For many of us, Friday afternoon is the best time of the summer — the moment when the weekend is upon us and we're getting ready to head to the beach or just relax at home for a couple of days.
For our nation's leaders, Friday afternoon is something else — a time to put out news stories that they hope will avoid major media scrutiny. Case in point: Friday's Wall Street Journal article (time-stamped 4:16 p.m.) suggesting that the White House "is preparing to release convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard" in an effort to "smooth relations with Israel in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal."
But there's something odd about this story — it's not actually news. Irrespective of anything the White House does, Pollard will almost certainly be released from prison this November.
Pollard, who has been in prison for 30 years, has become a cause celebre for Israel and a major source of friction in the US-Israel relationship. Pollard was arrested in 1985 on the doorsteps of the Israeli embassy and convicted of turning over classified documents to the Israeli government. In the years since, Israeli leaders have tried to win his release, an effort that has been defiantly stymied by US intelligence agencies, which consider Pollard a traitor who did grievous harm to US national security.
Last year, in the midst of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, the United States privately broached the idea of granting Pollard an early release in return for concessions from the Israeli government, but the move went nowhere. Since then, the relationship between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has nose-dived, reaching a new low this month with the signing of the Iran nuclear deal.
Improving relations with Israel would be a logical explanation for granting Pollard an early release. But according to the legal statutes when Pollard was convicted, defendants sentenced to life sentences in the federal court system are eligible for mandatory parole after 30 years. Indeed, in order for Pollard to remain in custody, the government would have to surpass the high bar of proving he violated prison rules or is likely to commit future crimes.
The Journal article even floated the notion that the White House could seek to have Pollard released before November, a charge unambiguously shot down by a spokesperson from the National Security Council — and one that would be hard to pull off anyway.
So what's going on here? If anything, this appears to be a case of some enterprising White House official taking credit for something that is already scheduled to happen. Pollard is likely to go free; why not try to garner some goodwill with Israel?
But if this is the case, it doesn't make much sense. It's difficult to imagine that the Israeli government would shift its tone at all on the Iran nuclear deal simply because of Pollard. Moreover, it too understands that his release in November is not the White House's doing.
Considering that a key US ally is trying to torpedo one of the president's crowning foreign policy achievements, it's not clear why the Obama administration would even want to throw Israel and Netanyahu a bone. Indeed, if it appears that Netanyahu was able to finagle an early release for Pollard, it would help him politically in Israel — something that the Obama administration shouldn't want.
The reality is, with or without Pollard's release, we're in for 18 months of bad, worsening, possibly rock-bottom relations between Washington and Jerusalem. The differences between the United States and Israel are not personality-driven either. Rather, they reflect a fundamental and irreconcilable divergence of national security interests on both Iran and the future of the Arab-Israeli peace. Those are the kind of facts you can't wish away with a Friday news dump.
Michael A. Cohen's column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @speechboy71.