Sebastian Gorka Out Of White House; His Murky Past

Sebastian Gorka, who was termed “a big mystery” by a White House official earlier this year is no longer working for the Trump administration.

Though he apparently issued a resignation letter, the White House insisted Friday he did not resign.

"Sebastian Gorka did not resign, but I can confirm he no longer works at the White House," a press statement released by a Trump representative said, indicating he was fired.

Although what he did was never spelled out, Gorka was serving as a deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, focusing on national security and terrorism.

Speaking to Washington Examiner, a White House official said his responsibilities “were appearing on television, giving White House tours and peeling out in his Mustang.”

In his exit letter excerpted in the Federalist, Gorka seemed to link his exit with departed senior strategist Steve Bannon’s, with whom he was closely aligned.

"The individuals who most embodied and represented the policies that will ‘Make America Great Again,’ have been internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months," Gorka wrote.

"The best and most effective way I can support you, Mr. President, is from outside the People’s House.”

Gorka’s stint inside the White House was marred by questions of his past and his credentials.

Gorka’s full name is Sebastian L. v. Gorka , the lowercase "v" denotes membership in a group called the Vitézi Rend (Order of Vitéz), a far-right nationalist group in Hungary originally founded by fascist dictator Miklós Horthy, Vox reported.

Gorka’s parents are from Hungary and he lived there from 1992 to 2007.

According to the Vox report, Gorka was seen on Hungarian television in 2007 endorsing a militia — Hungarian Guard— that the European Court of Justice found to be “essentially racist.” He also penned several op-eds for a paper notable for publishing virulently anti-Semitic material.

Gorka’s post-2002 qualifications were also criticized by American academics, who said the PhD awarded to him by Corvinus University in Hungary failed to uphold basic standards of citation and intellectual rigor.

Writing in the blog Lawyers, Guns & Money, Dan Nexon, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University said: “I am confident that [Gorka’s dissertation] would not earn him a doctorate at any reputable academic department in the United States.

“Indeed, it would be unacceptable as an undergraduate thesis,” he added.

Even after his PhD, Gorka’s work in his purported field of expertise left much to be desired, and counterterrorism professionals considered him a lightweight. Experts also found his insistence on a tight link between Islam as a religion and jihadism untenable.

It was Bannon’s patronage that got Gorka in the White House in the first place — he was national security editor for Bannon’s Breitbart News website since 2014.

Now with Bannon back in Breitbart as executive chairman, it’s probable Gorka be back at the national security beat at the right-wing news outlet.