Four days after Newsmax reported that Joe Biden was likely to name longtime confidant Tony Blinken as secretary of state by Thanksgiving, The New York Times reported Sunday night that Biden would shortly announce Blinken’s appointment to the top job in his Cabinet.
The onetime deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama is expected to make restoration of the Iran nuclear agreement and the U.S. membership in the Paris Agreement on climate change top priorities of a Biden foreign policy.
Blinken, 58, is considered as close to Biden as Secretaries of State James Baker and Mike Pompeo were to Presidents George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump, respectively.
He served as staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the early 1990s when then-Sen. Biden, D-Del., was chairman and was later deputy director of the National Security Council in the Obama White House.
If confirmed by the Senate, Blinken would be the third Jewish secretary of state in U.S. history after Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright.
“And he has a personal history with Israel and the Jewish community that is powerful,” a leader in the Washington, D.C., Jewish community told Newsmax, recalling that Blinken’s father, former ambassador to Hungary Donald Blinken, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Georgia.
Tony Blinken’s stepfather, the same source noted, was the late Samuel Pisar, survivor of the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps, who became an international lawyer and best-selling author.
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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