A conservative think tank contends that if President Trump is truly interested in draining the D.C. swamp, he will need to start with the biggest "swamp creature" of them all.

That would be the president's own National Security Council, according to the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, headed by Frank Gaffney Jr.

As long as Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster is serving as the White House national security adviser, the president's agenda is in jeopardy and likely doomed to failure, according to Gaffney.

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That's because McMaster's ties to the bureaucratic apparatus loyal to the policies of former President Obama are too thick to overcome, Gaffney asserts.

McMaster has been purging national security officials loyal to Trump's chief strategist, Steve Bannon, while surrounding himself with operatives loyal to Obama – or at least Obama's policies with regard to Iran, immigration and shielding Islam from criticism by insisting jihadists hold to a "perverted" view of Islam.

The first example is Dina Habib Powell, an Egyptian-American who was tapped by McMaster to be his deputy despite her lack of foreign policy and defense experience, and her close friendship with Obama advisers Valerie Jarrett and Huma Abedin.

In contrast, anyone who views Obama holdovers with a wary eye, or who criticizes Islam as the inspiration for all jihadist attacks, is being ousted from the NSC, per McMaster's orders.

Most recently, McMaster removed chief NSC strategist Rich Higgins for penning a memo warning of a mounting conspiracy against the president by an allied force of secular globalists and religious Islamists in Washington. Higgins also wanted the president to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

But now McMaster's own past is starting to attract attention. He worked at a U.K.-based think tank supported by a George Soros-funded group whose primary purpose was to help sell Obama’s Iran nuke deal to the media and the public.

From September 2006 to February 2017, McMaster is listed as serving as consulting senior fellow to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, or IISS, which describes itself as a “world-leading authority on global security, political risk and military conflict."

Since the Iran deal was signed by Obama, IISS has published a report saying Iran should not be held accountable for small, individual violations of the agreement as long as it has not committed an overall "material breach" of the pact.

The Institute for Science and International Security recently published a paper that warns the Trump administration against following the advice of IISS.

The paper gives a list of "instances where we feel the IISS report seeks to downplay compliance controversies, to the detriment of taking a holistic view of Iran’s compliance and actions overall."

"The Trump administration is right to take a more enforcement based approach to the Iran nuclear deal," the paper concludes. "A far better approach is to aggressively enforce the deal, challenging Iran on each violation regardless of its size, and insist that Iran can no longer exploit loopholes and ambiguities in the deal. It is perhaps on this issue of enforcement where we have our most fundamental disagreement with a recent International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) report."

Trump has repeatedly rebuked what former Secretary of State John Kerry finally confessed was a mere “political understanding” with Iran, calling it the "worst deal" ever negotiated with a foreign power.

Not to be deterred, McMaster has continued to support U.S. compliance with the Iran deal, even as the U.S. is now reaping the consequences of past failed nuclear deals with another rogue state, North Korea.

Aware of the mistakes of the past administrations, President Trump reportedly ordered his subordinates in April to prepare for him an alternative plan to certify that Iran was in compliance with the deal and that it is in the interest of the United States. He is said to have been furious when no such option was provided 90 days later, compelling him once again to affirm an inaccurate certification.

One of the men McMaster purged from the NSC was Ezra Cohen Watnick, who reportedly held anti-Islam views and was described as an “Iran hawk” who wanted to revamp counter-Iran efforts in the Middle East. Watnick, like Higgins, also wanted to reform the intelligence community to rein in the "deep state."

The Center for Security Policy launched what it calls its "Swamp Creatures Series" Wednesday to identify officials inside the national security establishment who are thwarting Trump's agenda. And the CSP list of those who need to be shown the door starts with McMaster.

"Washington has been betraying America for so long it doesn't even recognize, much less condemn the treasonous activity engaged in daily by left-wing and Islamic extremist groups, some of which it actively supports," said James Simpson, author of a CSP-published book, "The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America."

Gaffney noted McMaster’s repudiation of Trump’s term “radical Islamic terrorism," while openly opposing the president's policies on Iran, Qatar, Syria, Afghanistan, Israel and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Gaffney said McMaster's purging of those who support Trump combined with his choosing of officials loyal to the Obama's globalist policies amounts to a "coup d’etat with respect to foreign and defense policy."

“President Trump ran for office on a platform that is, in important respects, at odds with the views of Lt. Gen. McMaster and virtually all of those now populating the National Security Council staff," Gaffney said.

"Ronald Reagan understood that ‘personnel is policy.’ If those who are nominally Mr. Trump’s personnel actually support policies he ran against, the people who elected him will be grievously disappointed — and disserved," he said. "So will Donald Trump."

Gaffney's Center for Security Policy plans to monitor and collect ongoing evidence of McMaster’s dedication to Obama policy priorities to the detriment of the current commander in chief.