The White House vehemently denied a report last Friday about a heightened counterintelligence threat, but on Monday night, Vice President JD Vance appeared to undercut that denial with a blatant but indirect admission.
On Friday, NBC News reported that the Pentagon had raised its counterintelligence threat level on Israel to “critical” – its “highest level” – amid concerns that the Middle East nation was “ramping up its spying on the U.S.” The White House dismissed the report as entirely “false,” and claimed the source of the information – two U.S. officials and one former official – did not “have any knowledge of what’s going on.”

And yet, when asked by Fox News’ Jesse Waters “how concerned” he was about “Israel spying on the United States,” Vance did not push back on the claim, and instead stressed that the United States and Israel had diverging interests.
“Well look, obviously the Israelis and I – excuse me, the Israelis and the United States have a lot of shared interests, but we also have some situations where our interests diverge,” Vance told Waters.
“The president has been very clear that while Israel obviously has some objectives that it has, the United States’ main objective in Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, and we’ve actually created the space necessary where the president believes that we can get the long-term settlement to Iran’s nuclear deal.”
In 2021, Israeli military intelligence officers “were caught planting listening devices at [the Defense Intelligence Agency] headquarters,” according to The New York Times, and in 2025, were caught attempting to “plant a listening device in a Secret Service vehicle.” Last year also saw U.S. Lt. Gen. Patrick Frank summoning an Israeli official for a meeting after discovering recording devices allegedly planted in a U.S. military base, per The Guardian.
Vance continued, “Now, Israel may like that, they may not like that, but fundamentally we think this is in the best interest of the United States, so we’re going to keep on pursuing it.”

