Former Trump adviser warns of Qatar and Muslim Brotherhood campaign against him

The New York Times recently published a report revealing that the FBI had conducted investigations to determine whether Walid Phares, former adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, had worked in secret to influence the Egyptian government in the U.S. administration. These investigations focused on possible links between Phares and both the Egyptian state and President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. 

These investigations ultimately came to nothing, despite the fact that the New York newspaper reported that the investigating authorities had obtained information against Phares from an Egyptian source and had questioned Trump's former adviser about the nature of his relations with Egypt. For their part, the US and Phares himself have accused Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood of being behind the campaign against him and of ordering The New York Times to publish articles against the person of President Trump's former collaborator.  

Walid Phares told the Al-Arabiya media that the current problems with The New York Times and the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar lobby in the US had been going on for quite some time to discredit him. Donald Trump's former adviser understands that he is at the center of the target for repudiating extremist organizations, among which is the Brotherhood, a group that has been labeled as terrorist by several countries, including the American giant. 

He explained that the time of greatest attacks against him began with the selection of Republican Party presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his appointment as National Security advisor during his election campaign in 2011 and 2012. The Muslim Brotherhood group called 'Kiir' subsequently sent violent messages against Phares to Congress and the presidential candidate, calling for his removal from office. However, these attempts were not successful. Phares added that these groups were concerned that he would be appointed to the Romney Administration if he was successful in the 2012 election. 

Then, Democratic candidate Barack Obama won the election and the campaign against Phares was halted until it was reactivated again in 2013 due to the events in Egypt, when Abdel Fattah al-Sisi suspended the Constitution and threw out Mohamed Morsi, a president then linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.  

Phares revealed that, by intervening in the American and Arab media, he supported the Egyptian people who rose up against the Muslim Brotherhood regime, driving them from power. He stated that he was among the few voices in Washington that explained the truth of what happened in Egypt, and that "what happened is not what the Brotherhood and its allies in Washington represent as a military coup led by the then Minister of Defense, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, but rather a true people's revolution in which some 33 million Egyptians moved to overthrow the regime that oppressed the Egyptians," as Al-Arabiya put it.

He explained that the lobby of the Muslim Brotherhood considered at the time that Phares was working for Al-Sisi, and this lobby began to transmit reports in the United States accusing him of supporting a military government instead of supporting the so-called legitimate Executive of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Walid Phares stressed that there had been many clashes between him and the Brotherhood at various levels, as he was always working to defend civilian groups in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere against extremist militias and groups linked to the Brotherhood.

He added that in 2016, when President Donald Trump appointed him as a foreign affairs consultant, several groups from the Muslim Brotherhood, with the help of the Iranian lobby, ran a fierce defamation campaign against him in several American newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times. Phares confirmed that, after the end of the US elections and Trump's victory, he learned that a Brotherhood source in Egypt had sent a file to official US agencies to prevent him from taking up office in the Administration. 

Phare's referred in the interview with Al-Arabiya to The New York Times' relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood: "The relationship is focused on two points. The first is that the lobbying offices contracted by Qatar and the Brotherhood provide official and legal statements to the government about their activities with the US media. This lobby is known to work and communicates widely with The New York Times". "Published reports revealed that in 2018, the Brotherhood and Qatar lobby contacted The New York Times more than 67 times, proposing articles about them, according to official statements," added Phares, who also noted that "the second point comes when we look at The New York Times articles related to Egypt, where we see hundreds of them and, over the years, they explicitly support the Brotherhood and are scathingly critical of President Al-Sisi's government.

For its part, Qatar continues to be linked to the dissemination of extremist speeches and the sponsorship of entities such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that is directly declared to be terrorist by several countries. The entity's terrorist links are being investigated in several Western nations; moreover, a significant number of Al-Qaeda leaders have been active within the Muslim Brotherhood in the past.  

 Indeed, from Al-Jazeera, the state-run network of the Gulf monarchy led by Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, there is plenty of room for voices linked to Islamist radicalism and the Muslim Brotherhood, such as that of leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is a refugee in the Qatari country, to be sought in the United States, has been banned from France and Britain and is not welcome in Arab League countries such as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia (the latter being major international enemies of the Qatari country, on which they have maintained an economic and political blockade since 2017 on the understanding that the Gulf monarchy supports cross-border extremist terrorism).