Trump National Security Adviser Met With Leader of Party Founded by Nazis

By Tina Nguyen, Vanity Fair

21 December 16

The right-wing Austrian Freedom Party is also closely aligned with Russia.

hile Trump allies and assorted hangers-on reject the notion that they ran a bigoted campaign, accusations of racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia have continued to dog the president-elect’s inner circle. Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, failed to secure a federal judicial appointment in 1986 over allegations of past racist comments, while former Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, has bragged about creating a “platform of the alt-right” and is alleged by his ex-wife to have had less than kind things to say about Jews. Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Flynn, has called Islam a “cancer” and tweeted that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”

Such provocations have been well received among far-right nationalist groups in Europe, which has seen its own explosion of xenophobic anger over the past several years. And Flynn, like Trump, appears to be cultivating these populist ties. As The New York Times first reported Monday, Trump’s national security adviser recently sat for a meeting with Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the far-right Freedom Party, who traveled to Trump Tower after the election to pay his respects. Strache published a Facebook post Monday confirming that the meeting took place last month shortly after the Freedom Party nearly won the recent presidential election in Austria, a huge feat for a party that barely existed years ago.

The ideological overlap between Strache, Flynn, and Trump is hardly insignificant, as The Huffington Post notes. All three are vocally anti-Islam and have each expressed skepticism toward immigration, the European Union, and multiculturalism more generally. Strache, like Trump, is also particularly sensitive to allegations of anti-Semitism, despite invoking many of its tropes: the Freedom Party leader has gone out of his way in the past to deny such claims by hosting conferences on anti-Semitism in Israel, even as he has ruffled critics by comparing his own struggles to those of Jews during the Holocaust.

The history of the Austrian Freedom Party itself is hard to disentangle from its anti-Semitic past. The party’s first leader was Anton Reinthaller, a former Nazi official and member of the SS. “This is not just any opposition party: It is one with Nazi sympathies,” Daniel Serwer, a professor at Johns Hopkins University specializing in foreign policy, told the Huffington Post. “Nor is Flynn any national security adviser. He is a documented conspiracy propagator. His long-term strategy colleague, Steve Bannon, is an ethnic nationalist and anti-Semite. The president-elect is an anti-Muslim and anti-immigration bigot.” (Bannon has denied making anti-Semitic comments.)

Flynn’s outreach to Strache is worrisome for other reasons, too. In his Facebook post, Strache also announced that he had signed a “cooperation pact” with Vladimir Putin, who recently shared a table with Flynn at a gala in Moscow celebrating the tenth anniversary of RT, the Russian state television organization. Strache said he would act as “a neutral and reliable intermediary and partner” between the Trump White House and Russia, and boasted that “the Freedom Party continues to gain international influence.”