Ted Cruz talks with organizer Frank Gaffney after addressing the South Carolina National Security Action Summit on March 14, 2015, in West Columbia, South Carolina. | Getty Cruz draws from anti-Islamist fringe The senator's foreign-policy team includes advisers with a history of extreme statements.

Ted Cruz's new team of foreign policy advisers includes several fringe conservative activists and fervid anti-Islamist hardliners — but few of the GOP establishment elites who are outraged over the rise of Donald Trump.

Cruz's list of nearly two dozen names includes Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., a former Reagan Pentagon official whose focus on the influence of Islam in the U.S. has drawn charges of bigotry. In June 2009, Gaffney claimed there was "mounting evidence" that President Barack Obama "not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself." The next year Gaffney repeated a blogger's claim that the new official logo for a Pentagon missile defense agency "appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo." The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Gaffney "one of America's most notorious Islamophobes."


Cruz's list features three other members of Gaffney's think tank, the Center for Security Policy, whose home page on Thursday featured an article titled, "An Islamic Revolution in America?"

“It’s the foreign policy version of nativism,” said one person who held several senior posts in the George W. Bush administration. This person, who considers himself a moderate, described several people on Cruz's team as marginal figures and said he was "amazed" by the presence of Gaffney and others like him.

Other Cruz advisers likewise warn that Islam is making sinister gains within the U.S. One is William G. "Jerry" Boykin, a retired lieutenant general who was rebuked by President George W. Bush when, as a Pentagon official in 2003, he gave a speech framing the war on terror as a battle between Christianity and Islam. Now an ordained minister, Boykin has said that Islam obliges its followers “to destroy our Constitution" and therefore does not merit full First Amendment protections.

Another is Andrew McCarthy, a former federal attorney who led the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. McCarthy is the author of the 2010 book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Cruz himself has made the threat of radical Islam a centerpiece of his campaign, and often attacks President Barack Obama for declining to use the phrase "radical Islamic terrorism." Obama generally seeks to avoid talking about terrorism in religious terms for fear of alienating moderate Muslims.

“We need to take off the blinders of political correctness that prevent us from seeing what is right in front of us," Cruz said in a December speech at the Heritage Foundation. "That enemy is radical Islamic terrorism and it is trying to destroy our country and our way of life."

Notably absent from Cruz's advisory team are key members of the Republican foreign policy establishment. That includes the party's living former secretaries of state and defense and former national security advisers. None of the more than 100 foreign policy insiders who signed an open letter earlier this month opposing Donald Trump's nomination are on his list, nor are many former members of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio's former, establishment-heavy foreign policy teams.

One exception is Elliott Abrams, a former senior George W. Bush White House and State Department official, widely respected within the GOP, who counseled Jeb Bush and then backed Rubio. The support of Abrams — often called a neoconservative for his staunch pro-democracy and pro-Israel views — is noteworthy given that Cruz has decried a “crazy neocon invade-every-country-on-earth and send our kids to die in the Middle East” element of his party.

In a statement released by the campaign on Thursday, Abrams said that Cruz has "a perfect record of support for Israel" and "understands the power relationships" in the Middle East. "He is very clearly the most pro-Israel candidate in the race today," Abrams added.

Abrams has also cautioned against demonizing Islam, as have some other members of Cruz's team, including Yale historian and former Bush national security council aide Mary Habeck, who is also a specialist in jihadism. (Habeck is the author of the 2010 book Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror.)

"I am delighted to have such a range of Republican foreign policy folks uniting because they know Ted Cruz is ready to be Commander in Chief," said Cruz's top foreign policy aide, Victoria Coates.

Coates defended Gaffney's controversial record, saying he "has been a serious figure in American national security circles since the Reagan administration--and he has a profound understanding of the core principles that informed Reagan's foreign policy."

"While Senator Cruz may not agree with every single thing every single one of his advisers has ever said (nor they with him), the fact of the matter is that Frank has been a clear voice drawing attention to the threat of radical Islam — and while it might not be politically correct, Senator Cruz and I value his perspective," she added.

Coates herself has an unconventional background: She is an art historian whose blogging for the conservative website RedState while she taught at the University of Pennsylvania drew the notice of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After leaving office, Rumsfeld hired Coates to help write his memoir. Coates went on to work for Texas Governor Rick Perry's 2012 presidential campaign and then joined Cruz's Senate staff.

Cruz's team also includes Michael Ledeen, an Iran specialist highly critical of President Obama's nuclear deal with Tehran; former Missouri Senator Jim Talent, who, like Cruz, served on the Senate's Armed Services Committee (and who also advised Rubio); and Fred Fleitz, who served as chief of staff to then-Undersecretary of State John Bolton.

Trump, meanwhile, has yet to release a long-promised list of foreign policy advisers. Pressed on the question Wednesday, the billionaire mogul said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that "I'm speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things."

Ohio Governor John Kasich's foreign policy advisers include former Navy Secretary John Lehman and Richard Allen, a former national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan.