On March 30 Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan found it "neither logical nor plausible" for the CIA to claim it had no intelligence budget expenditure data of support to Israel between the years 1990 and 2015. The court then ordered the Department of Justice legal counsel to "meet and confer" about responding to the original Freedom of Information Act request for the data and file a response by April 24.
The original FOIA request sought public disclosure of the secret portion of US taxpayer-funded foreign assistance delivered to Israel. (PDF) Although "memorandum of understanding" packages, the most recent guaranteeing $3.8 billion per year over a decade, and additional Israel-bound appropriations passed by Congress are publicly known, secret US intelligence aid is not.
On September 11, 2013 journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed that the National Security Agency was pumping electronic intercepts of communications of American citizens to Israel, with no legally binding limits on how the data could be used.
On August 5, 2015 President Barack Obama quantified the possible dollar value boundaries of intelligence aid during a speech at American University, claiming "…due to American military and intelligence assistance, which my administration has provided at unprecedented levels, Israel can defend itself against any conventional danger…" Given historic military aid is publicly known, secret intelligence aid to Israel in 2015 was either an additional $1.9 billion per year or $13.2 billion if the president adjusted for inflation. These are the amounts Obama would have had to provide to meet "unprecedented" combined levels of military and intelligence assistance.
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