Advertisement

Gorka is doubling down on his critique of the White House not critiquing Islam enough

Dude.

Deputy assistant to President Trump, Sebastian Gorka, talks with people in the Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington, Tuesday, May 2, 2017, during a ceremony commemorating Israeli Independence Day. CREDIT: AP Photo/Susan Walsh
Deputy assistant to President Trump, Sebastian Gorka, talks with people in the Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington, Tuesday, May 2, 2017, during a ceremony commemorating Israeli Independence Day. CREDIT: AP Photo/Susan Walsh

The questionably-credentialed former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka left the White House last week, but he’s still complaining the White House isn’t Islamophobic enough.

In his resignation letter made public on Friday, Gorka raised complaints the White House wasn’t critical enough of Islam. On Sunday, he doubled down, telling The Jerusalem Post that national security adviser H.R. McMaster sees “the threat of Islam through an Obama administration lens, meaning that religion has nothing to do with the war we are in.”

It’s worth noting that this was not actually the view of the Obama administration – but Gorka, as The Jerusalem Post aptly put it, speaks of “the violent extremism as a problem inherent to Islam itself.”

“He believes – and he told me in his office – that all of these people are just criminals. That is simply wrong,” Gorka said of McMaster.

Advertisement

The Federalist first reported that Gorka would be leaving his job at the White House Friday evening, and although Gorka submitted a resignation letter, an anonymous source told The Federalist and a number of other outlets that Gorka “did not resign” but “no longer works at the White House.”

In his resignation letter, Gorka said he would be leaving the White House because “the individuals who most embodied and represented the policies that will ‘Make America Great Again,’ have been internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months.”

Gorka wrote that that was most clear to him when he heard Trump’s recent speech on Afghanistan.

“The fact that those who drafted and approved the speech removed any mention of Radical Islam or radical Islamic terrorism proves that a crucial element of your presidential campaign has been lost,” the letter said.

It was never completely clear what Gorka’s role in the White House was. He was officially a national security adviser to the president, but he was never given security clearance and a number of experts have questioned his qualifications and credentials.

Advertisement

Gorka has been called “functionally a strategist” for former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who left the White House two weeks ago, with whom Gorka worked at Breitbart before both men joined the Trump administration.

But certainly Gorka’s most prominent role was as Trump’s favorite attack dog.

Notably, Gorka is also reportedly a sworn member of a Nazi-allied group in Hungary, although those ties, inexplicably, did not stop cable outlets from frequently inviting him on and not asking him about Nazis. During his tenure, he refused to condemn an attack on a mosque because, he said, it could’ve been faked by liberals and everyone needed to stop criticizing white supremacists so much.

Gorka also told The Jerusalem Post that his ties to Vietzi Rend, the Nazi-allied group, only ever came up when Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner would joke about them.

“The attacks against me never came up openly inside the building,” Gorka said. “The only time they would come up is when Jared [Kushner] would joke about them. He would always joke about the latest absurd accusation to be made. But it’s possible they came up privately.”

Unsurprisingly, Gorka has said he will be returning to Breitbart.

Despite leaving his post, Gorka’s wife Katherine is remaining in her job at the Department of Homeland Security, where her central goal is to redirect funding toward Islamic terror and away from far-right domestic terror

Advertisement

Gorka’s exit also doesn’t mean the administration is free of racists. Among those left behind are adviser Stephen Miller, who is close with white nationalist Richard Spencer and became known for his nativist views when he was working for Attorney General Jeff Sessions during Sessions’ time in the Senate. Sessions himself remains in his job, despite being found to be too racist to be a federal judge and saying he thought the KKK was “OK” until he found out they smoked weed

Gorka did not pick up multiple calls from ThinkProgress Monday.