Huckabee hosted ex-spy Jonathan Pollard for meeting at US embassy, NYT reports

Ambassador Mike Huckabee hosted a meeting at the US embassy in Jerusalem with Jonathan Pollard, the former spy who gave reams of classified American documents to Israel, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

The meeting with the US ambassador, which reportedly took place in July and was confirmed to the Times by Pollard and three US officials, is notable because Pollard served 30 years in a US prison following a high-profile conviction.

According to the Times, it is unclear whether Huckabee got approval from the State Department ahead of the meeting. It said the meeting “alarmed” the CIA station chief in Israel, and the White House was not informed of it.

The meeting was reportedly kept off of Huckabee’s official schedule.

The CIA declined to comment on the meeting, and White House officials told the outlet that the White House was not aware of it in advance.

Pollard, 70, was an analyst for the US Navy when he was arrested for sending US secrets to Israel during the Cold War, causing a strain in relations between Jerusalem and Washington.

He moved to Israel five years ago, after he was released from prison and the restrictive conditions of his parole were lifted during the first administration of President Donald Trump. He told the Times that this was his first meeting in a US government office since then.

“It was a friendly meeting,” Pollard told the NYT. He said “a lot of things that came up in conversation,” while calling Trump a “madman who has literally sold us down the drain, for Saudi gold,” in apparent reference to the president’s recent decision to sell F-35 fighter jets to Riyadh.

The decision was officially opposed by the Israel Defense Forces, which warned that Israel’s regional air superiority would be put at risk.

The US embassy said in a statement to the Times that Huckabee holds “meetings with numerous people, and as a matter of general policy, we do not comment as to the content of conversations,” while charging that the report was “filled with inaccuracies.”

Daniel Kurtzer, who served as US ambassador to Israel in 2001-2005, told the Times that the meeting “just defies any kind of logic.”

While noting that Pollard served a harsh punishment for his actions, he added there was “no reason to rehabilitate him.”

Pollard was arrested in 1985, convicted of espionage, and sentenced to life in prison two years later, despite pleading guilty in a deal his attorneys had expected would result in a more lenient sentence.

He was eventually released in 2015, but was kept in the United States by parole rules and not allowed to travel to Israel.

For several years, he remained subject to a curfew, had to wear a wrist monitor, and was prohibited from working for any company that lacked US government monitoring software on its computer systems. In addition, he was restricted from traveling abroad.

Pollard arrived in Israel in 2020 with his wife, Esther, who passed away in 2022. He had long expressed a desire to move to Israel, which granted him citizenship in 1995 while he was still in prison.

The couple was met on the tarmac by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who gave Pollard his new Israeli paperwork and greeted him with the traditional Jewish blessing for when something new happens.