Rolling Stone on Sebastian Gorka: [View all]

[Ilsa]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/sebastian-gorka-the-west-wings-phony-foreign-policy-guru-w496912

Sebastian Gorka, the West Wing's Phony Foreign-Policy Guru
Gorka's a former Breitbart editor with Islamophobic views and ties to neo-Nazi extremists – and he has the ear of the president

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But critics charge that Gorka's hyperbole and his hands-off relationship with the truth have lately sent his stock skyrocketing with the president. Renowned for his disdain for the media and his blithe readiness to defend Trump to the last tweet, Gorka – who apparently tools around Washington in a Mustang with a license plate that reads ART [OF] WAR – has become a nearly ubiquitous presence on television and radio as a spokesman for the White House. "Did you see Gorka?" Trump reportedly said after Gorka took part in figurative fisticuffs on CNN. "So great. I mean, really, truly great!"

Gorka views himself as a "utility infielder, especially in the field of counterterrorism," and claims to provide behind-the-scenes advice to Trump on how to fight terrorism, while serving under the wing of Steve Bannon, his former boss at Breitbart. "It's surreal and quite horrifying that someone who's such an amateur has reached such heights," says David Ucko, associate professor in the Department of War and Conflict Studies at National Defense University. Adds Michael S. Smith II, a veteran terrorism analyst who's had unpleasant run-ins with Gorka, "This is not somebody who should be working anywhere near the White House." Even more bluntly, a colleague of Smith's, Cindy Storer, an ex-CIA terrorism analyst, said, "He's nuts."

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Perhaps even more worrisome, Gorka's thesis proposed a dramatic restructuring of the national-security apparatus to create a police state. He suggests a radical reform of "internal barriers between the police force, the army and various intelligence services." This could also be seen as the start of a Gestapo-like, all-powerful national system of repression. "That's about as Nazi Germany- or Soviet Union-like a proposal as I've ever heard," says Patrick Eddington of the conservative Cato Institute. "The net effect would be to suspend the Bill of Rights, if his proposal ever saw the light of day."

During the decade and a half Gorka spent in Hungary, he was enmeshed in a web of ultraright, anti-Semitic and even Nazi-like parties, politicians and media outlets. For most of the 2000s, the Gorkas ran a think tank in Budapest called the Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security (ITDIS). For funding, Gorka received at least $27,650 in U.S. federal grants, according to government records. "We worked for ourselves," Katharine Gorka tells Rolling Stone.

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