A New York Times report claims a top aide to Ambassador Mike Huckabee buried findings on nine Americans killed in the West Bank, a charge Huckabee calls defamatory nonsense.
The Daily Caller reported that the Times accused David Milstein, senior advisor at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, of suppressing a detailed staff report on those killings.
Milstein is a top aide to Ambassador Mike Huckabee and the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. The Times account said he pushed to soft-pedal Israeli settler violence and cast Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in a better light.
Huckabee rejected the entire package. He said it rested on no named sources and ranked with past Times failures he called farcical.
The core file the embassy staff produced was grim. By March, that report found Israeli investigations into the string of killings had gone nowhere. Some cases were closed. No one had been charged.
In February, 19-year-old Nasrallah Abu Siyam was shot dead in the West Bank while trying to stop settlers from stealing his livestock. He was described as the ninth American killed in the sequence that drew Capitol Hill attention.
After that shooting, 30 members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. They demanded updates on the investigations. The pressure track fits a broader fight in Washington over how the United States handles West Bank violence, including moments when Republican senators blocked a resolution seeking formal reports on the same theater.
Democratic Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen was in the mix as well. The Times account claimed Milstein steered the embassy toward a letter reply to Van Hollen instead of handing over the full March report.
Huckabee did not parse the story gently. He sent the paper a statement, then posted the full text on X. The embassy pointed reporters to that post when reached for comment.
Huckabee wrote:
"The elements of the story the New York Times is trying to assemble are so lacking in fact that it ranks up with other Times farcical endeavors like the embarrassing ‘dog rape’ story, or the totally debunked story about a small boy being shot in the face by IDF in Gaza (when in fact, the little boy was not only alive but had been evacuated out of Gaza with his mother by Embassy Jerusalem to a safe location in another country to keep him from being murdered by Hamas). I personally and categorically refute the elements of your proposed ‘story’ and I’m surprised that you expect to be taken seriously with such nonsense without even one named source. You surely can do better. You should consult your attorneys as to whether publishing such drivel could subject the Times to litigation for defamation."
That is a flat institutional denial. No hedge. No partial concession. He framed the piece as anonymous, thin, and legally risky.
Milstein was already under a separate media cloud. Politico Playbook reported he sent a Paperless Post wedding invitation dated Sept. 16 that solicited “monetary wedding gift[s]” in “U.S. dollars or shekels.”
QR codes later came down. Milstein said the recipient list had grown larger than intended. Earlier in September, Huckabee publicly defended him after the Politico cash-gift story landed.
None of that wedding dust settles the West Bank file. It does show how quickly process fights and personal optics stack on top of lethal cases involving U.S. citizens.
American citizens killed abroad are not abstract. Families want answers. Congress has a right to demand them. The March embassy findings, stalled probes, closed cases, zero charges, are the kind of record that should travel intact to the secretary of state and to oversight committees.
What the Times alleged is different: that a political aide throttled candor to protect Netanyahu’s image. Huckabee says that claim is empty. Readers are left with a hard fact pattern on the killings and a categorical rebuttal on the suppression charge.
The same Washington debate keeps surfacing in other lanes, from a Senate Democrat’s hold on a major arms sale over civilian toll and settler violence to city-level theater in which NYC’s mayor conceded he cannot arrest Netanyahu and pivoted to federal demands.
President Trump has previously expressed opposition to Israeli annexation of the West Bank. That marker sits alongside other signals that the administration will break with Netanyahu when American interests require it. Policy daylight is not the same thing as an unnamed media brief against embassy staff.
The public knows at least one name and circumstance: Nasrallah Abu Siyam, 19, shot while defending his livestock. It knows a congressional letter went to Rubio. It knows an embassy report by March described Israeli investigations as stalled and empty of charges.
It also knows the ambassador’s answer to the Times: no named sources, no facts sufficient to carry the charge, and a warning about defamation.
Staffers were said to feel a chilling effect under Milstein. That allegation, like the suppression claim itself, arrives without the on-record architecture Huckabee demanded. Serious reporting on dead Americans should clear a higher bar than a thesis in search of a source.
Accountability is not optional when U.S. citizens are killed and local probes go nowhere. It is also not optional for prestige newsrooms that print heavy charges against a sitting ambassador’s senior aide while refusing to attach a single name to the claim.
