JOHN KIRIAKOU: Sebastian Gorka Is Back

This time around, Trump has elected to ignore the F.B.I. security clearance vetting process for the sworn member of Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian group that served under the Nazis.

Sebastian Gorka in 2018. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)

By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News

Sebastian Gorka is back.  U.S. President-elect Donald Trump last week named Gorka as the administration’s “terrorism czar” on the National Security Council.  Trump has made a series of disastrous appointments to his administration since his election on Nov. 5.  But this might be the worst.  Don’t remember Sebastian Gorka? 

Eight years ago, when Trump was elected president for the first time, Gorka was one of his more controversial appointments as “deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs,” that is, deputy national security adviser.  That’s a hugely important position.  The deputy national security advisor assists the president in managing the entire intelligence community and manages the administration’s anti-terrorism efforts.  But Gorka immediately ran into trouble.

As it turned out, Gorka was, apparently, a sworn member of Hungary’s neo-Nazi Vitezi Rend, or “Order of Heroes,” a group that the State Department says was “under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany during World War II” and which continues to be neo-Nazi in its orientation.

Gorka only became an American citizen in 2012, and membership should have disqualified him not only from citizenship, but even from entering the United States in the first place. 

Furthermore, at Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Gorka actually wore the uniform and badge of the Vitezi Rend, and the Times of Israel newspaper reported that he may even have inherited them from his Nazi grandfather.

A Jewish newspaper, The Forward, broke the news of Gorka’s membership in Vitezi Rend.  It said that the group’s own leaders confirm that Gorka took a “lifelong oath of loyalty.” (Gorka has ignored multiple email requests for comment.)  

Bruce Einhorn, a retired immigration judge and current professor of nationality law at Pepperdine University, told The Forward that Gorka’s “silence speaks volumes.”  Einhorn continued that Gorka’s “failure to disclose a material fact,” his membership in a racist organization that promotes violence, could undermine the validity of both his immigration status and his claim to U.S. citizenship.  No statute of limitations exists for such a violation.

To make matters even more revolting, according to The Forward, men who have sworn allegiance to the Vitezi Rend are permitted to take a lowercase “v” as a middle initial and as a secret symbol of brotherhood.  Gorka used the “v,” signing his name in both his 2008 doctoral thesis and in his testimony before Congress in 2011, as “Sebastian L. v. Gorka.”  In the end, the F.B.I. wouldn’t give Gorka a security clearance and, after only seven months, he was forced to resign.

This time around, however, Trump has elected to ignore the F.B.I. security clearance vetting process and has announced that Gorka will be the deputy national security adviser and terrorism czar.  Period.  The role does not require Senate confirmation and, technically, Trump can simply decree that Gorka will receive a top secret security clearance; F.B.I. be damned.  

There actually has been some fallout from the appointment.  Michael Anton, a national security official in Trump’s first term who was in line to be deputy national security adviser took himself out of contention when he was told that there would be a position waiting for Gorka, according to The Washington Post. 

The Israeli media, which has long been a source of support for Trump, is furious that an overt anti-Semite will hold such a position of authority.  And an unnamed member of the Trump national security transition team told the Post, “Almost universally, the entire team considers Gorka to be a clown.  They’re dreading working with him.”

Gorka has been largely silent since the election.  He has only given interviews to his old friend and colleague Steve Bannon and, he says, he provided Israel with advice on how to confront Hamas.  What was that advice?  “Kill every single one of them.  God bless Israel.  God bless Judeo-Christian civilization.”  That’s a strange position for a Nazi.

John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act — a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.