With his job reportedly safe for the time being, White House staffer Sebastian Gorka on Sunday addressed the annual conference of the Jerusalem Post as part of an ongoing effort to improve his reputation in the Jewish community.
According to a report in the Atlantic, the self-styled counterterrorism expert was met with a friendly reception at the event, where he spent the bulk of his on-stage interview with editor Yaakov Katz discussing the threat posed by “radical Islam.”
Katz opened the conversation with a question about Gorka’s ties to a Hungarian knightly order founded by a Nazi collaborator, which have fueled rumors that the Trump White House planned to remove him from his post as deputy assistant to the President. But he did not push back when Gorka gave the same, indirect answer that he’d previously provided to other publications, according to the report.
“I have spent my life fighting against totalitarian ideologies and so did my father,” Gorka said, as quoted by the Atlantic, adding that no one has “ever found one sentence that I have said in the last 46 years that is anti-Semitic or anti-Israel.”
Allies of Gorka and the Trump administration have in recent weeks published a number of op-eds in conservative and Orthodox Jewish publications defending his reputation. Many, including fellow activists and lawyers Jeff Ballabon and Bruce Abramson, have argued that his critics are part of a liberal agenda to smear individuals like Gorka who take a forceful view towards “the jihadi threat to America.”
Abramson, who co-authored one op-ed with Ballabon for Jerusalem Post, told the Atlantic they were “contacted by some people who knew the president” tipping them off about the “slander” being published about Gorka.
In the face of lingering questions about his limited counterterrorism experience, links to Hungary’s far-right and a reported lack of a security clearance, Gorka remains in the White House.
The Daily Beast, which first reported that Gorka might be shifted into a role at a different federal agency, on Friday spoke to unnamed senior administration officials who said that Trump and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon personally intervened to save his job.
