National Security Council Shoots Down ‘Lies’ About Staffer Accused of Work for Israeli Government

‘Merav was never employed by the Israeli Defense Ministry, let alone was she an Israeli official,’ spox says

The National Security Council categorically rejected claims surfaced in a news report that a senior staffer previously worked for the Israeli government before subsequent calls from anti-Semitic groups, like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), emerged for that staffer’s dismissal.

Merav Ceren, now helping to steer White House policy for Israel and Iran, is a “patriotic American,” Brian Hughes, a deputy national security adviser, said in a statement provided to the Washington Free Beacon. He was responding to assertions first leveled by Ryan Grim and Saagar Enjeti on the Substack site, Drop Site News, that Ceren had “formerly worked for the Israeli Ministry of Defense.” She had not, Hughes said.

“Merav was never employed by the Israeli Defense Ministry, let alone was she an Israeli official. She did a policy fellowship studying resource management in the West Bank, which is overseen by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, which required her to liaison with them for her research,” Hughes said. “She is a patriotic American committed to implementing President Trump’s agenda, and these lies are efforts to undermine the President’s agenda.”

Ceren is a longtime Republican policy hand in Washington, D.C., and has previously worked for Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.).

Drop Site News, founded by longtime progressives Grim and Jeremy Scahill, beats a consistently anti-Israel drum. Its news report was based on a 2016 biography for Ceren posted to the website of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which erroneously stated that “she worked at Israel’s Ministry of Defense.”

The report reverberated across the anti-Israel corners of the internet. CAIR demanded the Trump administration drop her from the National Security Council. The non-profit has faced accusations of financing Islamic terrorism and was named by the FBI as an unindicted co-conspirator in a 2008 Hamas financing probe. Just days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, a top CAIR leader said the slaughter of Jews made him “happy”—prompting the Biden administration to cut ties with the organization.

The Quincy Institute, an isolationist think tank funded by George Soros and Charles Koch that advocates for normalized relations with Iran, also seized on the report, labeling Ceren as a “former Israeli Ministry of Defense official.”

It’s not Drop Site’s first brush with misinformation. The website has also publicly cast doubt on widely substantiated accounts of Hamas’s sexual violence on Oct 7. In July 2024, Drop Site published a gushing interview with Hamas leaders, calling the massacre a “righteous rebellion.”

The ordeal comes as Israel weighs a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. At the same time, the United States is embroiled in negotiations over a second nuclear deal with Tehran.