Frank Gaffney, a birther, anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist, is hosting a “National Security Action Summit” this weekend in New Hampshire, where conference organizers say he will be joined by GOP presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum and George Pataki.
At Gaffney’s South Carolina summit in March, Santorum was confronted with a question about Obama’s supposed attempt to nuke Charleston, South Carolina, and his Iowa conference in May was dominated by fears about Muslim immigrants, courtesy of Donald Trump.
One speaker on the schedule of the New Hampshire event is John Guandolo, a disgraced former FBI agent who believes that CIA Director John Brennan is a secret Muslim working for Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood. He also thinks President Obama is working for the Islamist cause.
According to Guandolo, Brennan decided to “convert to Islam” in Saudi Arabia as “the culmination of a counterintelligence operation against him to recruit him.” He alleged that Brennan is now aligned with Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the fact that the Saudi government is one of the region’s chief opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood and bankrolled the Egyptian government’s suppression of the group.
While speaking with conspiracy theorist radio host Rick Wiles, Guandolo said U.S. government officials like Brennan want to “aid and abet the enemy, and that is a criminal act,” adding that Obama is similarly “an individual who is significantly sympathetic to the cause of our enemies.”
Guandolo has repeatedly called for Obama and Brennan to be removed from their offices for their “treasonous” ties to Saudi Arabia, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, Guandolo even believes that Obama is actively aiding Al Qaeda.
Guandolo wants the police to arrest members of Muslim-American affinity groups, claiming that anyone associated with such groups are “terrorists,” and believes Muslims “do not have a First Amendment right to do anything.”
As the myth-busting outlet Snopes said, “Guandolo markets the idea of an imminent, pervasive threat to security in the United States has resulted from a conspiracy by Muslims to infiltrate the government at its highest levels and is paid for his 'expertise' through his being hired to provide lectures and training classes on the subject,”
What was Guandolo doing before he started claiming that the U.S. government is under the control of Islamists who are “having great success of implementing Shariah law”? He was an FBI agent who was forced to resign after he undermined a corruption probe by having sex with a source.
Guandolo was serving as an FBI agent involved in the case against ex-Rep. William Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat convicted of corruption, when he was caught being “inappropriately aggressive” with Lori Modi, a Virginia businesswoman government informant in the case who, later said that they “had consensual sexual intercourse” on “two occasions.”
“At some point, Guandolo's superiors saw the ‘document’ that ‘detailed his affairs’ with female agents and an internal probe was launched by the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility, according to the court filing,” TPM notes. “In the document, which has not been released, Guandolo also says ‘he had had an intimate relationship with a confidential source that he thought could damage an investigation’ -- probably referring to Mody.”
Bruce Alpert of the Times-Picayune reports that Guandolo drove Mody “to all the meetings where she secretly taped and delivered cash to the New Orleans Democrat,” and “after Mody told prosecutors of her relationship with Guandolo, the government announced that they would not call her as a witness and scrambled to have the lead FBI agent in the case provide the testimony to establish the surveillance tapes.”
While Guandolo resigned before an investigation into the sex scandal could be launched (the office can only investigate current employees), he now portrays himself as a victim of Islamists who took over the U.S. intelligence community and purged all dissenters.
But it seems that the sex scandal was good for his career, as Guandolo will now be speaking alongside Republican candidates for the White House.
