Mark Wilson / Getty Images
Sebastian Gorka, an adviser to President Donald Trump, resigned from his position late Friday night, BuzzFeed News confirmed,
Gorka previously worked as an international news editor at the right-wing outlet Breitbart, under the leadership of Steve Bannon — the one time chief strategist to President Trump who has since returned to Breitbart. Gorka, whose title was deputy assistant to the president, was particularly known for his focus on Islamic terrorism and was a frequent face on cable news.
Gorka is the latest White House official to leave his post, after Bannon was ousted earlier this month by Trump's chief of staff Gen. John Kelly. The resignation was first reported by The Federalist.
Gorka has been a source of controversy as long as he has been in the Trump administration. Earlier this year, there were reports that Gorka belonged to Historical Vitézi Rend, a far-right Hungarian group that had ties to the Nazi party and a complicated history. Gorka has denied he belonged to the group and denied holding anti-Semitic beliefs.
More recently, after a bomb exploded at a Mosque in rural Minneapolis, Gorka said he was not convinced the attack was not “a fake hate crime.”
A number of progressive and liberal groups had called on Trump to fire Gorka and chief White House strategist Steve Bannon in the wake of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville last weekend.
Gorka, who was born in the United Kingdom, spent the 1990s and early 2000s in Hungary, where his parents were born, as a self-styled defense and intelligence expert. After moving to America and earning his citizenship, he became an increasingly prominent critic of Islam through his work at Breitbart and eventually as a television pundit. Gorka was a fierce critic of former president Barack Obama over what he saw as Obama’s unwillingness to properly call out radical islamic terrorism.
Gorka and his wife Katharine, who works at the Department of Homeland Security and previously served on the Trump transition team, were said to be major drivers of Trump’s foreign policy strategy focusing on Islamic terror. “Our pillow talk is the Islamic State and Al Qaeda,” he once said in a speech. Under Trump, DHS’s task force to counter violent extremism shifted to refocus specifically on Islamic terror groups while putting fewer resources towards combating far-right domestic terrorism, with the assistance of Katharine Gorka.
Gorka has been accused of exaggerating his intelligence bona fides and his bid for security clearance was rejected by Hungarian counterintelligence.
It was not immediately clear whether Katharine Gorka will remain a part of the administration.
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/2gd3l0C
0 comments:
Post a Comment