United States President, Donald Trump has called for a former member of the National Security Council, dismissed for circulating a conspiratorial memo and known for Islamophobic tweets, to take up a senior position with the Department of Defence.
Mr Trump says Rich Higgins (pictured) should become Chief of Staff to Under-secretary of Defence Policy, Anthony Tata, who himself has yet to have a Senate confirmation hearing for the role.
The move is part of an aggressive push by the White House to staff the Pentagon with figures loyal to Mr Trump and with connections to ousted former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn.
Mr Higgins’s selection comes amid purges in the Trump Administration of moderate Republicans and the appointment of a closely linked circle of acolytes of Mr Flynn in the Pentagon.
In 2017, when Mr Higgins was in the Strategic Planning Office at the National Security Council he wrote a memo that included sweeping and conspiratorial descriptions of the political threats facing the President.
Among those Mr Higgins said posed a threat to Mr Trump were “deep state actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans”.
In the memo, he also accused the European Union, the United Nations, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and the International Muslim Brotherhood of spreading “hate speech narratives”.
He described this as “escalations of cultural Marxist memes”.
Mr Higgins also believes he was fired from the National Security Council “after warning of a deep state coup to remove the President”.
In recent weeks, Mr Higgins has re-emerged as a peddler of conspiracy theories on Twitter, claiming that the Catholic Church and Democratic Party have been overrun by communists, and retweeting followers who misleadingly connected the Black Lives Matter movement to the Islamic State terrorist group.
Washington, 3 July 2020
