Donald Trump is considering naming anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist Clare Lopez as his deputy national security adviser, according to a list of possible appointees the Daily Caller published Tuesday.
The Daily Caller reported that the list was an internal document put together by the President-elect’s transition team.
From her post as vice president at the Center for Security Policy, Lopez has helped popularize the idea that the U.S. government is being overrun by allies of the Muslim Brotherhood. Lopez, who worked for 20 years at the CIA, has nevertheless argued that the Islamist group has worked its way into senior intelligence and administration roles.
“Brotherhood affiliates and associates and those connected to it are the go-to advisers, if not appointees, for the top levels of our national security in our government, in this administration for sure, but going back many decades, really, is the program of this Brotherhood,” she said in a March interview, while serving as a national security adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) presidential campaign.
The ideas promoted by Lopez and the Center for Security Policy’s president, Frank Gaffney, have been used by the alt-right to stoke fears about the threat Islamic extremists pose to the United States.
Lopez, who has also written for far-right sites Breitbart News and World Net Daily, helped popularize the myth that senior Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin was an “operative” of the Muslim Brotherhood.
She also drew comparisons to communists infiltrating the U.S. government during the Cold War, saying the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) was “spot on in just about everything he said.”
Trump used research from the Center for Security Policy to support his proposal to ban Muslim immigrants from entering the U.S. His latest iteration of that proposal involves restricting immigration from all countries with a “history of terrorism.”
