The White House Case for War Was Written by an Israeli Lobby

A three-part investigation into how foreign propaganda entered the highest office in America

On February 27, 2026, while traveling aboard Air Force One to Texas, President Donald J. Trump issued the executive authorization for Operation Epic Fury. The coordinated U.S. and Israeli military campaign commenced the following day, striking across the Iranian homeland. The death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei plunged the region into crisis. America was at war.

But where was the case?

The bombs started falling on February 28th. It wasn’t until March 2nd that the White House published what was supposed to be the definitive justification: a document boldly entitled “The Iranian Regime’s Decades of Terrorism against American Citizens,” listing 44 incidents and 992 American deaths. It was presented to the public as an authoritative, solemn accounting.

There was just one problem. The data didn’t come from a three-letter intelligence agency. It didn’t come from the Pentagon or the State Department. The source wasn’t given at all.

So where did it come from?

Over the past two weeks, this investigation — supported by paid subscribers to The Digger — has traced the White House case for war back to its origins. What we found is, I believe, one of the most significant breaches of public trust in modern American history. Here is the full story.

Part 1: The Plagiarism

We owe a debt of gratitude to Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit), who first noticed that the White House statement looked familiar. I verified his findings independently, stripping away editorial introductions and running both texts through a standard data-science comparison algorithm. The results were undeniable.

The White House’s case for war was copied, virtually word for word, from a report published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) — an Israeli-aligned think tank whose original name was EMET (Hebrew for “truth”), founded with the explicit goal of enhancing Israel’s image in North America. The FDD report was written by Tzvi Kahn, a former Assistant Director for Policy and Government Affairs at AIPAC — the most powerful Israel lobbying organisation in America.

The pipeline: a former AIPAC official writes a document at FDD. The White House copies it word for word. America goes to war.

A diff report showed The White House had copy pasted FDD propaganda

But it gets worse. We know from leaked undercover footage filmed by Al Jazeera that the FDD is not just a think tank. Sima Vaknin-Gil — a former Israeli military intelligence officer serving as Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs — was caught on hidden camera explicitly claiming the FDD as Israel’s asset:

“We are a different government working on foreign soil and we have to be very very cautious. We have three different sub-campaigns that are very very sensitive… We have FDD. We have others working on this.”

The White House used material from an organisation claimed by Israeli intelligence to justify a war to the American public.

Read Part 1 in full:

Bombshell: Israel lobby Ghostwrote Trump's case for war.

Part 2: The Author

The immediate question was: who inside the White House did this? The document didn’t write itself. A specific person sat at a keyboard and copy-pasted Israeli lobbying material into an official government publication.

Hidden in the page metadata — invisible to ordinary readers but embedded in the White House content management system — was the answer. The author field reads: Jacob Schneider.

<script type="application/ld+json" class="wp-parsely-metadata">
{
  "@context":"https:\/\/schema.org",
  "@type":"NewsArticle",
  "headline":"The Iranian Regime’s Decades of Terrorism Against American Citizens",
  "url":"http:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/articles\/2026\/03\/the-iranian-regimes-decades-of-terrorism-against-american-citizens\/",
  ...
  "author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jacob Schneider"}],
  "creator":["Jacob Schneider"],
  ...
}
</script>

Schneider’s title is “Special Assistant to the President and Rapid Response Director.” He has a BA in Political Science from Bethel University. His entire career has been in campaign communications — RNC rapid response, Trump campaign rapid response. He has no foreign policy expertise, no intelligence background, and no Middle East credentials whatsoever. His job is propaganda.

How did he get there? Schneider himself told a local newspaper in 2020 that he was recruited via Twitter: “He’d met a couple people through Twitter and they reached out to him to ask if he would be interested in moving to Washington, D.C. to work on the campaign. He said yes… and ended up moving to Washington, D.C. within about 10 days.”

I checked his Twitter interactions from June 2020. At the exact moment he claims he was recruited, Schneider was publicly interacting with someone from the Center for Security Policy — a neoconservative war lobby that has campaigned for regime change in Iran for decades. That same organisation held at least two key National Security Council positions in the Trump administration at the time.

The CSP’s founder, Frank Gaffney, is a former “Distinguished Adviser” to the FDD which provided the source material for The White House war. The organisations are connected at every level. The same network that produces the propaganda also appears connected to the recruitment of the man who launders it into the White House.

Read Part 2 in full:

Proof: Who wrote the White House case for war?

Part 3: The Machine

Parts 1 and 2 could have been a story about one lazy staffer copying one document. Part 3 proves it’s something far more systematic.

Five people write White House articles about Iran, Israel, and Gaza. Four of them never quote a single outside expert. The fifth — Jacob Schneider — quotes nobody but outside experts. And every single one of them is connected to the same Israeli lobbying organisation.

I went through all 20 of Schneider’s articles and extracted every person and organisation he quotes. Every expert, every think tank, every polling firm. Roughly 350 names. Then I categorised them.

Across 19 of his 20 articles, 100% of the non-government think tank voices trace back to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies or its network.

One hundred percent. Not 80%. Not “mostly.” Every single one.

When Schneider needed “independent” nuclear experts to validate the bombing of Iran, he quoted four people:

Andrea Stricker — an FDD employee who spent 12 years at David Albright’s Institute for Science and International Security before moving directly to FDD.

David Albright — Stricker’s former boss, who co-authored a 155-page Iran strategy report with FDD’s CEO calling for “overt preparations for warplanes and missiles to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.” That was in 2013. In 2026, those exact recommendations became White House policy.

Spencer Faragasso — Albright’s colleague at ISIS who co-authors reports with him. Same organisation quoted twice.

Brian Carter — American Enterprise Institute, which is funded by the same pro-Israel mega-donors as FDD. Paul Singer gave $1.1 million to AEI and $3.6 million to FDD. Bernard Marcus, FDD’s largest donor, provides roughly a third of their budget.

Four “independent” experts. One network.

And then we found a plausible route by which the material gets into the White House. Richard Goldberg is a Senior Advisor at FDD. John Bolton brought him onto the National Security Council in 2019 — and FDD continued to pay his salary while he served in government. An FDD lobbyist, paid by the lobby, sitting on the National Security Council. Goldberg then re-entered the White House in late 2024 as Senior Counselor to the National Energy Dominance Council — directly overlapping with the period Schneider was publishing.

On top of that, FDD Action openly advertises a “Policy Support Desk” providing White House staff with free policy analysis, private briefings, and legislative drafting assistance. They market it on their website. The pipeline isn’t hidden. It’s just not something anyone had mapped until now.

Read Part 3 in full

What Comes Next

This investigation is not finished. Subscribers to The Digger have funded the work so far, and with their support, here’s what we’re going after next:

The Vandenberg Coalition. The polling Schneider cites as evidence that Americans support the war comes from an organisation with six FDD personnel on its advisory board — including FDD’s CEO and founder. FDD helps justify the war, an FDD-linked organisation polls on support for it, and the White House cites that poll as independent evidence. It’s a closed loop. We’re going to map it fully.

The money trail. Paul Singer and Bernard Marcus fund both FDD and AEI. We’re going to trace the full donor network behind the organisations whose experts populate Schneider’s articles.

The other authors. We’ve focused on Schneider so far. But Allison Schuster, Micah Stopperich, Mary Wales, and Jacqueline Kotkiewicz also write on these subjects. Their articles are formal government instruments — executive orders, presidential memoranda. Do those also carry fingerprints? We’re going to check.

The FDD Action “Policy Support Desk.” FDD’s lobbying arm explicitly offers policy analysis, briefings, and legislative drafting to White House staff. We want to know: who uses it? What materials have been distributed? This could be subject to FOIA requests by American researchers.

This investigation exists because subscribers fund it. Every part of this series — the data collection, the source analysis, the verification — was done with the support of people who believe this kind of journalism matters.

If you’ve read this far, you understand what we’ve found: a foreign lobbying operation has successfully built a pipeline to place its propaganda directly into official White House communications, presented to the American public as independent government analysis, to justify a war.

If you want this investigation to continue, please consider subscribing. And if you’re already a subscriber — thank you. This work would not exist without you.

Share this. The more people who understand how the case for this war was manufactured, the harder it becomes to manufacture the next one.