The group’s authors also appeared on Russian media, including Sputnik and RT News, criticizing mainstream European leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron. 

From 2013 until last month, Bolton was chairman of the Gatestone Institute, a New York-based advocacy group that warns of a looming Muslim takeover of Europe leading to a “Great White Death.” 

The group has published numerous stories and headlines on its website with similar themes. “Germany Confiscating Homes to Use for Migrants,” warned one from May 2017, about a single apartment rental property in Hamburg that had gone into temporary trusteeship. Another from February 2015 claimed the immigrants, for instance Somalis, in Sweden were turning that country into the “Rape Capital of the West.” 

Gatestone is “a key part of the whole Islamaphobic cottage industry on the internet,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights and advocacy group. 

Hooper added that Bolton’s associated with Gatestone, "and in one of the most powerful positions on the planet, is very disturbing.” 

On its web page, Gatestone says it is a nonpartisan nonprofit “dedicated to educating the public about what the mainstream media fails to report” on a variety of topics, including human rights, free speech and energy. 

Alina Polyakova, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies far-right populism and disinformation campaigns in the European Union, said Gatestone is “putting out content that was clearly anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and was echoing some of the Russian disinformation propaganda” being spread by internet trolls and on social media. 

Polyakova said she and others in the Washington foreign policy community were “surprised” Bolton had chaired the group. 

Bolton formally started as national security adviser in early April. He has continued to meet with White House attorneys over possible conflicts of interest including his political action committee, and his affiliation with Gatestone is a potential focus.

The NSC said it does not respond to inquiries about outside organizations but confirmed Bolton is aware of the story. 

Bolton doesn’t appear to have bylined the anti-Muslim articles at issue on Gatestone’s website, focusing his pieces instead on Iran and other topics. Even so, he has a long association with Pamela Geller, an anti-Islamic activist who organized a campaign against a mosque near 9/11's ground zero in Manhattan, having written the foreword for a book she co-wrote and appearing on her internet radio show. 

Bolton is also on the record criticizing Trump’s initial plan, announced in December 2015, to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the United States. 

Yet in fanning anti-Muslim news, Gatestone had a common purpose with a broader Russian disinformation campaign that sought to portray Western society as at risk of “Islamization.” 

“We see this kind of pattern emerge where a website puts up something, it looks like a news story, then bots and trolls amplify it,” Polykova said. 

Some of the group’s work was widely distributed, including a claim about Muslim-controlled “no-go zones” in France that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz cited in an op-ed during the 2016 Republican presidential primary campaign. 

Gatestone’s president, Sears Roebuck heiress Nina Rosenwald, said in an email that Bolton was not involved in any of the articles and that Gatestone has no knowledge of Russian trolls having promoted its work.

Rosenwald emailed numerous links to support Gatestone’s claims, including a number in French and German. One entry flagged as documenting “warring Muslim gangs” in Marseille, France, when translated into English, says only that the city had deployed specialized police officers to a high-crime area, with no mention of warring Muslims. 

Another links to comments by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In calling for uniform regional police standards, Merkel said “no-go” areas where the police avoid going should not be allowed; yet a German government spokesman in Berlin, Johannes Pepping, told NBC News that Merkel was not referring to immigrants or Muslims.

Source: NBC News