Mouaz Moustafa, a former Democrat congressional aide and current lobbyist who long pushed for U.S.-led regime change in Syria, attempted to smear Tulsi Gabbard, nominee for Director of National Intelligence, in an interview with Politico published online Thursday.
Moustafa, executive director of the advocacy group Syrian Emergency Task Force, gave a heavily biased, one-sided rant against Gabbard in the interview, which Politico uncritically published in full, with only a Gabbard spokesperson pushing back.
Moustafa is an associate of former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and worked closely with U.S. officials during the Obama administration on trying to foment a civil uprising against then-dictator Bashar al-Assad by a number of different Syrian groups, including a branch of al-Qaeda.
Moustafa threatened to stop giving information to the U.S. government about Syria if Gabbard — who opposes the U.S. getting involved in regime change wars — is confirmed and baselessly speculated that other countries would stop doing so as well.
“If Tulsi Gabbard is running our intelligence services, France, U.K., Australia… if I was them, I wouldn’t share intelligence with us,” he said.
He also said in meetings he had with members of Congress, he was “struck by Gabbard’s lack of outrage at Assad’s atrocities,” and “came away increasingly concerned that her aims and worldview were at odds with the U.S. mission in Syria and U.S. foreign policy more broadly.”
Moustafa also said he took her and other members of Congress to the Syria-Turkish border, and she “showed nothing but support for Assad.”
He claimed that when meeting a “couple of little girls who were burned head to toe, whose family was killed by Assad and Russian airstrikes,” Gabbard asked them, “How do you know it was Assad and Russia, not ISIS?”
Alexa Henning, a Trump transition spokesperson, called that account “100 percent false.”
Henning also noted that families of hostages held by terrorists in Syria recently wrote a letter supporting Gabbard’s nomination.
“Lt. Col. Gabbard’s views have been shaped by her military service and multiple deployments to war zones where she’s seen the cost of war and who ultimately pays the price,” Henning said. “She is 100 percent aligned with President Trump’s peace through strength, American First vision, which is why the American people overwhelmingly elected him president.”
Mouaz also complained about an independent fact-finding trip to Syria that Gabbard took on her own, claiming it was organized by “essentially the version of Nazis in Syria,” and said she took pictures with Assad.
He also claimed that when he brought a high-level Syrian defector to brief members of Congress, they had to hide his face because Gabbard would be there and they were afraid she would reveal his identity to Assad.
Henning told Politico:
Tulsi Gabbard has served in the military for over two decades and possesses an active TS/SCI security clearance. As someone who served for eight years in the U.S. House of Representatives and attended many classified briefings, there is zero evidence that confidentiality has ever been violated, this is another smear by anonymous officials with no proof.
Nowhere in the interview did Moustafa ever mention that Gabbard called Assad a “brutal dictator” during a 2019 interview with CNN.
Moustafa also baselessly claimed Gabbard would share intelligence with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and “take anything on [Russia-backed] RT and endorse it right away, and would take anything that’s being put up by Iran or Hezbollah and endorse it as facts.”
Moustafa also did not mention that Gabbard has also criticized Putin’s “brutal attack” against Ukraine.
Moustafa suggested that senators ask her, “Why has she always been in line with Putin and Iran and Hezbollah’s views, not just on Syria but on Ukraine and other places?”
He argued that the DNI “needs to play an important role in pushing back against these authoritarian regimes…to ensure that in places like Syria and elsewhere, things are moving in a direction that allows for a pluralistic, democratic state.”
Human Events Senior Editor Jack Posobiec questioned on X Friday why Politico was using Moustafa as a source.
“He’s an activist associated with some of the biggest warmongers in the U.S.,” he said, posting photos of Moustafa with Kinzinger and the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). “Of course he opposes [a] decorated veteran who is against the forever wars.”
Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone News, posted on X: “That’s Mouaz Moustafa, the top US govt lobbyist for the Al Qaeda junta that now controls Syria Here he is in 2013 organizing arms deliveries to Al Qaeda’s CIA-sponsored partners in the field – a program Tulsi tried to block.”
And John Rossomando, a Middle East researcher and foreign affairs analyst, posted on X that Moustafa was linked with Turkish intelligence and a supporter of Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a terrorist group which was previously known as the Al-Nusra Front, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda.
“I find Mouaz Moustafa less than credible,” he posted.
In an interview with Breitbart News, Rossomando expanded on his post.
“Mouaz is an Islamist. He’s been a supporter of HTS, going to back to when it still was part of al-Qaeda. He’s been a person who’s worked with Turkey’s MIT, which trained and equipped all of these jihadi groups. He was the asset,” he said, citing a former close associate of Moustafa whose name he wanted to keep private.
Rossomando, author of The Arab Spring Ruse: How the Muslim Brotherhood Duped Washington in Libya and Syria, added, “But the thing is, nobody wants to look into his dirty laundry. The guy is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda throughout the Syrian civil war were like two peas in a pod.”
A X account known as The Last Refuge, a consortium of conservative writers, posted a lengthy thread that also claimed Moustafa was “100% a part of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
“Well documented by me for years. A tool of Erdogan et al. Mouaz Moustafa. Also, a key element of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Now raising questions about Tulsi Gabbard,” it said.
The last post in the thread said, “What this tells me is that the U.S. Intelligence Community (the Deep and Dark part) does NOT want Tulsi Gabbard anywhere near their business.
“Those elements of the IC funded, ISIS, al-Qaeda and ultimately the Muslim Brotherhood. If Moustafa is prominent in a Politico article, which is full of lies, and his job is to attack Tulsi Gabbard, then the IC is running a narrative operation against Gabbard.
Politico is the same outlet that published a letter from 51 former intelligence officials who claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.
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