Daily Kickoff
👋 Good Tuesday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we interview the creators of the upcoming Showtime series “Ghosts of Beirut” and take a look at the Iran sanctions legislation the Republican Study Committee is introducing on Capitol Hill. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Zak Malamed, Timothy Shriver and Gov. Mike DeWine.
President Joe Biden will host a reception celebrating Jewish American Heritage Month at the White House this afternoon. Biden, First Lady Jill Biden and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff are scheduled to deliver remarks, and Vice President Kamala Harris will attend the reception. The event is also set to feature a performance by Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond, the stars of the Broadway musical “Parade,” and a menu designed by Israeli-American chef Michael Solomonov, according to a White House official.
The official said that the administration will “soon release” its national strategy to counter antisemitism, which will “address increasing awareness and understanding of both antisemitism and Jewish American heritage, improving safety and security for Jewish communities, reversing the normalization of antisemitism and addressing antisemitic discrimination, and building coalitions across all communities to fight hate.”
The strategy will include “100 meaningful actions that government agencies will take to counter antisemitism, as well as over 100 calls to action for Congress, state and local governments, companies, technology platforms, civil society, faith leaders, and others to counter antisemitism,” the official continued.
The full Senate will receive a classified briefing on Iran today, including the state of negotiations regarding a nuclear agreement with Tehran. Briefers will include Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, Undersecretary of Defense Colin Kahl, Deputy Director of National Intelligence Morgan Muir, Treasury’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson and Vice Adm. Stephen Koehler. Absent from the proceedings will be Iran envoy Rob Malley, who is on leave, Politico reports. A Democratic aide told Politico that there has been “progress” on the nuclear talks.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee will meet today to debate and vote on a bill creating an ambassador-level special envoy position for the Abraham Accords. Axios’ Barak Ravid reported yesterday that the State Department is considering appointing former Ambassador Dan Shapiro as the department’s point person on the Abraham Accords — but in a senior adviser position with a broader remit than the normalization agreements.
And in Philadelphia, Democrats will head to the polls to cast their ballots in the city’s mayoral primary. The party’s nominee is expected to win the general election later this year, owing to the city’s deep-blue makeup.
Three Jewish Democrats — Allan Domb, Jeff Brown and Rebecca Rhynhart — are among the top-tier candidates on the ballot today. Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel talked to Philadelphia insiders last week to get the run of the race — read his write-up here.
Hours before polls opened, Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) called for future mayoral elections to use ranked-choice voting, in which voters rank the candidates and votes are distributed proportionally, as opposed to the winner-take-all situation in the city today. “It’s nuts that our next mayor could be someone who receives 25% (or less!) in the Democratic Primary,” Boyle tweeted.
And in Kentucky, party politics are spilling into the Republican primary for governor. Republicans in the Bluegrass State will cast their ballots today to determine who will face off against Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear in November. Frontrunners Daniel Cameron, the state’s attorney general, and former U.N. Ambassador Kelly Craft have exchanged barbs that have veered into the personal, as the two remain largely aligned on policy issues. Cameron, a protege of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), notched an endorsement from former President Donald Trump, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recorded a robocall boosting Craft on the eve of the election.
coming soon
Showtime’s ‘Ghosts of Beirut’ examines the CIA-Mossad operation that brought down one of the world’s most elusive terrorists

Imad Mughniyeh is the most famous terrorist you’ve never heard of. That’s the premise of “Ghosts of Beirut,” a new limited series from Showtime that traces the elusive Hezbollah leader’s rise from the slums of South Beirut to his mysterious killing in Syria in 2008. The full story of Mughniyeh’s death, which was long assumed to have been masterminded by the CIA and the Mossad, remains classified by the intelligence agencies. So the series’ creators — “Fauda” creators Avi Issacharoff and Lior Raz, Emmy-winning documentary producer Greg Barker, and “All Quiet on the Western Front” producer Daniel Dreifuss — offer what the show’s title sequence calls “a fictional account of deeply researched events,” Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports.
Joint operation: Mughniyeh orchestrated attacks that killed hundreds, and pioneered suicide bombs as a brutal method to shock and sow chaos. The series follows the CIA analysts who he stymied for decades — earning him the nickname “The Ghost” — and the intelligence agencies’ many failed attempts to capture or kill him. Viewers get a glimpse of the strategic rivalry between the CIA and Mossad, and the tricky calculus that ensues as the two allies pursue goals that are not always perfectly aligned.
A moment in time: The tension between the Israelis and the Americans reaches its climax in a scene where Mughniyeh is walking with Qasem Soleimani, who until his death in 2020 was the commander of the Quds Force in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The CIA received presidential permission to assassinate Mughniyeh, and the CIA and Mossad agents were directly on his heels. But the 2007 “presidential finding,” as the permission is officially called, did not extend to Soleimani. The Israelis, helmed by then-Mossad chief Meir Dagan, wanted to take Soleimani down too, but Washington said no. “As far as we know, that really happened, that there was a moment where the two of them were walking together, and there was a decision made,” said Barker.