Cruz National Security Adviser: Joseph McCarthy Was ‘Spot-On’

Clare Lopez, a member of Sen. Ted Cruz’s recently announced national security advisory team, declared in a recent radio interview that Sen. Joseph McCarthy was “spot-on” in his investigation of communists infiltrating the U.S. government, implying that a similar effort should be made to root out Muslim Brotherhood associates in “the top levels of national security in our government.”

Lopez joined South Carolina radio host Vince Coakley on March 1 to discuss efforts in Congress — led in part by Cruz — to urge the Obama administration to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, which Lopez said misses the point because the real threat from the group is “the subversion, the infiltration, the influence operations.”

“Brotherhood affiliates and associates and those connected to it are the go-to advisers, if not appointees, for the top levels of national security in our government, in this administration for sure, but going back many decades, really, is the program of this Brotherhood,” she claimed.

She compared the situation to the influence of communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee and Sen. McCarthy got involved in rooting out subversives, calling McCarthy’s efforts “spot-on.”

“We can go all the way back, of course, to the time of the Cold War and back to the 1920s, ‘30s, ‘40s when communists, you know, the KGB, infiltrated our government at the very highest levels,” she said. “And then, like now, we were unprepared and in large measure unaware of what was going on, at least until the House Un-American Activities got rolling in the 1950s with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who absolutely was spot-on in just about everything he said about the levels of infiltration. So we have precedent for this where we were not fully aware of the infiltration occurring at the time.”

Another top Cruz adviser, Frank Gaffney — Lopez’s boss at the Center for Security Policy —  has called for the reinstatement of HUAC.