A Homeland Security official once accused former CIA head John Brennan of converting to Islam, according to a report.
Frank Wuco, a White House adviser for Homeland Security focused on implementing President Trump’s executive orders, made the thinly sourced claim during a 2013 radio show appearance.
He also alleged President Obama’s autobiography was actually penned by former Weather Underground figure Bill Ayers and that former Attorney General Eric Holder once belonged to the Black Panthers.
The remarks were unearthed by CNN’s KFile, which reviewed more than 40 hours of the former naval intelligence officer’s radio appearances.
Wuco was found to promote a number of conspiracy theories years before he joined the Trump administration.
Among them was the February 2013 charge about Brennan, who had just been tapped by President Obama to lead the CIA.
The then-conservative talk radio personality interviewed John Guandolo, who was tossed out of the FBI on numerous ethical violations, who was the lone source for the claim about Brennan.
Wuco mentions Guandolo recently went public and stated “to the best of your knowledge and I want to fully air this out, that according to contacts, friends of yours within the FBI, they were stationed with John Brennan in Saudi Arabia when Brennan was there, and at that time, Brennan converted to Islam.”
“If true, it sort of fits the pattern of a guy who seems to be really almost uncontrollably attracted to political winds shifting, if he’s so attracted to shifting political winds that he will dive headlong into them when he’s serving in a foreign country to favor the foreign government,” he continued. “That is, that’s disconcerting.”
There’s no evidence, however, to substantiate the bizarre claim.
Brennan was raised Catholic, and told Irish Central in May 2016 that his upbringing gave him “a strong foundation in morality and ethics and core religious foundations.”
Several months after his Brennan claim, the report found, Wuco then implied Holder was with the militant Black Panthers during the 1970s.
“I firmly believe that this is much of what motivates this man,” he said of Holder.
“As a college student in the 1970s, you do not join the Black Panther movement unless you are angry about things,” he continued. “And unless you feel that there has to be some sort of action, not just to achieve justice in our time, but to achieve equilibrium for things that have happened in the past over which you or Eric Holder has no control whatsoever.”
Again, CNN reported, there was no evidence to back up the public May 2013 claim.
He’d previously pushed a popular conservative claim that the parents of Huma Abedin, the longtime Hillary Clinton aide and estranged wife of Anthony Weiner, were tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.
That suggestion has been widely debunked over the last five years.
Along with suggesting Ayers ghost wrote Obama’s book, “Dreams From My Father,” he also accused Columbia University in July 2012 of helping cover Obama’s alleged foreign birth.
“His student loan applications, sealed,” he said. “He had a foreign student ID I believe while he went to Columbia University, applied for foreign aid.”
President Trump has long promoted the suggestion that Obama was born overseas, something that’s also widely been discredited.
DHS didn’t comment to CNN on its findings, which were found after discovering previously reported statements Wuco made.
The earlier remarks trashed the LGBT community and harped on the “Zimbabwe-fication” in the U.S.
A DHS spokesman previously told CNN those statements were “years-old comments cherry picked from thousands of hours.” They have “no bearing on his ability to perform his job for the American people.”
