On Friday’s Breitbart News Daily, Breitbart News National Security editor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of the best-selling book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, talked about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s clash over Russia at the third presidential debate.
“As I’ve said repeatedly, if there is anybody who’s been in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, it is Hillary Clinton. Everybody needs to have out there, the millennials that they know, their nephews, their nieces, just watch Clinton Cash on YouTube,” Gorka said. “The fact that 20 percent of our uranium was sold to Kremlin front companies, in a deal that was signed off by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, means if there’s anybody who can be bought by the Kremlin, it’s Hillary Clinton.”
“That happened when her husband was receiving $120 million speaking fee from the same companies that bought the uranium,” Gorka noted.
“I have to give great credit to your callers,” he told SiriusXM host Alex Marlow. “Your show is really about the callers. They see through this. They understand that there’s the mainstream media spin, and most often, it is 180 degrees out of phase with reality. If Trump were some kind of puppet for Moscow, wouldn’t this man have casinos in Kaliningrad? Wouldn’t he have giant Trump Towers in Moscow? He doesn’t. That tells you everything you need to know. Reality is completely the reverse of what anybody else inside the mainstream media would have you believe.”
One of those callers joined the conversation at that point to observe that audiences for mainstream media outlets like CNN were given a very different perspective on the debate than people who watched it without such a media filter.
“I think that the real story will be that there is, perhaps, a majority of people out there who simply have had enough,” said Gorka. “Look at the viewing figures for stations like CNN. I think it tells you everything. Look at the figures for Breitbart, the viewers and clicks. I think that’s the hidden story of this election – that the mainstream media believes they still dominate, but I think in two weeks’ time, two-and-a-half weeks’ time, there’s going to be potentially a very big surprise for those people who think they still speak for America and can control what America sees, whether it’s the debates, whether it’s any kind of reporting on any issue, whether it’s the border, or the economy.”
“Just the polls themselves – look at the poll figures, and then look at the Trump rallies,” he suggested. “Again, spin versus reality. Look at the fact that Hillary seems to be leading everywhere, if you listen to the polls, and then just watch the turnout for her campaign events. I think that tells you everything you need to know.”
Gorka was pleased that national security has been such an important theme in the 2016 presidential debates, pausing to issue a disclaimer that he has provided national security advice to Donald Trump in the past, “long before anybody took him seriously.”
“I’m not part of his campaign, but I’ve spoken to this man on more than one occasion about the big issues, such as ISIS, North Korea, Russia, and Iran,” he clarified.
With that disclosure made, Gorka faulted Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and their advisers for clumsy handling of major foreign policy issues, agreeing with Donald Trump’s criticism that Clinton and Obama constantly telegraph their moves to the enemy.
“It’s not just Hillary. It’s her coterie. It is the liberal elite. The Obama administration has done exactly the same,” he noted. “Every major deployment in Iraq, every major operation, has been announced in advance, which is anathema to just the most basic principles of warfare. And it’s fascinating. This isn’t a new thing. Her husband did exactly the same thing, during the Balkan wars. Your callers may not recall, but he actually announced before our engagement in the Balkans, he said, ‘I refuse, and I will never put boots on the ground in Yugoslavia.’ Doesn’t that sound familiar? Haven’t you heard somebody else say that, in this current presidential campaign?”
“Telegraphing in advance what you’re going to do is dynamite for the opposition, for your enemy, because then they will prepare to exploit that against you,” Gorka explained. “Look, even after the WikiLeaks became more and more uncomfortable for Hillary, what did we have the vice president do on national television? Announce that, well, they’ve decided Russia is behind all of this, and we’re going to launch a cyber-attack against them, at a time of our choosing. If you read that in a Tom Clancy novel, you’d say, ‘Has Tom lost it?’ Nobody does this.”
“Mr. Trump’s point that he understands we are at war – I can assure your listeners, he knows we are at war, and he wants to win this war, but he’s not going to tell the enemy what we’re going to do. It’s a very, very, valid point,” he said.
Marlow brought up an overlooked moment from the third debate, when Clinton inadvertently revealed some sensitive information about U.S. response times to nuclear attack. Gorka said he wanted to address this issue “in a certain way, if you’ll permit me, as somebody who actually cares for the security of the Republic and who lives in the national security arena.”
From that perspective, he declined to comment on “the veracity, or lack thereof, of what she said.”
“Just one thing has to be drawn, one conclusion has to be drawn: the whole platform of the Hillary campaign, that Mr. Trump is not fit to serve as commander-in-chief, he’s not stable, he can’t be trusted – all of that applies to her, and solely to her,” Gorka said. “Anybody who puts Top Secret/SCI super-classified information on a private homebrew server, and then talks about our nuclear reaction times on live television, in front of tens of millions of people – that woman should not be allowed – I know this is a line Mr. Trump has borrowed from me, but I have to use it – that individual should not be allowed to run for local dog catcher, let alone the most powerful person in the world. It is unconscionable what she did on national television, and the fact the liberal media is giving her heat on that tells you everything you need to know.”
Gorka turned to the chaos currently engulfing two key cities in the Middle East, Iraq’s Mosul and Syria’s Aleppo.
“What we have is this group of – a very heterogenous military force has deployed to Mosul. Again, this was announced weeks in advance by the current administration. We have the Sunni elements of the standing Iraqi army. We have elements of the Kurdish Peshmerga. And, on top of that – this is perhaps the most problematic – we have so-called ‘mobilization forces,’ which are made up Shia former militias, working together, hopefully, to take Mosul with our brave men, and some of our women, as well, as advisers providing training, providing intelligence, and also bombing capabilities for those forces,” Gorka explained.
“The idea is to recapture the second-biggest city in Iraq, which isn’t just important for the size of the city, but because this is the location where, in June 2014, the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared formally the re-establishment of the Caliphate, the new empire of Islam,” he noted. “So Mosul is very, very important. The problem with this operation is the very mixed nature of who’s fighting. They have very, very different interests in terms of the future of Iraq.”
“And the biggest problem of all: you can launch an attack to capture a city – but what happens if you capture it?” he asked. “Are you going to stay there? Are the local Sunnis going to allow Shia or Kurds to stay in the region? And what happens when the fighters come back? It’s like squeezing a balloon. You can push the fighters out, but sooner or later, if you haven’t killed all of them, they will be back.”
As for Aleppo, Gorka called it a “tragedy,” saying that “the last five years in Syria are truly a humanitarian disaster.”
“Here again, we have reality, and we have spin,” he said. “The idea that somehow, we’re going to have a cooperative Russia assist us in stopping the killing and bring stability to that nation is a fantasy. The whole Obama administration’s policy is based on an article of faith that is, again, just phantasmagorical – the idea that Assad must go.”
“Whatever the desperate situation in Aleppo, Assad is not going anywhere,” Gorka noted regretfully. “As long as that man enjoys the support not only of Russia, but Iran and even China, this is a head of state that isn’t going anywhere – unless, of course, America wishes to go to war with Russia, China, and Iran, which is not advisable right now.”
“So we have to stabilize the region. We have to realize that only a political resolution is realistic. And unfortunately, the current powers-that-be in Washington simply do not understand that,” he said.
Dr. Gorka’s parting thought was to “reinforce that November the 8th is primarily about one issue, as far as I’m concerned, and I think most Americans agree with me: it’s about which person do you think is going to keep you and your family safe.”
“So when you’re going to the polling booth, and please bring as many people with you as you can, remember it’s a choice between Hillary – Servergate, Benghazi, nuclear launch times – and a man who believes we are at war with the jihadists and wishes to win. It really is quite that simple, Alex,” he said.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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