- Look, Piers, first things first.
I know President Trump, and I can tell you, hand on heart,
I'll put a hand on a Bible if you want,
there is not a racist molecule in that man's body.
- [Shalewa] That's Sebastian Gorka.
He is both a former and current member
of the Trump Administration, from White House aide
to a member of the National Security Education Board.
Here's how one man with alleged close ties
to a pro-Nazi group went from being fired by the FBI
for his Islamophobic rhetoric
to having the former steak salesman's ear for a second time.
I'm comedian Shalewa Sharpe,
and this is the story of how one man's failure in Hungary
launched him to success in America.
Sebastian Lukacs Gorka was born in 1970
in London to Hungarian parents.
His father Paul, according to one of Gorka's books,
at age 15,
NBC News notes that Gorka
Gorka's father joined Hungary's clandestine
anti-Soviet resistance.
He was caught and tortured.
But during the failed revolution of 1956,
he broke free and fled the country
to start a family in London.
Gorka's father received a Vitez medal
for his resistance to the Soviet Union,
a medal with deep ties to Nazis.
In short, Vitez Rend was an organization
founded by Hungarian ruler Miklos Horthy, who once said,
During World War II, the US State Department
listed Vitezi Rend among a group of
Historians have claimed Vitezi Rend helped Nazis
deport and kill Hungarian Jews.
Gorka himself would later wear his father's medal
to Trump's inauguration for all to see.
And his affiliation goes much deeper than just an accessory.
According to members of Vitezi Rend,
Gorka took a lifelong oath of loyalty to the group.
Forward notes,
Members of the group adopt a lowercase V
as a middle initial.
There are multiple records of Gorka spelling his name
with the inclusion of the V.
However, Gorka denies being a member or swearing an oath
and chalks all this up to simply honoring his late father,
who had ties to Nazis.
His mother Susan worked as a translator for David Irving,
a noted yet discredited British historian
who claimed the Holocaust never happened
or it was at least way overblown.
He was eventually sentenced to three years in prison
in Austria on charges of denying the Holocaust.
Gorka attended Heythrop College at the University of London,
where he joined the British Territorial Army,
a volunteer reservist unit.
After graduating, Gorka moved to his parents' homeland
of Hungary in the early '90s.
From 1993 to 1998, he worked as a low-level staffer
at the defense ministry while studying for a master's.
He eventually worked as an advisor to Hungarian leader
and right-wing nationalist, Viktor Orban,
who John McCain once called a
neo-Fascist dictator.
The attacks on September 11th, 2001,
radicalized Gorka into the bombastic
and garish official he is today.
Take this recent anecdote from the Washington Post,
where Gorka spoke to a crowd of Trump supporters
three days after Trump won the election.
There were nods and quiet applause
as Gorka fished around in the pocket of his yellow blazer,
searching for his remote.
He paused to draw out the suspense
before pressing the remote's button.
Up popped a photograph of a dead bloodied brown-skinned man
lying on the ground next to an AK-47 assault rifle.
The audience began to cheer,
first hesitantly, and then with gusto.
Gorka's booming voice filled the room.
But let's take a moment to jump back
into Gorka's time in Hungary.
He began popping up on Hungarian TV as a minor pundit.
He was labeled as a counter-terrorism expert
with little evidence to back that up.
In 2002, he tried to work on a parliamentary committee
investigating the prime minister,
but he was denied security clearance
under the assumption he was working as a British spy,
Perhaps Gorka shouldn't have falsely and frequently claimed,
according to some accounts, to have worked for MI6,
the James Bond stuff.
There is no evidence to support Gorka's claim
of being James Bond.
However, there is a trove of evidence
suggesting Gorka is a Bond villain.
In 2006, Gorka tried to run for mayor
of a small town in Hungary, but lost.
The next year, he helped found a radical right-wing party
called the New Democratic Coalition.
Two of its three founding members had been heavy hitters
in an openly anti-Semitic party called Jobbik.
During a televised interview in 2007,
when speaking on behalf of his new political party,
Gorka acknowledged his support
for a plan to create a paramilitary militia.
But this political endeavor was also short-lived.
The party didn't last.
After several consecutive failures,
Gorka needed something to show for,
so he got his PhD from Corvinus University in Budapest,
but even that came with caveats.
The school has been widely criticized for its many faults.
A scholar at Georgetown University
who reviewed Gorka's dissertation told Rolling Stone,
Two of the three people who served as endorses
of Gorka's PhD did not have any academic credentials at all.
And the one who did was a right-wing politician in Hungary
and a Gorka family friend who once suggested
putting pig heads atop the Hungarian border
to send a message to Muslim refugees.
A professor at the University of North Carolina
who studied Gorka's past wrote,
And an advisor on Gorka's dissertation on terrorism
went after Gorka himself.
Sebastian is knowledgeable.
I would not call him an expert on terrorism.
Failing to make a name for himself in Hungary,
Gorka moved somewhere with apparently lower standards.
In 2008, Gorka moved to the United States
and later worked as an adjunct professor
of US national security and foreign policy
at Georgetown University.
God knows what he was teaching there.
In 2014, Gorka went to work for Breitbart,
the far-right publication,
as their national securities editor.
He wrote many articles for the site,
which was run at the time by Steve Bannon.
One of Gorka's articles with the headline
Muslim Brotherhood Overruns National Cathedral in DC
was wildly untrue, according to Rolling Stone:
He also wrote several articles
in support of NYPD's highly controversial unit
which spied on Muslims in the United States.
Al Jazeera notes,
In one Breitbart article,
Gorka argued that NYPD's Muslim surveillance program
The program, of course, by NYPD's own admission,
did not turn up one intelligence lead.
In the midst of his Breitbart stint,
Gorka worked for the FBI,
giving speeches to bureau employees
on counter-terrorism issues.
In one of his speeches, according to the Daily Beast,
The FBI cut ties with Gorka for his Islamophobic rhetoric.
And it was looking like he was just as lost
as he was in Hungary.
But when Trump took 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,
Gorka was tapped as a deputy assistant to the president.
There was one big problem though:
He didn't have any security clearance,
meaning he couldn't attend any meetings.
One former Obama Administration official told BuzzFeed News,
That's exactly what he did.
He'd go on TV seemingly every night and defend his boss.
It's only weird to journalists like yourself
who are biased
But in August of 2017, Gorka resigned from his post.
Of course, Trump's ego-driven White House
denied the claim that Gorka resigned,
but didn't offer any further information
as to what happened.
Three years and hundreds of Gorka radio shows later,
and he's back in the White House, working as a member
of the National Security Education Board.
For a second time,
the controversial figure with the Islamophobic views,
alleged close ties to a pro-Nazi group
and a penchant for a police state has the president's ear,
if he has security clearance.
Oh, it's good to be back.
(slow orchestral music)
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