A top Trump national security official may have revealed who the government’s pre-election security push is really aimed at, just days before the midterms.
White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka said in an interview with The Epoch Times that the government must act “whenever” conservative commentator Tucker Carlson “posts a new anti-American interview,” independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Friday in his Substack newsletter.
Gorka was responding to a question about how the government could address foreign influence operations on social media platforms such as TikTok. He waved off what he called the “knee-jerk” impulse to invoke the First Amendment, insisting “there are things we have to do if there’s a threat to national security that actually comports with the U.S. Constitution.”
Carlson, a former Trump ally who has become one of the president’s loudest right-wing detractors, has broken sharply with the administration over the Iran war. Gorka zeroed in on that criticism, pointing to “any of his recent rants about, you know, the justified war against the Islamo-fascist regime in Iran” and urging the audience to “watch the speed with which posts like that are accelerated in ways that human beings can’t.”
He went on to cast much of the online pushback against the Trump administration as foreign-driven.
“There are countries in whose interest it is to amplify artificially those voices that undermine the duly elected administration and commander-in-chief of the United States,” Gorka said. “Whether it’s China, whether it’s Iran, whether it’s Russia, they want to see more of this. It’s not organic, so they have to artificially accelerate it.”
Klippenstein noted that Gorka stopped short of accusing Carlson of taking direction from a foreign government, which would be illegal. Instead, he argued, Gorka’s logic is more sweeping and more alarming, since it turns any American whose criticism of the war or the president catches fire into a possible target for the government’s counter-influence machinery, which Klippenstein warned amounts to censorship.
Gorka’s comments follow months of attacks on Carlson from Trump’s orbit over his war criticism. In March, far-right activist Laura Loomer, a Trump confidante, accused Carlson of trying to sabotage Republicans in the midterms after previously pushing then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to treat him as a “national security threat.” In April, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former White House press secretary, called Carlson’s daily “misinformation” “dangerous” in an interview with CNBC.
Trump went further in May, posting that coverage suggesting Iran was holding its own militarily against the U.S. amounted to “virtual TREASON” and accusing news outlets of “aiding and abetting the enemy.”
Klippenstein, whose piece is the fifth installment in a series examining the national security apparatus around the midterms, predicted the Trump administration will lean even harder on foreign meddling claims if Tuesday’s elections don’t break Trump’s way, an outcome he said polling suggests is likely.
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