POLITICS
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If Dan Coats Leaves, Trump Might Just Pick This Far-Right Islam Critic to Take Over

Fred Fleitz may be in line to become the Director of National Intelligence.

DAN SPINELLI
Reporter

President Donald Trump is reportedly planning a shakeup of his national security team. The news site Axios reported Friday that Trump is planning to oust Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and, along with several other outlets, identified the president’s preferred replacement as Fred Fleitz, John Bolton’s former deputy and a former CIA analyst best known for his association with a far-right, anti-Muslim think tank.

If appointed, Fleitz could play a key role in reducing the importance of the office itself—further empowering Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the process. A source told Axios that Trump wants to “downsize” the office and considers it “an unnecessary bureaucratic layer,” an argument identical to the one Fleitz made in a 2016 op-ed for the National Review. “The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has developed into a huge additional layer of bureaucracy,” he wrote, “with far too many officials, that has made American intelligence analysis and collection less efficient and more risk-averse.”

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Fleitz, through frequent appearances on Fox News, has aligned himself much more closely with Trump, but his longtime benefactor and ideological ally is Bolton, whose relationship with Fleitz goes back nearly two decades. Fleitz served as Bolton’s chief of staff in the State Department under President George W. Bush before going to work for him at the National Security Council last year, a position he left after less than six months in October. His selection as Bolton’s deputy was sharply opposed at the time by Muslim and Jewish advocacy groups due to Fleitz’s affiliation with the conspiratorial Center for Security Policy, where he now serves as president and chief executive.

In 2015, he co-authored a report for the think tank that claimed more than 80 percent of American mosques are “incubators of, at best, subversion and, at worst, violence.” Fleitz distanced himself from the report’s most extreme policy recommendations last year—like stripping Muslims who support “shariah-compliant norms” of their citizenship—but has been sharply critical of Islam in other venues. During an April 2017 appearance on former professional baseball player Curt Schilling’s Breitbart radio show, Fleitz said, “We’re just not allowed to talk about radical Islam honestly in this country. Our young people are growing up—they have no idea of the threat that they’re facing from this ideology that’s not going to go away.”

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