He prayed alongside well-known Muslim Brotherhood figures, including the leaders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR.

But his objective was not worship. In fact, he was not even a Muslim. Chris Gaubatz grew a beard, went through a "conversion" ceremony at a notorious Northern Virginia mosque and became an intern for CAIR — ultimately gathering first-hand documentation of the group's subversive aims — because he believes the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots in the U.S. are a threat to the nation's security.

"I was just young and in my 20s, and I was more than happy to serve my country," he told Jamie Glazov in an interview on "The Glazov Gang."

TRENDING: 3 ways Red China is helping elect Joe Biden

"We have men and women overseas who are getting shot at. From my perspective, the least that I could do is go into a mosque and pretend to be a Muslim," he said.

Asked about his personal safety, Gaubatz said his faith in Jesus Christ has enabled him to "put any fear and anxiety aside."

"What I'm worried about is doing the right thing and protecting this country," he said. "And I know there are patriots all over the country that would be willing to do the same thing."

Serving as an intern, Gaubatz gathered some 12,000 pages of CAIR documents that were headed for a shredder at the organization's national office in Washington, just three blocks from the U.S. Capitol building. Information from the documents, as well as from audio and digital recordings of conversations, was published in "Muslim Mafia," co-authored by his father, David Gaubatz, and investigative journalist Paul Sperry. The book demonstrated CAIR's connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that spawned al-Qaida and Hamas and stated in writing its intent to put America under Islamic law and the authority of the Quran.

CAIR responded to the book with a lawsuit in 2009 against Chris and David Gaubatz and others that only now is set to go to trial, likely in the fall.

Help defend Chris Gaubatz and the First Amendment right to expose the Muslim Brotherhood's infiltration of America through your contribution to his legal defense

Noting Islam dictates the penalty for abandoning the faith is death, Glazov asked whether someone who pretended to be a Muslim and "betrayed" Islam might be in even more jeopardy.

"From their perspective, this is a jihad, and if they're willing to blow up children in Manchester, then, of course, they're willing to go after someone like myself," said Gaubatz, who now is vice president of the nonprofit Understanding the Threat, which provides training and consulting on the "threat of the global Islamic movement."

But he said that from a security standpoint, going public with his story "was actually safer thing to do."

"The last thing they want to do is bring any attention to this," he said.

Islam the problem

Interviewed in the wake of the Manchester terrorist attack, Gaubatz said he witnessed first-hand how CAIR orchestrates the response of the Muslim community to such incidents to curb any negative publicity for Islam and make Muslims out to be the victims of a "backlash."

"They work closely with their media contacts in the mainstream media, so that as soon as something like this happens, they're the ones setting the narrative," Gaubatz told Glazov.

He said the United States must stop approaching the threat "as though it is just people that are killing people, shooting things and blowing things up."

"That is barbaric, it is savage, it is evil, but that is not how we're going to lose this war," he said of the tactic of terrorism.

"We crush the enemy when we face them on the battlefield. The way we're going to lose this war is in the information battle space."

He emphasized that American is engaged in a "war of narratives."

"And as long as we're not having a discussion about Islam being the problem, we will never defeat that ideology," he said.

Gaubatz said CAIR is working with "hard-left, Marxist and socialist groups" because they share the same short-term objective, "which is to tear down American society and rebuild it in their utopian worldview."

In the long-run, their visions for the future obviously differ, but Muslims and the left work together in the mean time, Gaubatz said, "because they know that once they get the U.S. out of the way, there is nothing stopping them."

One year ago, as WND reported, Gaubatz testified before a hearing of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee chaired by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, titled "Willful Blindness: Consequences of Agency Efforts To Deemphasize Radical Islam in Combating Terrorism."

In his prepared testimony, Gaubatz said that when his group, Understanding the Threat, offers training to federal, state and local law enforcement, Muslim Brotherhood groups "work to intimidate the hosts of the training venues into canceling the training by threatening them with cries of 'Islamophobia' or 'racism.'"

He pointed out that a document the FBI entered into evidence in the Holy Land Foundation terror-funding trial in Texas, in which CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator, declares the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America.

The document says the Muslim Brotherhood "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

'Side by side' with CAIR

Gaubatz grew a beard and converted to Islam at the Dar al Hijrah mosque near Washington, D.C., where previously the imam was Anwar al-Awlaki. The Washington Post had called al-Awlaki the face of modern Islam before he turned up in Yemen working with al-Qaida.

Gaubatz recalled praying "side by side" with CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad and spokesman Ibrahim Hooper.

He recalled hearing Hooper frequently use the phrase "those right-wingers."

"He just absolutely despised anybody that was on the right side of the aisle," Gaubatz told Glazov.

CAIR has a training program, he said, in which they teach Muslims how to respond to anything negative that is said about Islam by spinning the narrative and inserting the term "Islamophobia" into the conversation.

"They are incredibly organized, and they're at this day in and day out," he said.

He met Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., a Muslim, and was at the Capitol when the first Muslim elected to Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., was leading prayers.

"I used to go to mosques on behalf of CAIR and hand out literature," Gaubatz said. "So, I lived this day in and day out, Monday through Friday for six months straight."

In his travels to mosques across the country, he said, "one thing I noticed was Islam is Islam."

"Those aren't my words. Those are the Islamic scholars, whether you're in Atlanta or Northern Virginia, or you're reading literature out of Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia. It's all the same Islam, and they'll be the first to tell you that," he said.

Trump and naming the enemy

Glazov asked Gaubatz his view of how the Trump administration is handling the threat.

He said he is supportive of the president and understands there is a battle within his party and even within his administration over how to frame the threat with regard to Islam.

President Trump, he said, is fully aware of the role of Islam, "but the establishment Republicans are fighting him tooth and nail."

"If he were to actually come out right now and say the problem is Islam and we're going to deal with this," he said, "it would be Republicans that would fight him just as much as the left."

The FBI cut off ties to CAIR in January 2009 after the group was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, the largest terrorism-finance case in U.S. history.

More than a dozen CAIR leaders have been charged or convicted of terrorism-related crimes.

FBI wiretap evidence from the Holy Land case showed CAIR's Awad was at an October 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders and activists in Philadelphia. CAIR, according to the evidence, was born out of a need to give a "media twinkle" to the Muslim leaders' agenda of supporting violent jihad abroad while slowly institutionalizing Islamic law in the U.S.

A federal judge later determined that the Justice Department provided “ample evidence” to designate CAIR as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, affirming the Muslim group had been involved in “a conspiracy to support Hamas."

In addition, CAIR leaders have made statements affirming the aim of establishing Islamic rule in the United States.

The Islamic organization long had accused WND and others of "smearing" the Muslim group by citing a newspaper account of CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad telling Muslims in Northern California in 1998 that they were in America not to assimilate but to help assert Islam's rule over the country. But WND caught CAIR falsely claiming that it had contacted the paper and had "sought a retraction," insisting Ahmad never made the statement. Three years later, the issue arose again, and WND found CAIR still had not contacted the paper.

CAIR spokesman Hooper also has expressed a desire to replace the U.S. system of government with an Islamic state.

"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future," Hooper said in a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "But I'm not going to do anything violent to promote that. I'm going to do it through education."

Hooper, in an interview on Michael Medved’s radio show in October 2003, stated: “If Muslims ever become a majority in the United States, it would be safe to assume that they would want to replace the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law, as most Muslims believe that God’s law is superior to man-made law.”