The Democratic senator for Minnesota, Al Franken, has accused Donald Trump of launching an antisemitic TV advertisement along the lines of the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion.



Franken, who is Jewish, said he immediately was struck by what he called “a German shepherd whistle, a dog whistle” in a new two-minute advert from the Trump campaign, launched as the countdown to Tuesday’s election intensifies.

The film features lurid shots of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve interspersed with images of three prominent Jewish people: Janet Yellen, who chairs the Federal Reserve, the progressive financier George Soros and the Goldman Sachs chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein.

“The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election,” Trump is heard saying in the advert. “For those who control the levers of power in Washington and for the global special interests, they partner with these people that don’t have your good in mind.”

Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Franken told host Jake Tapper the advert was acting as a “dog whistle to a certain group in the United States”. He called the political commercial “an appeal to some of the worse elements in our society in the closing argument” of the election.

“I’m Jewish, so maybe I’m sensitive to it. But it clearly had an Elders of Zion feel to it, the international banking crisis conspiracy.”

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a fabricated text first published in 1903 that circulated around Europe disseminating a vicious conspiracy about a Jewish plot for world domination over the economy and culture.

The Trump campaign, which has links to the so-called “alt-right” extreme conservative movement, has been accused of pandering to antisemitism in the past, despite the candidate’s daughter Ivanka being Jewish, having converted when she married the investor and New York Observer owner Jared Kushner.

Senior advisers to the Republican presidential candidate have been caught out retweeting anti-Jewish rants. In July, Trump himself sparked controversy when he criticized his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, in a tweet alongside images of money and an image resembling the Star of David.

In February, Trump was slow to disavow support from the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and now Louisiana Senate candidate David Duke.

In a statement released on Sunday, Anti-Defamation League chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt said: “Whether intentional or not, the images and rhetoric in this ad touch on subjects that anti-Semites have used for ages. This needs to stop.”

In response, Jason Greenblatt, chief legal officer of the Trump Organization and co-chair of the candidate’s Israel advisory committee, said: “The ADL should focus on real antisemitism and hatred, and not try to find any where none exist.”

He added: “Mr Trump’s message and all of the behaviour that I have witnessed over the two decades that I have known him have consistently been pro-Jewish and pro-Israel and accusations otherwise are completely off-base.”

Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said also “denounced” the ad “in the strongest possible terms”, for using “contemptuous and historically anti-Semitic tropes”.

Franken, a former Saturday Night Live writer and performer, raised the controversy over the advert as Trump prepared to campaign on Sunday in the US senator’s own state.

The choice of campaign stop was a surprise given that the state has not voted Republican in a presidential election since the Richard Nixon landslide of 1972, but it reflected a bullish belief in the Trump camp that traditionally Democratic states are now in play.

Franken was speaking before the release on Sunday of a letter from FBI director James Comey, who said no criminal wrongdoing had been found in a new review of emails sent by Clinton using a private server while serving as secretary of state.

The Minnesota senator picked up on recent press reports about pro-Trump elements within the FBI engaging in leaks damaging to Clinton’s campaign, and went on to denounce what he called the FBI’s “rogue elements”.



Franken, who sits on the Senate judiciary committee, promised to convene hearings in which Comey would be called to answer for these “troubling” issues.

“We’re going to have hearings to try and get to the bottom of the rogue element in the FBI which seems to think it’s OK to go outside the FBI to try and affect the election,” he said.

“That’s disturbing. If you are director of the FBI, you should be able to stop that.”