House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Thursday accused President Joe Biden of "defying the will of Congress" and trying to "micromanage" Israel's defense effort for "100% political reasons."
Biden is refusing to supply Israel with weapons to use in its attack on the Hamas stronghold city of Rafah.
"I spoke with [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu myself less than 48 hours ago about this situation, because I wanted to hear it directly from him, and what they're withholding is precision weapons that are desperately needed," Johnson said on CNBC's "Squawk Box."
The precision weapons are necessary, said Johnson, to protect civilian lives during the siege, he added.
"These are the things that they need to do to do the job that must be done to eradicate the threat of Hamas, who is still lurking there," said Johnson, adding that by denying weapons, Biden would not only be defying Congress but also what his top officials "specifically told me that they would do," he added.
Biden's threats, made on CNN Wednesday, are based on politics, and come from the same reasoning behind him being hesitant to call out antisemitism on the nation's college campuses, said Johnson.
"He has the largest bully pulpit in America," said the speaker. "We desperately need him to look right into the camera and say, to speak with moral clarity, to say what is right and what is wrong, and he is unable and unwilling to do that because he doesn't want to offend a big segment of his base now, his party.
"There's an actual pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian wing of the Democratic Party."
Johnson also discussed the congressional efforts to examine antisemitism on the nation's college campuses, saying that six committees of jurisdiction are "looking at every angle of that."
"We are deeply concerned about this idea that the Ivy League and these other universities receive billions of dollars of taxpayer funds every year," he said. "This is the precious treasure of American taxpayers, and they don't deserve it if they can't uphold the basic constitutional rights and the security and safety of their students."
The speaker also discussed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, introduced to ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in the nation's elections.
"This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's the only theory that makes sense, that Joe Biden and [Alejandro] Mayorkas engineered the wide-open border," said Johnson. "They did this because they ultimately, some in that party and some who engineered this, wanted to turn them into voters and they wanted to affect the outcome of the next census by spreading them around the country. We're going to work on both of those issues."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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