On Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily, SiriusXM host Alex Marlow asked Dr. Sebastian Gorka, deputy adviser to the president, for his reaction to the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion reinstating most of President Trump’s travel restrictions, which had been blocked by district court judges.
“As I posted on my Twitter feed yesterday, two thumbs up!” Gorka said of the opinion. “Yesterday was a supremely good day for American interests and the interests of all taxpayers, all people concerned for the safety of this nation. Not only do we have fake news being taken down more than a peg or two, but we have a unanimous SCOTUS decision,” he said.
“This just tells you how absolutely right the president was, that he was totally within his constitutional and legal authorities to control the access to the United States by foreign nationals, especially those from active war zones where we have the highest concentration of jihadi groups like ISIS,” Gorka contended.
“It’s a stunning victory. He said he was going to take it all the way. He has, and now I’m told when the Supreme Court convenes again, we are going to implement the travel ban in almost exactly the fashion it was originally intended to be implemented,” he added.
Marlow asked if the White House felt “emboldened” enough by the Supreme Court victory to go even further with “extreme vetting” and screening procedures for immigrants.
“We’re not standing still,” Gorka replied. “We are reviewing all the processes that we inherited because the system was absolutely broken. If you look at the fact, for example, that the social media of those who wanted to immigrate to the United States could not be looked at by federal agents under the Obama administration, that’s just an example of the absurdity that we inherited.”
“Yes, this is just one chapter. It’s an important part of the whole process, but we are reviewing all legal measures that have to do with access to the United States by foreign nationals because we don’t want to see what’s happening elsewhere happen to the United States,” he said.
Marlow asked about the White House’s warning to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad that he and his military would pay a “heavy price” if he proceeds with another chemical weapons attack.
Gorka said that Americans should be reassured by the warning because it shows the Trump White House is serious about projecting strength and preventing war crimes.
“What we have done by issuing this statement – we’re not going to give away what’s going to follow next – but what we’ve done is demonstrate to the authorities in Syria that we have the capacity to know what they are doing,” he explained.
“This is not a step towards escalation. It is the opposite. It is signaling that the red line the president drew in the sand with those 59 cruise missiles stays,” Gorka said, referring to the April strike on a Syrian military airbase in response to a chemical weapons attack. “We will back it up. We know what’s happening. Therefore, it is in the best interests of those that we are signaling not to follow through with their intended operation.”
“It’s the opposite of escalation. It is us telling the people who have control of these weapons that ‘we know what you’re doing. Don’t do it,’” he said.
Marlow noted that radical Islamic terrorism topped the agenda when President Trump met with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday.
“It was a fabulous meeting,” Gorka said. “India isn’t a formal treaty ally, but we work very closely together. Our relationship is based upon multiple, multiple ties – more than $100 billion worth of trade between the two countries last year, and a leader that is cut from very similar cloth to the president himself, when you look at his platforms economically, in terms of deregulation and unshackling the economy.”
“But as you noted, perhaps the most important topic of all was our shared understanding of the terrorist threat,” he continued. “India has suffered for decades, and so there was a meeting of minds on refocusing international attention on the primary problem, which is radical Islamic terrorism.”
Gorka said no policy changes were discussed in the Trump-Modi meeting that could be discussed openly, “except to say that there will be, under the leadership of the two gentlemen, a deepening of security cooperation on this issue and others as well.”
He said there would definitely be “a recognition of the commonality of the threat, and a deepening of operational collaboration” between the United States and India.
Dr. Sebastian Gorka is the former National Security editor for Breitbart News, and the author of Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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