The Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney is among the conservative activists who have been on the warpath against national security adviser H.R. McMaster since McMaster fired a handful of hardline National Security Council staffers, attacking McMaster for his cautious approach to the Iran nuclear deal and his lack of affection for the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”
Earlier this week, Gaffney called for McMaster to be fired for his “disloyal and subversive behavior,” and in an interview this morning on the “Breitbart News Daily” program, declared that McMaster is engaging in “nothing short of a coup d’etat” against Trump.
Gaffney told Breitbart’s Raheem Kassam that McMaster is guilty of “rank insubordination to the president” because of his rejection of the term “radical Islamic terrorism,” his stances on Iran and other national security questions and his daring to surround Trump with people who might disagree with him.
“What he has been doing, systematically, far beyond the purging of the relatively few people who have been truly in the Trump camp, who have worked for him, who have supported his policies, who have tried to help him advance them, he has been surrounding the president with people who disagree with the president, in some cases quite vehemently,” Gaffney said.
“I think this is nothing short of a coup d’etat in terms, at least, of the president’s foreign and defense policies,” he added. “They have been subverted by his national security adviser and his minions and it must stop.”
Gaffney was particularly upset by McMaster’s hiring of “Obama people” and former Bush administration official Dina Habib Powell, whom he noted is “friends with Huma Abedin and Valerie Jarrett”—Gaffney has long insisted that Abedin was infiltrating the U.S. government for the Muslim Brotherhood.