The Democratic Party-aligned think tank Center for American Progress recently added former Secretary of State Antony Blinken to their board of directors—quietly, with no public announcement.
In 2024, ProPublica reported, based on leaked documents, that two U.S. government bodies—USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration—concluded that Israel was intentionally blocking food and medicine deliveries to Gaza. Despite these findings, Blinken’s May 2024 report to Congress stated that Israel was not restricting U.S. humanitarian aid, a determination that allowed billions in U.S. military aid and weapons sales to Israel to continue under Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act.
The Center for American Progress (CAP) did not tout the addition of Blinken to its board, like it has in the past when other former administration officials joined. CAP did not respond to Sludge’s questions about how Blinken will help the group in its mission to “promote peace and shared global prosperity.”
In May 2024, CAP’s former president Patrick Gaspard faulted Blinken for his report to Congress claiming that Israel was not violating international law in its use of U.S. weapons. Gaspard said there was “overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces have violated international law through indiscriminate bombing that has killed thousands of civilians.”
A couple of months prior, Gaspard took aim at the State Department for its “gross disregard of overwhelming evidence and a dangerous precedent in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy” in its claim that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not violating international law. Gaspard’s statement went on to call for a halt to offensive weapons sales to Israel in the conflict: “The United States, by its own imposed standards, cannot heedlessly deliver offensive weapons as the Israeli government continues to bombard and starve innocents on a mass scale.”
Gaspard was replaced as CAP’s president and CEO this past February by the group’s former president and CEO Neera Tanden, after her time in the Biden administration. Two sources told Jewish Insider that the move was an involuntary demotion for Gaspard, who is now a CAP distinguished senior fellow. The sources drew attention to Gaspard's criticism of Israel’s military actions in Gaza as playing a part in the change at the think tank, whose 501(c)3 arm has a roughly $50 million annual budget.
Also recently, CAP posted a note saying it would no longer list its donors publicly, in what it calls a “temporary protective step” due to the appearance of retaliation by the Trump administration. Foreign policy watchdogs told Sludge that think tanks like CAP, which weighs in regularly on foreign policy and defense topics, should not be embracing “dark money” donations and their potential for conflicts of interest.
Blinken was previously a co-founder of corporate consultancy WestExec Advisors before being appointed to be President Biden’s top diplomat. At the firm, which piped more than 15 foreign policy staff into the Biden administration, Blinken’s former clients included defense contracting giant Boeing, private equity titan Blackstone, and Japanese tech investor SoftBank, according to his December 2020 financial disclosure.
As part of his ethics agreement before becoming secretary of state, Blinken agreed to divest his equity interest in WestExec Advisors. The agreement, and Blinken’s financial disclosure, were quietly posted online on New Year’s Eve of 2020. Blinken is not currently listed as part of the WestExec team, though several State Department officials during the Biden years have joined the firm. Earlier this year, Blinken got a deal for a book, where he will dish on wars that flared up while he ran the State Department and discuss the war in Gaza, billed as “unfolding the complicated calculus by which the administration dealt with Israel’s military response.”
The 2024 ProPublica exposé sparked calls for Blinken’s resignation from groups including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil liberties organization in the country. Blinken was accused of lying to Congress in giving Israel a pass, jettisoning the findings from the expert U.S. government bodies and resulting in more than $18 billion in military aid for Israel. Commentator Mehdi Hasan called, on social media, for Blinken to be impeached, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) posted that Blinken lied and should resign. State Department officials who resigned in protest over the State Department’s policies backing Israel’s war in Gaza included Hala Rharrit and Stacy Gilbert, the latter saying last May, "there is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid.”
“This doesn’t exactly send the most progressive message about where the Center for American Progress is looking in its foreign policy research and vision,” Eli Clifton, senior advisor at the nonpartisan Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told Sludge. “The reality is that the Biden administration, where Secretary Blinken played a leading role in foreign policy, used no leverage against Prime Minister Netanyahu in what is clearly turning into an outright genocide—but also deeply politically unpopular. For an institution so closely aligned with the Democratic Party, there needs to be some recognition that the policies vis-à-vis Israel and Gaza were—and are—becoming even more deeply unpopular with the Democratic Party’s base.”
A July poll from Gallup found that just 32% of Americans support Israel’s military action in Gaza, a record low, and that only 8% of Democrats support it. In the poll, Netanyahu’s unfavorable rating among Americans has doubled since 2019. Another poll conducted by YouGov, taken in the months after the election, found that the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza was the top reason—cited by 29% of respondents—why they did not cast a vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, after having voted for Biden in 2020. Earlier this year, Blinken did not take an opportunity to distance himself from Netanyahu as a negotiating partner in a New York Times interview. Blinken stated in the back-and-forth that Israel was not committing genocide in Gaza.
