Avigdor Liberman on Sunday said he would not recommend either Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or former IDF chief Benny Gantz as prime minister, just as President Reuven Rivlin began consultations with party factions over who should form the next government.
“We will not budge in any direction,” Liberman told reporters during a press conference. “Since Netanyahu and the Likud decided to close the bloc with ultra-Orthodox parties and with this messianic party [referring to the right-wing Yamina party], we cannot recommend Benjamin Netanyahu.”
“As for Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz,” Liberman continued, “from what we can see he’s preserving the option to form a government with the ultra-Orthodox and the Joint List.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin called Israel a Russian-speaking country and talking about ties between the two countries on Tuesday.
“We consider Israel a Russian-speaking country,” he said at the Keren Hayesod foundation’s annual conference held in Moscow. “Russians and Israelis have ties of family and friendship. Our nations are united by common and often tragic pages in history.”
He noted that Russia invited Israeli leaders to Moscow next year to attend celebrations marking the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Putin also discussed the importance of teaching future generations about the war, according to The Moscow Times.

Will Benjamin Netanyahu or Benny Gantz be able to form a government, or will Israel have to go to the polls for a third election in the course of a year? That’s the question being asked throughout Israel in the wake of Tuesday’s election results, which again ended in a dead heat.
There are 55 mandates supporting Netanyahu for prime minister, 57 against Netanyahu for prime minister, with 44 supporting Gantz for sure. It remains unclear if the Joint Arab List, which doesn’t want to see Netanyahu in the top job once again, will support Gantz for prime minister or not. The 57-55 represents a stalemate. But eight more Knesset seats belong to Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu Party, so in theory, he can crown the next prime minister.

President Trump argued Saturday that Democrats in Congress have launched another “Witch Hunt” against him amid backlash over reports that he urged Ukraine’s president to launch an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden.
In a tweet Saturday afternoon, the president asserted that Democrats were attempting to shield Biden from an investigation by going after Trump on the topic of Ukraine. Biden is currently leading polls for the Democratic presidential nomination.

https://matzav.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/AUDIO-2019-09-19-12-28-55.m4a

President Donald Trump has approved the deployment of additional U.S. troops and air defense assets to Saudi Arabia, in a muted military response to last week’s attack on Saudi oil facilities.
At a news conference late Friday following a White House meeting with Trump, Defense Secretary Mark Esper emphasized that the deployments were defensive in nature, and in response to requests from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to help protect “critical infrastructure” from further attacks by Iran.
Word of the deployments, coupled with an announcement of new economic sanctions, indicated that despite Trump’s initial “locked and loaded” response to the attacks – and the urging of some advisers – he does not plan U.S. military retaliation.

Joe Biden hit back Saturday after being swept up in President Donald Trump’s latest national controversy, providing an early look at how he’ll respond to Trump’s attacks.
Last week, The Washington Post reported that Trump pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate a company with ties to Biden’s son Hunter. Trump’s request seemed designed to elicit damaging information about a political rival ahead of the 2020 election.
Biden, the top-polling 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who beats Trump in head-to-head matchups in battleground states and nationwide, said Saturday that if the president did that, it’s only because “he knows I’ll beat him like a drum.”
Biden also challenged Trump to release a transcript of his phone call with the Ukrainian leader.

Sen. Cory Booker’s presidential campaign manager is warning in a memo to staff that the Democratic senator from New Jersey must raise an additional $1.7 million by the end of the third quarter of fundraising – just 10 days away – or the campaign will not have a “legitimate long-term path forward.”
In the memo, campaign manager Addisu Demissie warned that following a weaker than expected cash haul during the early part of September, “the next 10 days will determine whether Cory Booker can stay in this race.”
The existence of the memo was first reported Saturday morning by NBC News, with Fox News confirming the news with multiple sources.
Read more at Fox News.
{Matzav.com}

Sen. Elizabeth Warren surged to first place in a respected poll of likely Iowa caucusgoers released on Saturday.
The poll is the first from the Des Moines Register, together with CNN and Mediacom, to put the two-term Massachusetts Democrat in the lead, at 22 percent. Former vice president Joe Biden, who led the Register’s June poll, fell by 3 percentage points to a close 20 percent. And Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., slipped 5 percentage points to a distant third, at 11 percent.
The poll was conducted Sept. 14-18 among 602 probable caucusgoers in the first-in-the-nation contest, which will take place in February. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

President Trump lashed out at the media Saturday night, accusing “The LameStream Media” of publishing “numerous phony stories.”
“The LameStream Media had a very bad week. They pushed numerous phony stories and got caught, especially The Failing New York Times, which has lost more money over the last 10 years than any paper in history, and The Amazon Washington Post. They are The Enemy of the People!” Trump tweeted.
Trump also accused the “Fake News Media” of being “partners” of Democrats.