Sebastian Gorka was never properly vetted before he joined the Trump administration which is why his affiliation with a Hungarian pro-Nazi group wasn’t an obstacle for him getting a job as Deputy Assistant to the President. Even after the following was reported, Gorka really had nothing to worry about:
The Forward reports Thursday that officers of Vitézi Rend, an anti-Semitic, quasi-Nazi Hungarian nationalist group, say Gorka is a sworn member. Gorka wore a medal typically worn by Vitézi Rend members to a January 20 inauguration ball, but said at the time that it was a gesture honoring his late father. He has also at times referred to himself as Sebastian L. v. Gorka, using a “v.” initial employed by Vitézi Rend members.
What eventually did Gorka in was his failure to obtain a security clearance and the departure of his ally Steve Bannon. He left the White House in August 2017.
But what you might not realize is that his wife Katharine never left. She served on the transition team before taking a position at the Department of Homeland Security as a policy adviser. She briefly was the subject of controversy after the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, but then was mostly forgotten.
In August 2017, the Huffington Post reported that Gorka and other aides worked to eliminate a DHS grant for Life After Hate, which would have been used to expand its outreach and intervention services for former white supremacists and others in the “criminal underground.” Earlier that summer, DHS, under the leadership of then-DHS Secretary John Kelly, cut some organizations out of grant money to counter violent extremism — including nearly a dozen that the Obama administration considered worthy of receiving the funds.
Some people put two and two together and thought there was perhaps a relationship between the husband’s affinity for Hungarian white supremacists and the wife’s opposition to funding programs aimed at rehabilitating white supremacists, but who knows what truly goes inside a marriage, right?
In any case, Katharine Gorka looks like she’s going to be getting a much higher profile job.
Katharine Gorka, a political appointee at the Department of Homeland Security who has stirred controversy for her views on terrorism and her role in the department’s efforts to combat violent extremism in the US, is expected to be the new press secretary at Customs and Border Protection.
Acting CBP Commissioner John Sanders told CNN Tuesday that Gorka is expected to take the position and he advocated for her to join the agency.
The Customer and Border Protection agency has responsibility for policing our borders and is distinct from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which has responsibility for patrolling the interior of the country. Both agencies are now controversial as they attempt to carry out the president’s cruel, inhuman and draconian immigration policies.
I don’t think the best way to alleviate people’s concerns is to hire the wife of the guy who wore a Vitézi Rend medal to the inauguration as the spokesperson for our border enforcement policies. It doesn’t help that she, like her husband, used to write anti-Islamic diatribes for Breitbart News.
In the Trump administration, every day is worse than the last, which means that every day is the worst day of our lives.
