Kash Patel, former President Donald Trump’s Pentagon chief of staff, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Monday slammed President Biden for reversing the Trump administration’s designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization, in the wake of the group’s attack against a U.S. war ship in the Red Sea.
“The Trump administration prioritized designating terrorist groups as terrorist groups, both at the State Department at Treasury and across all other government agencies. And we designated the Houthis as a terrorist group, even though a lot of people in the media were like, ‘Oh you can’t do that, we won’t be able to provide humanitarian aid.'”
“Well, what’s more important than humanitarian aid, unfortunately, is them killing us and preventing that from happening. And we did it. We got it through. … And then, in the first or second month of the Biden administration, they rescinded that designation,” he said.
Patel, who also served as Trump’s deputy director of national intelligence, added:
It just shows you what they think is priority. We just thought differently… . Foreign Terrorist Organizations were Trump’s top priority. We went after them. We killed al Qaeda senior leadership. We wiped out the emir of ISIS, we took out [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force leader Qasem] Soleimani — all of those people were foreign terrorist organizations. We struck Houthi foreign terrorists. We took out al Shabaab [and] Hezbollah leaders.
And I don’t think there’s an appropriate response that Joe Biden can now craft. We are such a weak position that I don’t know if anything short of escalating to a war effort for the United States is something that’s going to help resolve this situation. I’m not saying we should do that. I’m just saying we’ve been put in such a bad position that if we’re just going to kick some tin cans downrange and help let the media write disinformation campaigns about how we’re defeating the enemy, we’re gonna continue to lose.
Patel explained that the terrorist group designation is important since it prohibits the American government from doing business with those groups, as well as individuals associated with those groups, and from those groups doing business with anything that “touches upon the American banking system, which is essentially the world’s banking system.”
“So you shut them down financially and you are able to — when it comes to a military standpoint, which is my focus — you’re able to target them as terrorists. And then if they meet the threshold, you’re able to take out their leadership — people who are actually terrorists,” he explained.
“And when you remove the designation, like the Biden administration did, you allow them access to the global banking system, you allow them to travel freely, you allow them to engage in business with our allies,” he said, adding:
So you allow them to get money, get funded. You allow Iran to pay them, and we don’t have a recourse. Since they’re not a designated terrorist organization, operationally and intelligence-wise, they’re not a priority to take out, they’re not a priority for intelligence collection purposes.
“They’re, according to the Biden administration, ‘a humanitarian group,’ so a ‘humanitarian group’ attacked a United States destroyer in the Red Sea. And Joe Biden has done nothing about it,” he said.
Patel also noted President Biden unfroze $6 billion in assets in October, leaving Iran — “the epicenter for the attack by Hamas” and its proxy forces, such as the Houthis — “flush with cash.”
“[Iran] paid for it. They funded it. Hamas is an Iranian-proxy force. It’s a Shia-militia group, just like Hezbollah, and just like the Houthis in Yemen,” he said.
“When Joe Biden unfroze $6 billion and gave it to Iran, I said immediately that that was going to go to fund more war efforts by Iranian-proxy forces and the Ayatollah came on TV or whatever and said, ‘We will spend this money however we want,’ even though [Secretary of State] Antony Blinken and Biden are saying, ‘Oh, there’s gonna be rules and strings attached, and oversight,'” Patel said.
“Now, they’re funded and flush with cash. And then they go ahead and attack an American destroyer in the Red Sea right by the Bab el-Mandab Strait, which is one of the most important straits in the Gulf, because of the traffic that it controls, in terms of commerce flowing in and out of the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean,” he added.
Patel called the Biden administration’s response to the Houthis’ and other Iranian-backed proxy forces’ recent attacks on U.S. assets in the Middle East “feeble.”
“A foreign terrorist organization attacked a United States ship of war during war time, and it is unacceptable for us to just take out a couple of posts or you know, operational platforms that they have in random areas,” he said.
Since October 17, Iranian-backed proxy forces in the Middle East have conducted at least 74 attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syri, not including drones flown or missiles intercepted by U.S. ships in the region.
The attacks, by rockets and drones, have caused injuries to U.S. troops, including traumatic brain injuries and shrapnel wounds — which the Biden administration have called “minor.”
In response, the Biden Pentagon has conducted four strikes against the proxy groups — three of the strikes against weapons facilities with no casualties, and only one strike that resulted in killing those responsible.
He said the Biden administration is pushing a false narrative that everything is under control, but in reality, “they’ve seen two world wars start on the Biden watch.”
“I think you’re gonna see more of these types of attacks. While Iran continues to increase its relationship with Russia, with the CCP, with Saudi Arabia, with our former Middle Eastern allies — the Iranian banking system has been opened up to them, oil trade has been opened up to them, trade has been opened up to them,” he said.
“And now the world’s largest state sponsor of terror — Iran — flush with $6 billion in cash is winning the propaganda war that they are an actual, serious, credible threat to the United States of America,” he said, “Hope is not a strategy.”
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