NEW YORK — Amid widespread reports that National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster is expected to lose his job within days, it is instructive to recall the troubling ideology and concerning connections of the man who has been serving in one of the most powerful U.S. national security positions.

Below, in no particular order, are six Breitbart News exposes authored by this reporter that unearthed McMaster’s disturbing ties and ideology.

1 – McMaster repeatedly minimized the religious motivations of Islamic terrorist groups.

As Trump’s national security adviser, McMaster has faced controversy numerous times for repeatedly minimizing the religious motivations of terrorist groups, including referring to the ideology of Mideast jihadists as “irreligious” in an interview last December.

In November, after Sayfullo Saipov plowed into a crowd of pedestrians and bicyclists in Lower Manhattan, killing eight people, McMaster referred to the attack as among a grouping of “mass murderers.”

This despite reports Saipov left behind a note declaring that the attack was perpetuated in the name of the Islamic State. And witnesses heard Saipov shouting “Allahu Akbar!,” Arabic for “Allah is great,” during the terrorist assault. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.

One month earlier, McMaster labeled the September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorist attacks “mass murder attacks,” instead of calling them acts of terrorism.

Last February, CNN cited a source inside a National Security Council meeting quoting McMaster as saying that use of the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” is unhelpful in working with allies to fight terrorism.

In May, McMaster spoke on ABC’s This Week about whether Trump would use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” in a speech that the president was about to give in Saudi Arabia. “The president will call it whatever he wants to call it,” McMaster said.

“But I think it’s important that, whatever we call it, we recognize that [extremists] are not religious people. And, in fact, these enemies of all civilizations, what they want to do is to cloak their criminal behavior under this false idea of some kind of religious war.”

Breitbart News unearthed a 2014 speech about the Middle East in which McMaster claimed that Islamic terrorist organizations are “really un-Islamic” and are “really irreligious organizations” who cloak themselves in the “false legitimacy of Islam.”

Delivering the keynote address at last April’s Norwich University ROTC Centennial Symposium, McMaster criticized “modern-day barbarians like Daesh and al-Qaeda who cynically use a perverted interpretation of religion to perpetuate ignorance, incite hatred, and commit the most heinous crimes against innocents.”

2 – McMaster endorsed a book that advocates Quran-kissing apology ceremonies, and frames jihad as largely peaceful.

Breitbart News reported that McMaster endorsed and touted a book that frames jihad as a largely peaceful “means to struggle or exert effort,” such as waking up early in the morning to recite prayers. It argues that groups like al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations have hijacked the concept of jihad to wage warfare using such tactics as suicide bombings.

That same book calls Hamas an “Islamist political group” while failing to categorize the deadly organization as a terrorist group and refers to al-Qaeda attacks and anti-Israel terrorism as “resistance.”

One section of the book calls on the U.S. military to respond to any “desecrations” of the Quran by service members with an apology ceremony, and advocates kissing a new copy of the Quran before presenting the Islamic text to the local Muslim public.

The book’s author further demanded that any American soldier who “desecrates” the Quran be ejected from the foreign country of deployment, relieved of duty and turned over to a military judge for “punishment.”

“Desecration” of the Quran, according to the McMaster-endorsed book, includes such acts as “letting the Quran fall to the ground during a search, or more blatant instances.”

3 – McMaster worked at a think tank backed by George Soros-funded group that helped Obama sell the Iran nuclear deal.

From September 2006 to February 2017, McMaster is listed as a member of International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), where he served as consulting senior fellow. The IISS describes itself as a “world-leading authority on global security, political risk and military conflict.”

It is more than that. IISS is financed by a controversial, George Soros-funded group identified by the Obama White House as central in helping to sell the Iran nuclear deal to the public and news media.

The IISS has been supportive of the Obama administration-brokered 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, and the group has repeatedly hit back against charges that Tehran has violated the agreement. McMaster himself has been accused of purging the National Security Council of hardliners on Iran.

AN IISS donor is the Ploughshares Fund, a grantmaking group identified by the Obama White House as central in helping to market the Iran nuclear deal to the news media.

Ploughshares Fund is financed by Soros’ Open Society Institute.

The involvement of Ploughshares in selling the Iran agreement to the public was revealed in an extensive New York Times Magazine profile of Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, titled, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.” The article contains interviews with Rhodes and scores of top Obama administration officials.

Robert Malley, then a senior director at the National Security Council, expounded on the genesis and execution of the marketing plan to sell the Iran deal.

Malley explained to the Times that “experts” were utilized to create an “echo chamber” that disseminated administration claims about Iran to “hundreds of often-clueless reporters” in the news media.

Times author David Samuels wrote:

In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Rhodes told Samuels that the marketing strategy took advantage of the “absence of rational discourse” and utilized outside groups, including Ploughshares.

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he said. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.

Ploughshares says it has awarded hundreds of grants “whose aggregate value exceeded $60 million.”

A previous investigation by this reporter showed Ploughshares has partnered with a who’s-who of the radical left, including Code Pink, the pro-Palestinian J Street, United for Peace & Justice, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and Demos, a progressive economic advisory group where Obama’s controversial former green jobs czar, Van Jones, has served on the board.

The group says its mission is to support the “smartest minds and most effective organizations to reduce nuclear stockpiles, prevent new nuclear states, and increase global security.”

Ploughshares is in turn financed by Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Buffett Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Another Ploughshares donor is the Tides Foundation, which is one of the largest funders of the radical left. Tides is funded by Soros.

Ploughshares has donated to the Institute for Policy Studies, which calls for massive slashes in the U.S. defense budget.

It has also financed the International Crisis Group, a small organization that boasts George Soros and his son, Alexander, on its board and where Malley now worksas vice president for public policy.

4 – McMaster’s former group scrubbed — then re-added — Soros financing from its website.

Soros’s Open Society is also a direct donor to IISS.

The IISS re-added Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Soros-financed Ploughshares group to the list of donors on its website following a request from this reporter on the matter.

During a Breitbart News investigation in August, neither the Open Society or Ploughshares were listed on the IISS website page titled “Our Funding” despite this reporter finding literature from those two groups documenting their financing of IISS.

Also, both groups were listed in an archived version of the same IISS donor’s page.

Following a request for comment, both the Open Society and Ploughshares groups were added back to the IISS donor page.

At the time, IISS explained:

As well as the Open Society Foundation, we also accidentally removed the Carnegie, McArthur, and James Foundations, as well as a number of governments and corporate supporters, when we updated the page ten days ago. Your question brought this to our attention and the listing has now been corrected.

5 – McMaster’s former firm is funded by Sharia-ruled Bahrain — up to 25% of its total income.

Besides direct Soros funding, IISS also quietly took in about $32.5 million in funding from Bahrain, a country whose constitution explicitly enshrines Sharia Islamic law as the governing doctrine. The funding from Bahrain, a repressive regime with a dismal human rights track record but also an important regional U.S. ally, reportedly amounted to one quarter of the think tank’s total income.

A significant portion of the Bahraini funding reportedly pays for the think tank’s annual conference in Bahrain, the Mamana Dialogue. The original agreementbetween IISS and Bahrain to finance the conference contained a clause calling for the memorandum of understanding to remain confidential, according to the document, which was leaked by a watchdog and published by the Guardian newspaper last year.

As a member of IISS, McMaster participated in the Sixth Mamana Dialogue summit in Bahrain from December 11 to December 13, 2009, Breitbart News found. He is listed in IISS literature as being part of the Mamana Dialogue’s four-person panel that year on “military transformation, intelligence and security cooperation.”

6 – McMaster served at a group financed by multinational corporations doing billions in Iran business.

As Breitbart News reported, IISS is heavily bankrolled by multinational corporate firms doing billions of dollars in business with Iran.

Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.