Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Thursday morning!
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President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will travel to Surfside, Fla., today. The Bidens’ visit overlaps with that of Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. and U.N. Gilad Erdan, who will arrive in Surfside this afternoon.
Reps. Brad Schneider (D-IL), Peter Meijer (R-MI) and Kathy Manning (D-NC) will be part of next week’s House Foreign Affairs Committee trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories. Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) told Jewish Insider she’s “not sure” if she will be participating in the delegation.
Some members of the committee were never contacted by HFAC leadership about the trip, spokespeople told JI. A spokesperson for Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) told JI that Castro wanted to go “but was informed this trip was at full capacity due to COVID restrictions.” A spokesman for Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) said the delegation “was organized very quickly.”
Other members who confirmed they’re not attending: Reps. Brian Mast (R-FL), Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), Colin Allred (D-TX) — who recently became a father for the second time — Greg Steube (R-FL), Ami Bera (D-CA), Bill Keating (D-MA), Andy Levin (D-MI), Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Scott Perry (R-PA). Spokespeople for Steube, Perry and Levin told JI the representatives were not invited. It is not common for all or most committee members to join a CODEL.
Pro-Israel America is rolling out a new slate of endorsements today, throwing support behind 20 current House members, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Democratic House candidate Daniel Hernandez, who is running for an open seat in Arizona.
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld died on Tuesday at his home in Taos, N.M. Rumsfeld suffered from multiple myeloma. He was 88.
Podcast Playback
Former Gov. Chris Christie joins JI’s ‘Limited Liability Podcast’

Former Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie speaks onstage during the 2019 Concordia Annual Summit – Day 1 at Grand Hyatt New York on September 23, 2019 in New York City.
Former New Jersey governor and rumored 2024 presidential candidate Chris Christie joined “Limited Liability Podcast” co-hosts Richard Goldberg and Jarrod Bernstein for a wide-ranging conversation on former President Donald Trump’s level of culpability in the January 6 riot, the mechanics behind the failure of the Obama-Netanyahu relationship and why he believes Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) wanted to leave the Republican leadership.
On January 6th: “January 6th was an awful moment in our country’s history, and something that, as I was watching, I couldn’t believe that I was seeing what I was seeing. I think that what it says is, and I said this at the time, that [Trump] ginned this up over the course of months, not on January 6, but going all the way back to the summer of 2020 when he was talking about the election being stolen. I said this all along, [former Attorney General] Bill Barr has now said this publicly in the last couple of days: There’s just no evidence of it. I mean, I can’t tell you how many really smart people have come up to me and say they believe the election was stolen… Once you gin them up, you can’t control it even if you want to… That’s just unacceptable, unacceptable that the president played any role in that.”
Reimposing Sanctions: Christie said he would support reimposing sanctions on Iran even if the U.S. reentered the nuclear deal. “By the way, sanctions were working against them. And you saw in Iran, uprisings beginning for those who were opposed to the Islamic government, and we need to give that time to continue to play out,” he said, adding, “I think it was a bad move by President Biden” to not impose sanctions and negotiate to reenter the deal.
Principles and principals: “There are any number of instances where I could say to you that I think that Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu could have handled certain things, his relations with the United States, more deftly. Now, I agree with a lot of the policy positions he ultimately took. What I’m talking about is how he handled the relationship. And by the way, so could [former President] Barack Obama have handled that relationship better. In the end, I think that foreign policy is about two ideas: the principles that you share, and the relationship of the principals… That’s where Netanyahu, at times, was not as deft as he could have been. And I think President Obama was not nearly the supporter of Israel that he should have been. And you’re seeing in a lot of the House Democrats that same type of approach.”
Top issues: Asked to name the three top issues Republicans should run on in the midterms, Christie cited education, a rising China and the economy. “China is going to be our adversary for the next 80 years. We better get on understanding that they’re an adversary and start taking much stronger steps towards winning that fight both by strengthening ourselves and weakening the leadership in China… We have a Jimmy Carter-like economy in this country where unemployment remains higher than it should, and inflation winds up getting very high. Jimmy Carter’s the guy in the ‘76 election who coined the phrase ‘misery index,’ the combination of unemployment and inflation — I got a feeling that his buddy Joe Biden is going to be getting whacked around with the same ‘misery index’ that Jimmy Carter created, and which ultimately cost him his presidency.”
On Cheney: “Let me tell you why I think she’s out of leadership. You remember, she said all the things she said, and they had a first vote, and she was kept. Then she kept saying to them over and over and over: ‘Enough. You’re on the record. We heard you.’ Does anybody think that Liz Cheney supports Donald Trump after the first set of statements? You think anybody thinks that she thinks that what happened on January 6th was OK? Do you think anybody thinks that Liz Cheney thinks that Donald Trump actually won the election? Let me tell you what I think: Liz Cheney wanted out of leadership. I think she didn’t like it anymore. And when she won that vote the first time, she said, ‘Oh, God, that didn’t work. OK, let me keep standing.’ And then it finally worked.”
Bonus: Favorite Yiddish word? “Chutzpah and schmuck” said Christie, who relayed he picked up Yiddish words attending more bar and bat mitzvahs than he “could count” growing up in Livingston. Favorite Jewish food? The matzo ball soup from Tabachnicks in Livingston. Favorite Jersey beach? Bayhead in Northern Ocean County, where he and his wife own a beach house. Christie, who sits on the New York Mets’s board of governors, also went on to predict that new owner Steven A. Cohen would bring a World Series to Queens within five years.