Rep. Lee Zeldin on Secure Freedom Radio

Frank Gaffney: Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio, this is Frank Gaffney your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. We are very privileged to have with us an actual pedigreed intelligence officer. A major in the United States Army reserves these days, a combat veteran of Iraqi Freedom, a man who is currently serving in the House of Representatives after having served in other capacities including as a Federal Prosecutor. He is Congressman Lee Zeldin of the first district of New York. He serves on a number of committees of particular interest: the foreign affairs and veterans affairs committees. A member of the subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, where of course he served. It is always a delight to have him with us, Congressman Zeldin, welcome back.

Rep. Zeldin: Its good to back on here with you.

Frank Gaffney: Listen there’s so much to talk about Congressman. I don’t hardly know where to begin. I guess I’d like to start with what you made, as again a guy with a record in intelligence, of the FBI’s presentation of a expurgated, redacted version of the transcripts of this jihadist who murdered quite a number of our countrymen and women in Orland the weekend before last. Not too much interested in how this came to pass as what it suggests about our willful blindness about the nature of the threat.

Rep. Zeldin: Islam is filled with these jihadists at war with the United States and this is further evidence that our president is not yet at war with those elements. And I’d rather see jihadists on their heels in the Middle East rather than on offense within our borders at home. We’ve seen all sorts of evidence that the President and his administration is not willing to identify and confront this threat for exactly what it is. This effort to cleanse a 911 transcript, to not tell the full story, is a further attempt to pull the wool over the eyes over the American public. As we saw with the quick decision to release the full transcript, they must have thought they were going to get away with it and not get caught which is shameful.

Frank Gaffney: As you look at what we’re being subjected to here, again I call it using Andy McCarthy’s term, “Willful Blindness,” what is your thought, Congressman Lee Zeldin, of this idea that the President insists that we don’t need to worry about what we call these guys and we can safely, essentially expunge references as you say to Islam or sharia from the lexicon and our threat analysis?

Rep. Zeldin: You have to be willing to identify the enemy in order to defeat it. It is rule number one of a conflict. When you look at international law, rules of engagement, law of war and they’re always talking about positive identification of the enemy, and proportionality, and all of the legal analysis that’s done, and the legitimacy associated with a conflict is all under the understanding that the enemy is positively identified as “x.” This president wants the American public to believe that he has everything under control. The quote he used very recently is that we are firing on all cylinders. Two days later his CIA director refuted that talking about the capability of ISIS has not been reduced. But the president doesn’t want to identify the enemy. He wants us to believe that he knows what it is even though he is not willing to say it and that everything is completely under control and we’re firing on all cylinders. Meanwhile he tries to change narratives around where as if an AR15 went into that nightclub in Orlando and discharged itself, and there wasn’t a terrorist with that AR15 and that pistol, pledging allegiance to ISIS, yelling “Allahu Akbar,” and with loyalty to Al-Baghdadi. That reality, for this president, it is a very inconvenient reality that he is not willing to confront.

Frank Gaffney: As I mentioned, Congressman Lee Zeldin, you in a previous incarnation were a Federal prosecutor. If you were building a case, for example, against a fellow like this Mateen. And you were told that directly relevant information about the crime and about the perpetrator of the crime, and I don’t mean to suggest that terrorism is just another criminal activity but as a prosecutor that’s how you would be treating it, but is this not malfeasance? Is this not the kind of thing that a judge would sanction if you were to try to do it in a court of law?

Rep. Zeldin: Well if you’re trying to prosecute this case, the first thing I would do is, you try to identify, well obviously Mateen is dead, but lets just say he survived and was being prosecuted for it, you want to identify every single statute that exists that you can charge him under and then analyze the elements and then ensure that you can introduce the facts into evidence to meet the elements so you can convict the person of the offense. For these terrorists, and for the kinds that either exist or if there is anew one that needs to be treated because the department of justice or FBI sees something lacking is a reality that Mateen’s loyalty, his pledge to the leader of ISIS, to Islamic ideals that call for wiping every other religion off the map, his chanting of “Allahu Ackbar,” this is actually all just evidence from right around the attack let alone there was evidence in place over the course of years. If you want to prevent a suspected terrorist you can’t convict someone of a crime they haven’t yet committed. But if you want to keep Americans secure then stopping these acts before, not worrying about getting a prosecution afterwards. We have to confront the threat head on so that we can stop these attacks beforehand while also giving the tools to our justice system to prosecute them afterwards.

Frank Gaffney: Fundamentally what we’re supposed to be seeing the US government doing is protecting us before the fact not, as you say, simply prosecuting the perps afterwards. You have to be able to understand, going back to Sun Tzu, who the enemy is if you’re going to engage in that kind of protection. Very quickly and we only have a minute left, Congressman. You’ve been among the leaders in the fight against the so-called Iran deal. Looking at it a year on, what has happened? Have we in fact prevented Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon and if not is the threat more intense across a broad front from when it was before?

Rep. Zeldin: All we have seen over the course of the last year is one example after another that this isn’t even a deal at all. This is an unsigned, as John Kerry calls it, political commitment. Its one that where we have witnessed Iran continuing all of these other bad activities but now we have lost all the leverage that brought the Iranians to the table in the first place. Plus those in charge of Iran have gotten past the most recent undemocratic elections. We have some here in our country including in our administration saying that the Iranians elected the moderate candidates. Ignoring the fact that anyone who was moderate and there were 12,000 candidates taken off the ballot. We get this narrative here at home talking about Iranian leadership like these are moderates, that these are freedom loving leaders that want to be good world citizens. So all of the evidence on the left here indicate that this was a bad deal and its not too late to reverse course.

Frank Gaffney: We appreciate your leadership in that vein and look forward talking to you further about it. Congressman Lee Zeldin of the House foreign affairs committee representing the people of the first district of New York I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your cumulative service to our country in all of these capacities especially that you’re rendering these days and hope you will come back to us soon.