Technically your statement is incorrect. The MIT license allows dealing without restriction and sub-licensing, but the effect of re-licensing an MIT product as GPL would be a license with many unenforceable terms on the code that is MIT licensed.
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Note the "deal in the Software without restriction" and "sublicense" permissions and the virality of the terms that require the permission notice must be included with all copies.
One problem with this however is if someone has removed the license from the software like what has happened here, then that software really has no license because the license doesn't specifically state that it applies to derivatives. The Apache 2.0 license is much clearer on that subject of derivative works.