On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance, the second-highest elected official in the United States, delivered one of the clearest public critiques from any senior American official to a close ally.
Vance claimed that people in the Israeli government have been behind a sophisticated and expensive influence campaign to sabotage the Trump administration’s diplomatic efforts with Iran.
On his 3-hour appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Vance told Rogan that he had seen “a very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign to try to derail the negotiation and try to derail the deal.”
The vice president’s remarks were based on an investigation by Time magazine that reported a day ago that Trump’s former presidential campaign manager and digital strategist, Brad Parscale, had been hired by global ad agency Havas to lead a digital campaign for Israel, as revealed in Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings seen by the outlet.
Read More: Israeli Defense Minister Katz Renews Threat to ‘Eliminate’ Iranian Leaders
The deal, which is said to cost $1.5 million a month, required Clock Tower X’s team, led by Parscale, to deliver 100 original pieces of content per month including 80 percent aimed at Gen Z audiences on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts.
While officially framed as a campaign against antisemitism, an anonymous US senior intelligence official told Time that “what had begun as an effort to retain conservative support for Israel had evolved into an operation that was colliding with the president’s own political interests as Trump’s and Netanyahu’s war aims diverged.”
Vance was not afraid to speak his mind. When he opened Time magazine and realized that a foreign influence campaign was being funded to destroy the very deal he was going for; and many of the people who were receiving the money were attacking him in what he described as “completely dishonest ways,” his answer was: “Go to hell. I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people.”
Wednesday’s statement did not come out of a vacuum. The friction between Trump Administration and Tel Aviv has been ongoing and escalated in days since Trump signed the US–Iran memorandum of understanding (MOU) on June 17.
Trump publicly rebuffed Netanyahu and chided Israel military activity in Lebanon, while Vance cautioned Israeli leaders that they risk losing what he termed their “only remaining major ally.”
Read More: When Trump and Netanyahu Are On Different Paths
At the G7 Summit in France, he said that Netanyahu has got “a little excited” over the attacks on Lebanon, adding that, “Too many people have been killed. You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they’re not all Hezbollah.”
The memorandum of understanding prepared to broker an end to the war between US and Iran was not presented to the Israeli government; another new sign of divergence between Washington and Tel Aviv.
Vance also said that he was not worried about foreign governments trying to influence US policy because “a lot of foreign governments do that.”
But he was concerned that the US government would let foreign pressure sway US policies. He charged that certain figures within the Israeli system are pushing for the war to continue “not towards any objective, but just indefinitely.”
The Israeli Prime Minister’s office offered no comment. A White House spokesman said it did not have any knowledge of the Parscale campaign.
