Center for Security Policy founder Frank Gaffney, a senior policy adviser for presidential candidate Ted Cruz, tells Stephen K. Bannon on Breitbart News Daily the importance of national security issues in the 2016 presidential race.

He also addressed the controversy over the release of intelligence pertaining to Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

Gaffney thinks Donald Trump’s overwhelming victory in the New York primary was a sign that national security issues are not receiving the proper amount of attention in this election cycle. “I think it’s the defining issue of our time, and we’re still finding ourselves preoccupied with celebrity politics and a lot of other distractions,” he said.

“For a couple of decades, really, if you think about it – I think going back to the end of the Cold War, such as it was – people have stopped thinking about national security,” he lamented. “We’ve been the world’s only superpower. We sent our military around, and it seemed to do decisive jobs, at least until fairly recently.  It was somebody else’s problem, not ours. Our job, as Karl Rove famously said, was to go shopping. This is the sort of genetic makeup of the body politic these days.”

Gaffney praised Breitbart News as one of the media outlets that was “helping people connect with the reality that, whether we’re interested in the war that is upon us – I think it is the war for the free world, a major focus of which is, of course, the global jihad movement – whether we’re interested in it or not, it’s interested in us.”  

“We have got to get squared away on this,” he urged. “If we have four more years of this kind of policy of weakness, and emboldening our enemies, and undermining our allies, and the diminishing of our country, we’re toast.”

Gaffney said that all of the Republican candidates had signaled their understanding of the stakes for American security in the 2016 election, although their policy agendas are very different.  

“There is a general recognition, I think, among the Republican contenders that more of the same is a formula for disaster for our country, on national security and homeland security grounds most especially,” he said.

Gaffney thought President Obama’s visit to Saudi Arabia was a good moment to release the long-classified “28 pages” of 9/11 intelligence related to the Saudis.

“This is a time, I think, for truth to the Saudis,” he said. “They have been playing a double game against us for a long time. They buy our weapons, they sell us oil, they like us to protect them. But the reality is that they are undermining us in many ways, including through various forms of economic warfare.”

“You know, they said explicitly when they were driving down the price of oil – which consumers like us appreciated, by lower gas prices – that they were doing it to destroy our fracking industry. That is a hostile action. They’re now talking about dumping Treasury bills, if they’re held accountable for what they did on 9/11, and I believe they were directly involved in 9/11. That’s an act of economic warfare as well,” Gaffney charged.

He also said the Saudis were acting to “facilitate and underwrite the jihad,” as long as the jihadis aren’t working to destabilize the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

“That’s an act of real warfare against us, and I think it’s time for the President of the United States to say so to them directly, and effect change there, one way or the other,” he said.

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00AM to 9:00AM EST.

You can listen to the full interview with Frank Gaffney below: