He’s been called a “fish-oil salesman,” a “terrible scholar,” and a “fake terrorism expert,” and has been accused of having ties to a neo-Nazi group but on Tuesday President Donald Trump nominated Sebastian Gorka to become a member of the prestigious National Security Education Board. The term is for four years.
Gorka, supposedly a “counterterrorism adviser,” spent about seven months as part of the nascent Trump administration, serving as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Strategist but ultimately “was unable to get clearance for the National Security Council,” the AP reported in May of 2017.
While working in the Trump White House Foreign Policy published an article titled, “Sebastian Gorka May Be a Far-Right Nativist, but for Sure He’s a Terrible Scholar.” That makes it challenging to defend placing Gorka on the National Security Education Board, which have “Cabinet-level” status, according to its own website.
Board members “include experts from non-profit organizations and academia,” and currently “include representatives from the Department of Defense, Department of Commerce, Department of Energy, Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”
Gorka has achieved no similar status.
A a British-born Hungarian-American, Sebastian Gorka “attended the president’s Jan. 20 Inaugural Ball wearing the honorary medal of Hungarian nationalist organization Vitezi Rend,” NBC News reported in 2017.
During World War II “the State Department listed Vitezi Rend among a group of ‘organizations under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany.’ And Horthy, its founder, once said that ‘I have always been an anti-Semite throughout my life,’ according to ‘The Jews of Hungary,’ a 1995 book by Hungarian-Jewish historian Raphael Patai.”
Gorka was a Fox News contributor after finally leaving the White House in August of 2017, and later became a Salem Radio host.
Just before he left the White House Rolling Stone reported, “Gorka’s a former Breitbart editor with Islamophobic views and ties to neo-Nazi extremists – and he has the ear of the president.”
Also just before he left CNN aired this devastating report on Gorka:
Today Gorka tweeted he is hosting the Trump campaign’s bigoted anti-LGBTQ attorney on his show.