ISRAEL BETRAYED: Biden Admin Resumes Aid to Palestinians, Despite "Pay for Slay" (Sekulow Recap)

The Biden Administration has announced that they are about to violate federal law by resuming monetary aid to the terror-supporting Palestinian Authority (PA).

Today on Sekulow, we discussed the news that the Biden Administration is resuming aid to the Palestinian Authority despite their “Pay for Slay” program in direct violation of the Taylor Force Act.

Last night, through Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Biden Administration’s State Department announced they are resuming aid to the Palestinian Authority. Here’s part of his statement detailing the extent of the funding:

We plan to restart U.S. economic, development, and humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people.  This includes $75 million in economic and development assistance in the West Bank and Gaza, $10 million for peacebuilding programs through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and $150 million in humanitarian assistance for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

That is a total of $235 million. That comes in spite of the fact that the Taylor Force Act, a bipartisan law enacted in 2018, expressly prohibits economic support being provided to the Palestinian Authority.

The workaround here is they are not directly giving the funds to the governing authority. First they are giving the funds to another agency who then ends up giving it to the governing authority. It is clearly intended to subvert U.S. law, if that money is knowingly going to the Palestinian Authority once the agencies receive it.

My dad, ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow, gave his view on this attempted workaround:

If you can get around the law by simply having an intermediary shell, an intermediary company, that then gives the aid to the various organizations – that violates, in my view that would constitute a violation of the law. Now, it’s not been litigated. No one knows for sure, but it was clear what Congress had intended. What Congress had intended was until the Palestinian Authority changed its methods and programs to discourage “Pay for Slay”, that this would not happen.

Former Secretary of State and ACLJ Senior Counsel for Global Affairs Mike Pompeo joined us on the broadcast and  characterized the Biden Administration’s disturbing actions as blatantly wrong:

It just is a fundamental misunderstanding of the work that led to the Abraham Accords. It will be very difficult, I think, to certify that funds going to the Palestinian Authority aren’t going to end up in the hands of bad actors in violation of the Taylor Force Act. More than illegal, it’s immoral to underwrite what the Palestinian Authority is doing. To support a regime that continues to pay people to commit these heinous acts all across the Middle East is outrageous. The American people are rightly disturbed by this and I’m glad that the ACLJ is working so hard. Now, more than ever, these are the kinds of things I think we’ll see happen, and we need to put pressure on the Biden Administration to stop underwriting the Palestinian Authority.

This a really bad move by the Biden Administration, and it really does appear that they are violating existing U.S. law. We’re going to get to the bottom of this. We have just sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on this very issue to the Biden Administration.

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The full broadcast is complete with additional analysis of the Biden Administration’s move to restart funding to the Palestinian Authority, further conversation with former Secretary of State and ACLJ Senior Counsel for Global Affairs Mike Pompeo, and much more.

Watch the full broadcast below.