A Trump adviser who advocated for declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization and warned of a globalist “deep state” working to undermine the Trump agenda has been axed by the president’s top national security chief, H.R. McMaster.
But the fired adviser, Rich Higgans, is only the latest chip to fall in an ongoing “purge” of “America-first” stalwarts from the National Security Council.
The idea that an alliance of Obama holdovers consisting of globalists and Islamists are working inside the government as part of a “deep state” effort to destroy the Trump presidency has been a common theme put forth by outside analysts trying to explain the intrigue behind Trump’s first six months in the White House.
But the idea apparently was not confined to outsiders. Higgins, a high-level official inside the president’s National Security Council, sent a memo up the chain of command in May, warning of just such a plot. Higgins’ memo caught the eye of McMaster and cost him his job.
According to a report Wednesday by the Atlantic, McMaster removed Higgins from his post as director of strategic planning on July 21 after reading the memo, which was considered too “conspiratorial.”
The memo alleged that leftists, globalists, Islamists and “deep state” actors are engaged in “political warfare” against Trump. It states:
“Through the campaign, candidate Trump tapped into a deep vein of concern among many citizens that America is at risk and slipping away. Globalists and Islamists recognize that for their visions to succeed, America, both as an ideal and as a national and political identity, must be destroyed.”
The memo described the insurrection against Trump as “Maoist” in nature.
“In Maoist insurgencies, the formation of a counter-state is essential to seizing state power,” the memo reads. “Functioning as a hostile complete state acting within an existing state, it has an alternate infrastructure. Political warfare operates as one of the activities of the ‘counter-state.’
“Because the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national, and international levels, recognition should be given to the fact that they seamlessly interoperate through coordinated synchronized interactive narratives. These attack narratives are pervasive, full spectrum, and institutionalized at all levels. They operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies.”
Several sources told the Atlantic they believed the memo made its way to Trump’s desk, but that has not been confirmed.
Higgins spent a little more than two months on the job before he was ousted. Prior to joining the government, Higgins hit on similar issues in his writings, asserting Islam is in an alliance with secular, Marxist-oriented global elites in an effort to destroy America.
“National Security officials are prohibited from developing a factual understanding of Islamic threat doctrines, preferring instead to depend upon 5th column Muslim Brotherhood cultural advisors,” he wrote in a September 2016 op-ed for the Washington Times.
The exit of Higgins and another official within the NSC apparatus, Senior Director for the Middle East Derek Harvey, could be an indication that the “deep state,” if it exists, is gunning for its ultimate enemy within the White House – former Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon.
Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, has already been removed, at McMaster’s behest, from the daily briefings of the NSC.
McMaster recoils at ‘list’ of Obama holdovers
Like Higgins, Harvey is a Bannon ally. Harvey reportedly kept a list of Obama holdovers who were seeking to undermine the Trump agenda.
McMaster declined to fire any of the persons on the list and, in fact, made statements at a NSC town-hall meeting that “there is no such thing as a holdover.” He said career federal staffers were among the most loyal public servants.
Yet, that would seem to conflict with comments made by Obama’s own top domestic-policy adviser, Cecilia Muñoz, in April 2015. As reported by WND, Muñoz, speaking at a symposium of the White House Task Force on New Americans live-streamed over the Internet, said it was her top priority to “institutionalize” Obama’s policies throughout all federal agencies so they would live on long after she and her boss left the White House.
In addition to the terminations of Harvey and Higgins, McMaster also purged from the NSC staff Tera Dahl, a former Breitbart writer and congressional aide to Michele Bachmann.
A fourth Trump conservative, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, has been fired from his position as senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council, according to a report by Conservative Review on Wednesday.
As for the future, continued volatility could be in the cards, depending on McMaster’s ability to retain the president’s confidence, said Philip Haney, a former DHS immigration officer who co-authored the whistleblower book “See Something, Say Nothing.”
“If you are Trump, you need to realize your people are being purged out of the agencies, one by one, and if there are no holdovers why is McMaster firing people?” Haney told WND.
“The people he’s letting go are not Obama holdovers. He’s keeping those designated as holdovers and purging the people who helped President Trump get elected. So if he’s seeking unity, he seems to be replacing people who are loyal to Trump or prominently supportive of Trump.
“If you are (presidential deputy assistant) Sebastian Gorka and Steve Bannon, you’ve got to be pretty nervous right now.”
More important than the faces of the people leaving or entering the administration is the future of American foreign policy as it relates to Islamic terrorism and its more subtle counterpart – civilizational jihad.
Higgins may have tipped his hand to what he believes a responsible national security policy would look like in his op-ed last fall in the Washington Times.
He wrote:
A strategic reassessment of the entire combating terrorism effort that is free from politically correct nonsense is long overdue. The “Islam has nothing to do with terrorism” narratives have effectively shut down the intelligence process for the war in any meaningful sense. Sure, we CT officers could look at organizations and people and places, some of which had Islamic names, but we could never dig into the political and ideological reasons the enemy was attacking us – which is supposed to be the first order of business in any strategic threat assessment.
He tried to provide a vivid picture to his higher ups of what he believed they were up against, and he was rewarded with a pink slip.
