White House aide Sebastian Gorka argued in a testy, eleven-minute-long Thursday interview with “BBC Newsnight” that any media organization asking critical questions of the Trump administration is acting in bad faith and attempting to manufacture “fake news.”
The former Breitbart News editor and Fox News commentator responded to the bulk of BBC host Evan Davis’ questions by alleging that “agenda-driven” journalists were “obsessive” about finding fault with the President.
Davis opened the interview asking if Gorka believed that Trump’s Thursday press conference, the bulk of which was spent criticizing the media, was “unhinged.”
“I think it’s pathetic that the BBC would use words of that nature and also the adjective ‘weird,’” Gorka, who repeatedly characterized the presser as “fabulous,” replied. “It’s only weird to journalists like yourself who are biased.”
Davis pressed Gorka to respond to specific falsehoods Trump uttered in that news conference, such as the assertion that he had the biggest electoral college victory since Ronald Reagan. A reporter informed him during the press conference that was not true.
“I think you’re getting a little bit obsessive yourself,” Gorka said. “If you actually listen to the tape you just played, he said ‘I guess’ I had the largest. It wasn’t an unequivocal statement of fact.”
He again accused Davis of “obsessing on issues that aren’t the point” later in the interview. Davis had asked him why Trump said Friday that he knew nothing about former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn discussing sanctions with a Russian diplomat shortly after the election, given that subsequent reporting revealed Trump actually had been informed about the conversation weeks ago.
Gorka repeated the claim, which he has made almost verbatim in previous interviews, that the stories he reads about chaos inside the White House bear “absolutely no resemblance” to the facts on the ground.
An increasingly frustrated Davis asked Gorka if it is always “everybody else’s fault and never your own.”
“No, not at all, but there is an agenda-driven distortion,” he said. “This is a media, a mainstream media that has accused us in the White House of being anti-Semitic and white supremacist. This is how bad it is. This is a White House where Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, is key to the decision-making process and you have the audacity as the mainstream media to talk about anti-Semitism.”
Gorka pointed to the criticism the White House received for releasing a Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that broke with tradition by neglecting to explicitly mention Jews as victims. While both conservative and liberal Jewish groups took issue with that omission, Gorka previously characterized such criticism as “asinine.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly shot down questions about an uptick in anti-Semitic and racist incidents since the election, too. The President on Thursday told an Orthodox Jewish reporter who asked about those incidents, and was careful to say he wasn’t accusing Trump himself of anti-Semitism, that the question was “repulsive.”
Gorka’s critique of “agenda-driven” media is undermined by his frequent appearances on Fox New’s “Hannity” and his interviews with Breitbart, two news outlets that were unabashedly pro-Trump during the 2016 election.
In a Thursday interview with Breitbart’s Lee Stranahan, Gorka took aim at the media yet again, claiming the press “can’t stand” that the “forgotten man” in America “was given a voice” by Trump.
“It’s not about policies,” he said. “Remember, we never talk about Russia policy. It’s about who bugged Mike Flynn, and what he said to the vice president. It’s never about policy. It’s never about ISIS. It’s the classic attack, Lee: ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ Remember? That’s what they’re doing.”
Watch his full BBC interview below.
