A4 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, AUGUST 23 , 2019
BY ROBERT COSTA
AND TOM HAMBURGERThe National Rifle Association
shook up its legal team Thursday
and severed ties with its longtime
outside counsel, intensifying a civ-
il war that has upended the influ-
ential gun rights lobby.
The group ended its relation-
ship with prominent Washington
attorney Charles Cooper, while an-
other outside counsel, Michael
Volkov, resigned, according to
NRA spokesman Andrew Aru-
lanandam.
The moves follow an extensive
NRA inquiry into efforts to oust
chief executive Wayne LaPierre,
according to two NRA officials in-
volved in the deliberations who
spoke on the condition of anonym-
ity because they were not author-
ized to talk publicly.
The departures, which were
first reported by the New York
Times, come as LaPierre has been
working with another NRA out-
side counsel, William Brewer, to
fend off allegations of financial
mismanagement.
In a statement, LaPierre said
the lawyers who left were part a
broad effort to push him out that
he claims was led by the NRA’s
then-president, Oliver North, in
coordination with the group’s for-
mer ad agency.
“It disturbs me that the NRA’s
supposed ‘friends’ — a man I per-
sonally recruited to be president
of the NRA, our trusted ad agency
of four decades, a couple of our
attorneys, and a chief lieutenant —
would engage in this obviously
premeditated extortion scheme to
harm our association,” LaPierre
said.
Carolyn Meadows, the NRA’s
current president, said in a state-
ment there has been a “malicious
smear campaign against the NRA
and our leaders.”
“Kernels of ‘truth’ were
stripped of context, wrapped in
lies, and peddled to the media and
unsuspecting audiences,” she said.
An attorney for North declined
to comment. Before he was ousted
in April, North had warned in two
internal letters that Brewer’s firm
was reaping “extraordinary” legal
fees that were draining the NRA
coffers, a claim that NRA officials
have said is inaccurate.
Cooper, who has represented
the NRA for the past three dec-
ades, said in a statement that
throughout that time he “adhered
to the highest standards of profes-
sionalism and loyalty.”
He said his allegiance was to the
nonprofit group, “not to any indi-
vidual officers or directors of the
organization.”
“At every turn, I have advised
my client as to my best judgment
of the steps that should be taken to
advance and protect the best in-
terest of the NRA itself,” Cooper
added, declining to comment fur-
ther.
Volkov, who was retained in
2018, confirmed that he resigned
but declined to comment further,
citing “ethical restrictions.”
[email protected]
[email protected]Trump planned to “frankly” dis-
cuss sticking points among G-
nations including trade, a digital
services tax and NATO spending
obligations, the officials told re-
porters in a Thursday briefing.
It is unclear how receptive the
others will be to whatever
thoughts Trump might offer as to
how they should shift their own
economic approaches. Many
world leaders blame Trump’s
trade war with China and his
threats against Europe and Japan
for a major contraction in invest-
ment and spending, and are frus-
trated with what they see as at-
tempts to use weaknesses else-
where to demand changes he
thinks will benefit U.S. compa-
nies.
Trump’s refusal to agree to a
joint view of the climate threat
and an agenda to confront it roiled
the first two G-7 meetings he at-
tended, in Italy in 2017 and in
Canada last year.
France hopes to largely sidestep
that issue, relegating substantive
discussion on the environment to
meetings on Monday that will in-
clude invited non-G-7 leaders
from Africa and elsewhere.
Unless there is unexpected har-
mony among the G-7 leaders,
there will be no final communi-
que. “We’re not going to focus on a
communique if it’s not going to
work,” said one European official.
TRUMP FROM A1 Instead, France is tentatively
planning to issue statements by
leaders on separate issues and
concentrate on seeking consensus
on front-burner crises such as
Hong Kong, Libya, Syria and ter-
rorism. There will be an effort,
with little hope of success, to find a
middle ground between Trump’s
“maximum pressure” sanctions
on Iran, and Europe’s desire to
preserve the Iran nuclear deal.
“When countries like Denmark
are in the firing line, you just try to
get through the summit without
any damage,” said one G-7 diplo-
mat, referring to Trump’s cancel-
lation this week of a planned trip
there after the Danish govern-
ment rejected his interest in a U.S.
purchase of Greenland.
“Every one of these, you just
hope that it ends without any
problem. It just gets harder and
harder,” the diplomat said, speak-
ing on the condition of anonymity.
The Europeans “are increasing-
ly separating themselves from the
U.S.” as they struggle to deal with
Trump’s unconventional ap-
proach to diplomacy, said Heather
Conley, the director of the Europe
program at the Center for Stra-
tegic and International Studies.
“If that’s formulating a six-plus-
one, they will do that. If that is
looking to other, more-flexible cal-
ibrations to get their interests
done, they will do that,” she said.
In Canada last year, the govern-
ment of Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau went back and forth on
whether a joint communique was
possible, and prepared several al-
ternatives, according to Peter M.
Boehm, the senior Canadian dip-
lomat who served as Trudeau’s
“sherpa” for the gathering.
Trump was persuaded to sign a
lengthy communique only after
the United States was given its
own climate paragraph, separate
from what the others endorsed.
But after leaving the meeting ear-
ly, Trump withdrew his signature
from the entire document, via a
tweet sent from Air Force One, in a
huff over a perceived slight from
Trudeau.
He later told aides that he
thought the Canada summit was a
waste of time — especially a
lengthy discussion about plastic
pollution in the oceans, and pro-
posed support for a beach cleanup
initiative.
Trump leaves Washington on
Friday night for the summit in
Biarritz, on the Bay of Biscay near
the Spanish border, and the lead-
ers first meet formally at a Satur-
day night dinner. The gathering,
including Britain, Germany, Italy,
Japan, Canada, France and the
United States, is the 45th since the
group was formed in 1975. Russia
joined in 1998, and it was the
Group of Eight for 14 years until
the Russians were kicked out after
the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Hosting duties are rotated
among the members, and nextyear the United States will be in
charge of setting the agenda.
While its core interest remains the
global economy, the group has
evolved over the years to discuss
all manner of international issues
of concern to a membership with
shared values. Its small size is
designed for informality.
“What the leaders really like is
the fact they can have an unscript-
ed, fairly freewheeling discus-
sion,” Boehm said. “They can feel
free to interrupt each other and
have a dialogue.”
In their plenary meetings, only
the leaders are at the table, accom-
panied by their individual sherpas
— in Trump’s case, Kelly Ann
Shaw, deputy director of the Na-
tional Economic Counsel and for-
mer National Security Council
senior director for international
trade, investment and develop-
ment.
Trump has scheduled separate,
bilateral sessions with all of the
member leaders, except for Italy,
whose right-wing government
collapsed this week. He will also
meet with Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi, who will be at-
tending the expanded group
meetings on Monday, along with
counterparts from Egypt, Rwan-
da, South Africa, Burkino Faso,
Senegal, Australia and Chile.
The president has been briefed
for this year’s gathering by nation-
al security adviser John Bolton
and economic adviser Larry Kud-low.
As French President Emmanuel
Macron has tried to head off con-
flict, he sent his chief diplomatic
adviser, Emmanuel Bonne, to con-
sult with the White House last
week, and spoke to Trump by tele-
phone Tuesday.
John Kirton, director of the G
Research Group at the University
of Toronto, said he was “somewhat
optimistic” that Macron could
navigate dealing with an unpre-
dictable U.S. president and per-
haps even find a way to accommo-
date Trump on climate change.
“Most people are serious
enough to know that if you want to
waste all your time and energy
lecturing the president, ‘Donald,
say you were wrong’... then we all
fry and die,” Kirton said.
Others have far lower expecta-
tions. Trump has complained re-
peatedly to senior aides about
having to attend, White House
officials said, and sees his planned
meeting with Britain’s new prime
minister, Boris Johnson — consid-
ered a potential ally on the world
stage — as the only bright spot.
Another G-7 diplomat, also
speaking on the condition of ano-
nymity, observed that Trump likes
to divide the member countries
with spitballs such as his recent
suggestion that Russia be read-
mitted, despite its refusal to re-
verse its annexation of Crimea.
Trump made the same suggestion
just before the Canada summit.“You have to plan going into the
summit that he is going to try to
divide and conquer,” the second
diplomat said.
Johnson has been having his
own problems and may not want
to be cast as a fellow disrupter.
With Britain in an uproar over
Brexit and his majority down to
one parliamentary seat, Johnson
spent much of this week as a semi-
supplicant in Europe visiting Ma-
cron and German Chancellor An-
gela Merkel to try to smooth the
path for Britain’s imminent depar-
ture from the European Union.
The other G-7 members have
their own domestic problems.
Germany, after riding high for
years under Merkel, is facing an
economic downturn. Macron’s
popularity has tanked amid the
Yellow Vest labor protests across
the country. Scandals threaten to
derail Trudeau’s reelection bid
this fall.
What Japanese Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe last spring called his
“unshakable bond” with Trump
has been significantly shaken by
threats to trade and the U.S. mili-
tary presence in Japan. Italy’s
Giuseppe Conte, the man Trump
hailed last year as “my new
friend,” resigned Tuesday.
[email protected]
[email protected]Toluse Olorunnipa, Anne Gearan and
Damian Paletta contributed to this
report.Trump is the X factor as France aspires to stage a drama-free G-7 meeting
President Trump
decided long ago
that it would be
smart politics for
him to yoke his
administration to
Israel and to try to
brand the Democratic Party as
anti-Semitic.
He set about executing a pro-
Israel checklist: moving the U.S.
Embassy to Jerusalem,
recognizing the Golan Heights as
part of sovereign Israel, and
taking a hard line against Iran.
And he promoted himself as the
greatest president — a deity even
— for Jewish people.
Yet Trump has become
flummoxed that Jewish
Americans are not in turn lining
up to support his reelection,
according to people familiar with
his thinking, and he has lashed
out in predictable fashion.
“If you vote for a Democrat,
you’re very, very disloyal to Israel
and to the Jewish people,” Trump
said Wednesday on the South
Lawn of the White House. He was
amplifying a statement he made
in the Oval Office a day earlier: “I
think any Jewish people that vote
for a Democrat, I think it shows
either a total lack of knowledge or
great disloyalty.”
Trump’s use of the word
“disloyalty” drew immediate
criticism from Jewish groups,
whose leaders said it echoed anti-
Semitic tropes about where
American Jews’ loyalty lies. The
president insisted his comments
were not anti-Semitic.
Regardless, this turn in the
president’s rhetoric about Jews
magnifies his transactional
approach to politics and his
miscalculation that his hawkish
interpretation of support for
Israel should automatically
translate into electoral support
from Jewish Americans.
It also reveals a fundamental
misunderstanding of the
motivations of many Jews, who
are not a monolithic voting bloc
but rather prioritize a wide range
of issues — not only Israel, but
also education, the economy and
the environment, as well as
civility and morality.
“He is reflecting a concept of
Jewish Americans as single-issue
voters around Israel, which we’re
not; that we’re uniformly hawkish
on these issues, which we’re not,”
said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president
of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel
advocacy group. “In reality, what
matters most to us are the exact
values that the president is
spending his term trashing. We
care about equality and justice,
and we embrace the notion that
this is a nation of immigrants and
opportunity for all.”
Looking to his 2020 reelection
bid, Trump is thrusting Israel into
the culture wars he has waged as
president. He is trying to make
support for Israel a litmus test —
along with immigration and guns
— and calling Democrats anti-
Semitic to fire up his base.
Daniel Shapiro, who served as
U.S. ambassador to Israel under
President Barack Obama, said
Trump’s expectation that Jewish
people vote for him because of his
record on Israel is
“breathtakingly cynical.”
“In his typical buffoonish way,
he thinks that by [pushing] out
these instructions, essentially, to
American Jews to get in line and
become his supporters he’s going
to be successful,” Shapiro said.
“It’s all shaped by his narcissism.
It’s all shaped by his transactional
nature. It’s all shaped by his
insatiable need for praise and
confirmation of his greatness and
appreciation for the gifts he’s
bestowed on whoever it is he’s
courting. And it’s not going to fly
with this community.”
Trump’s transactional
expectations for Jewish voting
patterns reflect how he views
other voting blocs. He routinely
defends himself against charges
that he is racist by citing the
relatively low unemployment rate
for African Americans on his
watch, as well as the criminal
justice legislation he signed last
year, as if those are the only issues
of concern to black voters.
Trump has claimed a “Jexodus”
movement of Jews from
historically backing Democrats to
supporting Republicans. But
polling shows this may be more
fantasy than reality.
In the 2016 election, 71 percent
of Jewish voters cast ballots for
Hillary Clinton and 23 percent for
Trump, according to exit polling.
Gallup tracking poll data in 2018
showed that just 26 percent of
Jewish Americans approved of
Trump’s performance as
president while 71 percent
disapproved, making Jews the
least likely of any of the religious
groups studied to support Trump.
Trump has been told over and
over again that he is “the most
pro-Israel president ever,”
according to a former senior
administration official, delivering
on a wish list that includes
recognizing Jerusalem as the
capital of Israel — but the official
said Trump is angry that he has
not received more plaudits from
Jewish Americans. Trump
contrasts his unpopularity with
Jews to the overwhelming
support he enjoys from
evangelical Christians.
This official, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to speak
candidly about the president’s
mind-set, argued that Trump’s
rhetoric of late is “a manifestationof frustration of not getting the
recognition and the praise and
the support that he feels like he
deserves as a result of what he’s
done.”
Trump placed an early bet on
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, and they forged a
close alliance, but Netanyahu
faces a difficult reelection bid
next month, and a loss would be
devastating to Trump.
Furthermore, Trump’s push for a
Middle East peace deal has
stalled, and the Palestinians have
rejected the U.S. proposal.
Still, Trump tweeted a quote
early Wednesday from Wayne
Allyn Root, a noted conspiracy
theorist and conservative radio
host in Nevada, who praised
Trump on Newsmax and
lamented that a majority of Jews
vote for Democrats.
“President Trump is the
greatest President for Jews and
for Israel in the history of the
world, not just America... The
Jewish people in Israel love him
like he’s the King of Israel. They
love him like he is the second
coming of God,” Trump quoted
Root as saying.
Jews do not believe in a second
coming.
Trump has used statements
from Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)
criticizing Israel and its
treatment of Palestinians to label
them “anti-Semites.” And he has
called them “the face of the
Democratic Party.”
The Trump campaign’s chief
operating officer, Michael
Glassner, issued a strongly
worded statement Wednesday
accusing Democrats of
supporting those who want “to
wipe Israel from the map.”
“As a Jew myself, I strongly
believe that President Trump is
right to highlight that there is
only one party — the Democrats
— excusing and permitting such
anti-Jewish venom to be spewed
so freely,” Glassner said. “In stark
contrast, there is no bigger ally to
the Jewish community at home
and around the world than
President Trump.”
At Trump’s urging, the Israeli
government last week blocked the
two congresswomen from visiting
the country, citing their support
for a boycott movement against
Israel. The Israelis then relented
in response to a request from
Tlaib to visit her grandmother,
who lives in the occupied West
Bank, but the congresswoman
ultimately decided not to make
the trip because she would have
been required by Israel to pledgenot to promote boycotts.
Democratic leaders have
publicly supported the
congresswomen, even as they
have sought to distance the party
from some of their sentiments.
Senate Minority Leader Charles
E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said at this
spring’s American Israel Public
Affairs Committee conference
that his party supported Israel
and that it was “absolutely vital”
to continue doing so.
“Those who seek to use Israel
as a means of scoring political
points do a disservice to both
Israel and the United States,”
Schumer said, in a veiled
reference to Trump. “Our politics
may be more polarized than ever,
but it is incumbent upon all of us
who care about the U.S.-Israel
relationship to keep it bipartisan.”
After Trump’s “disloyalty”
comments this week, Schumer
said in a statement Wednesday:
“When President Trump uses a
trope that has been used against
the Jewish people for centuries
with dire consequences, he is
encouraging — wittingly or
unwittingly — anti-Semites
throughout the country and the
world.”
On the campaign trail,
Democratic candidates also
denounced Trump’s comments.
“Come on, man. That’s like a
dog whistle. ‘Loyalty.’ Come on,”
former vice president Joe Biden
told a crowd in Newton, Iowa.
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey
shared his understanding of
Jewish values. “There’s an idea in
Judaism about kindness and
decency and mercy,” he told
reporters in Altoona, Iowa. He
added, “One of the greatest
Jewish ideals is to welcome the
stranger. One of the great Jewish
writings comes from Micah. That
is, you know, ‘Do justice. And love
mercy.’ These ideals are not being
evidenced by the president of the
United States.”
[email protected]Chelsea Janes and David Weigel in
Iowa and Emily Guskin in Washington
contributed to this report.Lashing out at U.S. Jews, Trump drags Israel into his culture war
The
Debrief
PHILIP
RUCKER
PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POSTTOP: President Trump, shown Wednesday in Washington, recently
said Jews who vote for Democrats are “disloyal.” ABOVE: Trump
strongly backs Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right.NRA legal
team sees
shake-up
amid strife