A new interesting bit of information has surfaced in Israel’s war against Hamas, which began when it launched a surprise attack on Saturday, killing more than a thousand people and taking hostages. The Biden administration has faced scrutiny over its release of $6 billion in frozen funds to Iran, which has been found to have helped Hamas plan and execute the assault.
It appears the White House also helped to fund Hamas directly, despite being warned about the consequences of doing so. America First Legal published a post on social media in which it announced that it was filing a lawsuit against the Biden administration and was initiating the discovery process to find out what the White House knew about their plan to send aid to Palestinians.
We sued President Biden and Secretary Blinken for violating the Taylor Force Act and illegally subsidizing Palestinian terrorism.
Today, following barbaric attacks by Hamas — killing 14 Americans and 1000+ other innocent men, women, and children, and with an unknown number of Americans now being held hostage in Gaza — the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas granted our motion to begin discovery in our case. We are going to show what the Biden Administration knew about their plans and the outcomes of their policies.
In the document, the plaintiffs claim that a “recent production of records shows that the Government knew its ESF funding in the West Bank and Gaza was benefitting Palestinian terrorists, thereby ‘increasing the risk of terrorist attacks against the Plaintiffs and others similarly situated.’”
The lawsuit also notes that the White House’s “admission that its activities in the West Bank and Gaza benefit Hamas suggests, with reasonable particularity, the possible existence of other facts, currently hidden, establishing traceability.”
The Washington Free Beacon published a report in August detailing how Biden’s White House “pushed through plans to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer aid to the Palestinians despite internal assessments that those plans could boost the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas.”
According to documents that the news outlet obtained, officials working in the State Department warned that the agency could be funding Hamas by sending aid to the Palestinians.
State Department officials in 2021 outlined the concerns in private communications, asking the Treasury Department to exempt them from laws that bar the U.S. government from injecting taxpayer aid into territories controlled by Palestinian terror groups. The Biden administration needed this authorization in order to move forward with its plans to unfreeze more than $360 million in U.S. funds for the Palestinian Authority that were cut off during the Trump administration due to the authority's support for terrorists.
"We assess there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza. There is less but still some risk U.S. assistance would benefit other designated groups," the State Department wrote in a draft sanctions exemption request circulated internally in March 2021, shortly after Biden took office. "Notwithstanding this risk, State believes it is in our national security interest to provide assistance in the West Bank and Gaza to support the foreign policy objectives."
The documents—obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust—show the Biden administration was privately worried its efforts to restart Palestinian aid could benefit Hamas and other terror factions operating in the Gaza Strip. As officials publicly provided assurances to Congress and the press that this aid would be doled out "consistent with U.S. law," the State Department was scrambling to secure a sanctions exemption that would let it skirt anti-terrorism laws.
Nevertheless, despite the concerns expressed privately by State Department officials, the agency moved forward with the funding. The Biden administration proceeded with its plans to restart Palestinian aid, which could also violate the Taylor Force Act, which prohibits funding to the Palestinian government as long as it pays salaries to terrorists and their families. The documents showed that officials were aware that they were possibly breaking the law.
If it is found that the Biden administration did fund Hamas, it would be yet another scandal that the president and his close friends and allies in the elite media would have to explain away. It is not certain whether the plaintiffs could seek damages – especially if they cannot prove that this funding led to Saturday’s attack, which has killed 14 Americans so far. Still, if the discovery process exposes the Biden administration for giving millions of dollars to a known terrorist organization, it could cause incalculable political damage to the president.