When Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton appeared on CNN Friday night, he didn’t hold back when commenting on Trump’s pick for his counterterrorism director.
“Sebastian Gorka is a con man,” Bolton told host Kaitlan Collins.
“He needs a full-field FBI background investigation about his educational claims and things like that,” he added. “I think he is a perfect example of somebody who owes his position purely to Donald Trump, he doesn’t display loyalty, he displays fealty, and that’s what Trump wants.”
Boltson said Trump “doesn’t want Gorka’s opinions.”
“He wants Gorka to say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and I am fully confident that’s exactly what will happen, no matter what it is Trump says,” Bolton argued.
To hear Trump put it, Gorka has been a “tireless advocate for the America First Agenda and the MAGA Movement” since 2015, according to the president-elect’s announcement on Friday.
Gorka, who was born in the UK to Hungarian parents, is “a legal immigrant” with “more than 30 years of National Security experience,” Trump said.
What Trump neglected to mention was that Gorka was pushed out of his White House role as a strategist to the president in his first administration.
Divisive and combative as he staunchly defended Trump, Gorka was one of the main backers of the then-president’s ban on refugees and people from several Muslim-majority countries.
Gorka’s views on Islam have been a source of controversy — specifically, comments he has made about violence being an intrinsic part of the Islamic faith. His academic credentials have also been questioned, as Bolton suggested on CNN.
“Obviously he’s not the expert he claims to be — obviously,” Hungarian newspaper editor Gabor Horvath told NBC News in 2017.
“He got his master’s degree and his PhD from the Corvinus University in Hungary. The Corvinus University is not a center for national security studies, certainly not internationally recognized studies of this kind,” he added.
An op-ed inThe New York Times once referred to him as “The Islamophobic Huckster in the White House.”
Trump’s then-White House chief of staff John Kelly reportedly pulled Gorka’s security clearance when he was on vacation, making it impossible for him to do his job, HuffPost noted at the time.
This time around, Trump has suggested sidestepping the background check process usually conducted by the FBI to get his nominees and appointees into their expected roles.
Gorka has dismissed the threat of white nationalism, and instead argued that Islamist extremists constituted the biggest threat to the US.
His supposed ties to the Nazi-connected Hungarian political group Vitezi Rend have also worried some during his first short stint in the White House. The group collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War and reformed following the end of the country’s Communist government in 1989, according to HuffPost.
Jewish outlet The Forward reported in March 2017 that Gorka was a member of the group. Gorka wore the group’s insignia at Trump’s first inaugural ball, later saying that the medals he wore belonged to his father, who was handed them as “a declaration for his resistance to [Communist] dictatorship,” Gorka told Breitbart, one of his former employers.
Before coming to the US in 2008, Gorka moved to Hungary in 1992 and worked for the country’s Ministry of Defense before becoming an adviser to Prime Minister Viktor Orban in 1998.
Gorka ran for mayor in the small town of Piliscsaba in 2006, coming in third place. Several members of the community told NBC News that he was a member of Vitezi Rend; one of the group’s leaders told CNN that the organization was never connected to the Nazis and that Gorka was not a pledged member.
Gorka became a US citizen in 2012, which made it possible for him to work for the federal government.
He lasted about eight months in the White House before he was forced to leave. He claimed he resigned, a version of events disputed by the Trump White House.
“Sebastian Gorka did not resign, but I can confirm he no longer works at the White House,” a White House official told several news outlets at the time.
After his departure, Gorka became a political and counterterrorism commentator on right-wing media, with his own radio show and frequent appearances on Fox News and Newsmax.
The 54-year-old pugilist is well-known for his aggressiveness towards the press, often telling reporters to “take a long jump off a short pier,” as Politico noted.
“I wouldn’t have him in any US government,” Bolton told CNN.
“Fortunately, it’s not the highest position he had been mentioned for,” he added. “But I don’t think it’s going to bode well for counterterrorism efforts when the [National Security Council’s] senior director is somebody like that. ... But the questions of who are the deputy secretaries, who are the undersecretaries, and so on, is also going to tell us a lot about who’s actually running the government.”
