John Guandolo, the former FBI agent who has made a living calling out high-ranking government officials as secret plants working for the Muslim Brotherhood, may have finally crossed the Rubicon into total outrageousness.
Oh sure, he’s already gone after college professors who weren’t sufficiently anti-Muslim. He’s identified mosques that he says are bases of operation for militant Islam. He’s asserted that Muslims have no First Amendment rights in America and aim only to “subjugate” the nation. But it was just last week that he made what may be his most remarkable claim yet, insisting that John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency, is secretly a Muslim convert working to undermine the Constitution.
Speaking with noted Islamophobic radio personality Tom Trento, Guandolo claimed that Brennan had “interwoven his life professionally and personally with individuals that we know are terrorist and he has given them access” to top officials in the federal government and “brought known Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood leaders into the government and into advisory positions,” according to Salon. It was an eyebrow-raising description of Brennan, given that the former national security advisor is under fairly harsh criticism from the political left for his role in the drone killings of radical Muslim jihadists.
In a sense, this latest claim was different only as a matter of degree, not kind. As head of the Virginia-based Strategic Engagement Group, Guandolo has spent years on the lecture circuit, publicizing his fear that radical Islam has infiltrated the government. In 2011, for instance, a National Public Radio report focused on Guandolo’s false claim that a Jordanian-American professor had links to terrorists and his allegation that many American mosques were complicit in a seditious Muslim Brotherhood plot to dismantle the Constitution. Last summer, he and his organization came under fire again after holding training sessions for law enforcement officials in which he claimed that Muslims “do not have a First Amendment right to do anything,” according to several news reports.
Guandolo also has worked with many of the most vociferous Muslim-bashing ideologues, including ACT! for America’s Brigitte Gabriel, who in 2011 sounded very similar to Guandolo in an interview with The New York Times: “America has been infiltrated on all levels by radicals who wish to harm America. They have infiltrated us at the C.I.A., at the F.B.I., at the Pentagon, at the State Department.”
Guandolo’s new claim regarding Brennan doesn’t seem to be backed by a shred of evidence, beyond repeating a widespread rumor — which was briefly part of Brennan’s Wikipedia profile before being taken down — that Brennan converted to Islam while he was stationed in Saudi Arabia. But that didn’t stop a number of right-wing blogs and websites from joining in, including WorldNet Daily (WND), which featured the “news” under the tabloid headline “Shock Claim.”
“[Brennan’s] conversion to Islam was the culmination of a counterintelligence operation against him to recruit him,” WND quoted Guandolo saying. “The fact that foreign intelligence service operatives recruited Mr. Brennan when he was in a very sensitive and senior U.S. government position in a foreign country means that he either a traitor, which I am not saying but that’s one of the options … Or, he did it unwillingly and unwittingly, which means he is naïve.”
Of course, there’s also a third option — that Guandolo is so hostile to Muslims that he’s basically willing to say anything that seems to tar them. While Hatewatch doesn’t have access to the secret recesses of either Guandolo’s or John Brennan’s brain, we’re willing to bet that that’s the one that history will record.