had been held accountable.
This cannot stand. These bereaved families cannot be asked to accept an embassy accused of actively working against their interests in order to protect the reputation of a foreign government whose soldiers and settlers killed their loved ones. And as their fellow Americans, none of the rest of us will accept it either.
No, Mike Huckabee must resign. And if he refuses, President Donald Trump must remove him from office.
The Times report cites 15 U.S. officials and dozens of documents, collectively pointing to a sustained effort to sanitize reporting about the government of the corrupt and unpopular Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The conspiracy went on despite officials elsewhere in the Trump administration—including the president himself—expressing opposition to Netanyahu’s increasingly radical actions. Milstein allegedly blocked a warning that settlement expansion could violate Trump’s opposition to West Bank annexation. Reporting on Israeli inaction against settler violence was at one point replaced with a propagandistic cable praising a crackdown.
This is much more than office politics. These are matters of life and death. When Washington receives a false picture of violence, the people enduring it lose another chance of protection in a region where time is now of the essence. Whether whole communities will remain in the land where they have lived for centuries can depend on their interests being accurately relayed to the rest of the world. Some of those communities are the ancient Christian towns of the Holy Land, where they have worshiped since the time of Christ’s ministry there.
But thanks to the corruption and double-dealing of Huckabee’s office, when our elected representatives asked about dead American citizens, we were denied a full accounting. Even more concretely: That means families lost access to justice—and to the rights afforded to us all as American citizens.
Huckabee denies the allegations, of course, expecting far more sympathy than he has any right to expect. While he claims to have no knowledge of the scandal, officials who spoke to the Times described instances when he helped suppress or recast reporting and others when he restrained Milstein—which, far from exonerating the ambassador, only suggests to me that he was that much more familiar with his aide’s mischief.
And “mischief” is hardly the word for some of the downright sinister actions now being revealed to the public. Responsible Statecraft reported last year that an embassy cable warning of looming famine in Gaza never reached Washington; Milstein instead sent favorable reporting about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Consider what that means for a hungry child: His suffering can become invisible to the very officials with the power to intervene.
Milstein, the stepson of neoconservative talk show host Mark Levin, also circulated a wedding invitation seeking cash gifts from a guest list including Israelis. Huckabee’s very mature response to the scrutiny included calling the reporting outlet, POLITICO, “Politicrap.” An ambassador entrusted with American lives should be capable of answering serious questions with the seriousness they deserve.
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