GOP senator: Biden slow-walking aid for Israel using ‘bureaucratic sleight-of-hand’

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas weighs in on the public spat between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden, accusing the latter of slow-walking arms deliveries to Israel through a “bureaucratic sleight-of-hand.”

Noting a shipment of heavy bombs withheld by Biden over concerns about their potential use in Rafah, Cotton charges that the administration has also held up deliveries of fighter jets, tactical vehicles, mortars, tank shells and other munitions by not informing Congress of plans to ship them.

“Your administration can then claim that the weapons are ‘in process’ while never delivering them,” he writes in a letter to Biden, while saying the US president can bypass the need for Congressional approval by asserting emergency powers but is no longer doing so.

“Though your administration reportedly released a ship carrying at least some of these arms on Wednesday, that modest step doesn’t cure the damage done by the delay,” asserts Cotton. “Any delays to military support to Israel blatantly disregard Congress’s bipartisan mandate to supply Israel with all it needs to defeat the Hamas terrorists and other Iranian-backed groups.”