He’s Pete Hegseth’s Wealth Manager. He Also Pushes “Pro-Israel Policies” Like War With Iran. – Mother Jones

In March 2022, Pete Hegseth, then a Fox News analyst and host, spoke at a dinner put on by the Israel Heritage Foundation, a conservative Jewish group that has worked to boost US support for the Israeli far right.

The mostly unmemorable event was held at a midtown Manhattan restaurant to honor former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, then a potential presidential candidate yet to fall from Donald Trump’s graces. But one notable aside came when Hegseth singled out the IHF’s honorary chairman, Jonathan Burkan, saying they had become friends.

“Jon has a force of personality that you will never underestimate,” Hegseth said, before adding. “He manages my money now. It’s true.”

Burkan, who works at Morgan Stanley, remained Hegseth’s wealth manager after the TV personality became defense secretary last year. A person with knowledge of the arrangement said Burkan works most closely with Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Rauchet, who manages the couple’s finances and also functions as a Pentagon adviser. 

At the same time he’s working to make Hegseth richer, Burkan acts as a high-level advocate for Israeli interests. Burkan is not a registered foreign agent for Israel, but he has helped to organize trips to Israel for political figures. Burkan is also a founding member and director of another group, the Israel Justice Organization (IJO), that describes itself as working to “influence executive actions” to “promote pro Israel policies.”

Burkan vocally supported the US’ decision to wage war with Israel against Iran. In a March op-ed he co-wrote for a pro-settler media outlet, Burkan and IJO chair Joseph Frager praised Trump for launching airstrikes. “President Trump has prevented a Holocaust in both America and Israel,” they wrote. “One day the world will give him the credit he deserves.” Trump quickly posted that article on Truth Social.

It’s not clear if Burkan has used his personal relationship with Hegseth to advocate attacking Iran or for other Israeli priorities. In a brief phone call, Burkan declined to comment, saying he cannot talk to the media about stories involving his work for Morgan Stanley. He referred questions to the company. The Pentagon’s press office did not respond to emailed questions, including whether Burkan’s relationship with Hegseth mingled political advocacy with financial advice. 

But Burkan and Frager have touted their ties to and influence on Hegseth and other Trump administration officials. Hegseth is one of the various conservative figures who have joined trips that Frager, working with a rotating set of nonprofit organizations that include IHF and IJO, has organized to Israel and its West Bank settlements. “Without Joe Frager, I would not have the passion that I do for the state of Israel,” Hegseth said at the 2022 dinner honoring Pompeo. 

In April, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked Hegseth, in a letter and at a Senate hearing, about a Financial Times report that in the run-up to the US attack on Iran, Hegseth’s Morgan Stanley broker “contacted BlackRock in February about making a multimillion-dollar investment” in a defense-related fund.

Burkan was not named in the story, which said that Hegseth’s broker ultimately did not go ahead with the investment. Mother Jones has not independently verified the report. 

Hegseth has denied it. “That entire story is false—always has been, and was made up out of whole cloth,” he told Warren at the April hearing. Pressed by Warren on whether his broker required his sign off before making investment decisions, Hegseth said: “Of course.”

Morgan Stanley declined to comment. But a person familiar with the matter said the firm is legally prohibited from identifying clients, and that after looking into the Financial Times report it was “not aware of any Morgan Stanley representative having contacted BlackRock about making an investment” in the defense fund “in the weeks leading up to the launch of U.S. military operations in Iran.”

The joint US-Israeli war against Iran, which Trump started on February 28 after lobbying by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been deeply unpopular—increasingly viewed in the United States and Israel as a humiliating disaster. The unprovoked attack sent gas prices soaring, costing American consumers well over $100 billion. It has killed and injured thousands of civilians.

Trump’s decision to attack followed an extraordinary feat of personal advocacy by Netanyahu. After failing to persuade past presidents to back Israeli strikes on Iran, Netanyahu convinced Trump to join a bombing campaign, despite ongoing Iranian efforts to negotiate with the US over their nuclear program. The New York Times reported that Trump agreed to Israel’s plan in the face of skepticism by several cabinet officials and a US intelligence finding that Israeli claims the attack could oust the Iranian regime were far-fetched.

But Hegseth, according to the Times, “was the biggest proponent” for the war in the cabinet. A US intelligence official familiar with the discussions told Mother Jones that Hegseth’s support “gave Trump the validation he needed to go ahead.”

“The intelligence community got Iran right,” the person said. “They warned him about all the bad stuff that was gonna happen. But fucking Trump decided to listen to the Israelis and Pete Hegseth.”

The White House defended Hegseth’s advice to Trump. “Secretary Hegseth’s extraordinary leadership at the Pentagon was on full display throughout Operation Epic Fury,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “The Secretary consistently provided accurate, unbiased information to the President.”

There is little indication that advocates like Burkan had a significant, direct role in the decision to launch the war. Netanyahu and David Barnea, then-director of Mossad, made that case directly to Trump and his cabinet. But pro-Israeli advocates can point to having laid the groundwork for Hegseth and other influential officials to unskeptically accept Israeli overtures. 

Critics of Israeli influence in Washington have long focused on groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that help tilt US domestic politics toward Israel. But those organizations, with traditionally bipartisan lobbying operations, are relatively mainstream compared to more hardline groups that have focused on building the alliance between the Israeli and American right. That includes Christian evangelicals, who have long been targets of Israeli influence operations.

Through his work since 2008 running prolific junkets for prominent conservative Americans to visit Israel and its West Bank settlements, Frager, a New York gastroenterologist, has sought to build influence at a personal level. His ties to top Trump administration officials appear to mostly rest on the trips. In a 2015 interview, Frager told an Israeli outlet that “our efforts here in America are extremely valuable for the land of Israel, and I believe that this is my tafkid in America,” invoking the Hebrew word for divinely ordained purpose. “That’s why I’m still here, and not living in Israel where I should.”

Hegseth joined Frager at private dinners and trips to Israel in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. In 2021, Frager began organizing trips through the Israel Heritage Foundation, a new entity he and fellow religious zionists created within a longstanding Hudson Valley rabbinical seminary. 

The IHF, which did not respond to requests for comment, describes itself as nonpartisan. But it has hosted a swath of mostly right-leaning or Trump-friendly politicos at its events and trips to Israel, including former New York Mayor Eric Adams, Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.), Mike Pence, Kari Lake, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), and Michael Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chair now running for Senate in North Carolina. Trump himself attended a 2023 IHF gala.

“You’re talking about people who had prominence,” former IHF president Farley Weiss explained in an interview. “I think it’s critical to get people in these positions to go to Israel and see it.”

Mike Huckabee, now US Ambassador to Israel, took his first trip to the country with Frager in 2008, while he was running for president and courting religious conservatives. The former Arkansas governor went on to take more than a dozen additional trips with him, Frager boasted to Queens Jewish Link in November 2024. 

That travel appears to have helped cement Huckabee’s adoption of the politics of the Israeli settler movement, a success that is evident in an ambassador who is steeped in the politics and language of Israel’s far right. Huckabee has even disputed the legitimacy of Palestinian identity: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria,” he’s said. 

Following a 2018 Huckabee visit to Israel, Frager arranged and accompanied him on a trip to Doha, Qatar. A federal filing by a lobbyist for Qatar shows Huckabee was paid $50,000 for coming, and $50,000 went to Frager for setting it up. The Qataris fund governance efforts in Gaza, and Frager has claimed the goal of the trip was to win their help retrieving the bodies of two fallen Israeli soldiers held in Gaza. 

Hegseth has proved an even greater success. At a 2018 visit to a purported West Bank biblical site, where he stood with Frager and Yossi Dagan, the head of an Israeli settlement council, Hegseth was on message. 

“Warriors are the reason why the Jewish people are free and they will have to continue to be vigilant,” Hegseth said. ”My prayer is that as Americans we will stand alongside, shoulder to shoulder.”

Following Trump’s announcement he would nominate Hegseth as defense secretary, Frager told Queens Jewish Link that the former Fox News host had joined five trips he organized. “There won’t be any distance between the Defense Department and Israel,” Frager told the outlet for an article that trumpeted his relationship with the incoming cabinet official. “No one is more pro-Israel than Pete.”

In his first term, and again last year, Trump named Burkan to the board that oversees the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He attended the 2020 White House signing of the Abraham Accords, and, along with Frager, has personally met Netanyahu and other high level Israeli officials. In December, Burkan declared Trump the “best friend Israel has had.” 

At a May 2024 IHF dinner hosted in Trump World Tower, Martin Oliner, another Trump appointee to the Holocaust museum’s board, urged an Israeli diplomat to convey home what Oliner said were the clear views of the crowd: “The state of Israel has to do what it has to do. Look, we’ve been accused of genocide, so maybe it’s up to us to actually kill civilians.” 

“Take the lessons from Dresden. Take the lessons from the firebombing,” Oliner said. “Take the lessons from America when they dropped atomic bombs on Japan…Maybe we need to kill more civilians.” 

Oliner’s comments drew applause. But after Prism reported on them, they drew condemnation, and later a disavowal from the IHF. In the wake of that controversy, Burkan, Farley, Frager, Weiss, and others launched the Israel Justice Organization, a new group that appears to operate similarly. (Oliner didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Burkan has acted as a public face for the IJO; its website and his social media highlight his meetings with officials including Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Vice President JD Vance, and Trump. Burkan was part of a group of Jewish leaders who gathered with Trump in the Oval Office in April during Passover, and he returned to the White House in May as part of a Shabbat celebration.

In June, the month after Oliner’s remarks about killing civilians, Oliner and Burkan joined other Jewish leaders there for another event, where Oliner appears to have given Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, a self-published book of his columns. It is titled “In Praise of Donald Trump.”

The Israel Heritage Foundation continues on, maintaining active social media accounts. In March, a few days after a US Tomahawk missile killed more than 150 at an Iranian girls’ elementary school, most of them children, the IHF reposted a video in which Hegseth described the Iran war as an unmitigated success. The group’s post read: “A hero!”

Burkan’s friendship with Hegseth and his work as his financial adviser—like the defense secretary’s ties to Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson—highlight the extent to which the secretary is personally enmeshed, socially, financially and religiously, in a culture where views that would have been too extreme even for the first Trump administration are standard fare.

“The whole picture is abhorrent and abominable—that these are the people who are influencing the decision makers in this country,” says human rights attorney Azadeh Shahshahani. “This web of influence of these organizations and people who basically have no regard for the human dignity and the lives of Palestinians, Iranians, and Lebanese, are dictating the foreign policy of the US.”

Exactly how much sway this group has remains murky. But Burkan and Frager can fairly claim to have helped shape the views of key decision makers that led the Trump administration to embrace Netanyahu’s goals and start a war with Iran. 

They seem happy to tout that success. In an email, Weiss boasted that Israel Justice Organization “members have had relationships with Secretary of War Hegseth before he got his Cabinet position. They remain on friendly terms.” He said Hegseth has done “an incredible job” at the Pentagon, in part by leading “the U.S. military to work seamlessly with” Israeli forces.

In May, IJO helped convene several far-right Israeli government ministers in New York City as the conflict in Iran continued. Burkan offered remarks touting Frager’s years of success influencing Trump administration officials.

“People don’t realize Dr. Frager took Mike Huckabee multiple times,” Burkan said. “He took Pete Hegseth multiple times. This guy has literally changed America.”