I wanted to flag your attention to a story bubbling up in the MAGA world that may amount to something or may be merely entertaining. It turns on a guy named Sergio Gor, a 38-year-old who is in charge of the Presidential Personnel Office. He’s in charge of vetting presidential appointees, but with an apparently very Trumpian emphasis on evidences of political loyalty as opposed to more conventional kind of reviews. But it turns out that Gor himself has yet to submit what is called an SF-86, the standard form for appointees who need a high level security clearance. So the guy in charge of vetting political appointees has yet to submit his own materials to be vetted himself. Not great, but the kind of mix of incompetence and probable sleaze that’s pretty standard in Trumpland.
But now there’s a bit more.
Gor says he was born in Malta. But the New York Post reported on the 17th that Malta appears to have no records of such a person being born in the country on his birthday. Pressed on this point, Gor declined to tell the Post where he was born “other than to say it was not Russia.”
This has perhaps unsurprisingly gotten people’s attention and there is a swirl of accusations that he was not only born in Russia but is even a Russian spy. As near as I can tell, there’s no clear evidence for either of those claims. There was a seemingly credible thread purporting to demonstrate that Gor was born in Russia. But it’s since been retracted after the author said he’d misconstrued a document.
So a lot of smoke and chatter. But as far as Russia, I have not seen anything that you could call positive evidence. But still, claiming you were born in Malta when there appears to be good evidence you weren’t is a pretty big red flag.
A few other thoughts on this. I don’t think you could be in that position at all if you weren’t an American citizen. And your naturalization papers and your passport state clearly where you were born. So it’s hard to see how big a mystery this could be. Another point is: can he speak Maltese? Perhaps the idea is he was only born there and left when he was an infant. But if he spent any period of time there, does he speak Maltese? It’s not like speaking French. It’s a kind of obscure language. It’s actually a derivative of Arabic with a huge overlay of Italian and generally Indo-European vocabulary. It’s not a language you take to pass out of a language requirement.
Again, maybe this is easily explained. But if it is, it should be explained.
Yet another potential wrinkle of this is that Elon Musk appears to have feuded a lot with Gor during his tenure running DOGE. And it appears to have been Gor who got Trump to pull the nomination of Musk’s close associate to be head of NASA. So is this whole brouhaha Musk’s doing? Is he now feeding it as payback?
Again, I don’t know where this is going. I don’t know if it originated in some MAGA feud. But there does seem to be what should be a simple question that Gor seems unwilling to answer. So worth keeping an eye on it.