President-elect Donald Trump will name Sebastian Gorka, a former aide, as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism.
Gorka was said to be vying for deputy national security adviser alongside Michael Anton, another former national security official in the president’s first term. Anton reportedly pulled himself out of the running for the position when he heard that Gorka would be in the administration, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
“Since 2015, Dr. Gorka has been a tireless advocate for the America First Agenda and the MAGA Movement, serving previously as Strategist to the President in the first Trump Administration,” Trump said in a statement. “Dr. Gorka is a legal immigrant to the United States, with more than 30 years of National Security experience. In 2015, he was one of my Advisors for the GOP Primary Debates on National Security.”
The “legal immigrant” was born to Hungarian parents and lived in Hungary from 1992 to 2008 before becoming a naturalized citizen in 2012. During Trump’s first administration, it was unclear if Gorka was able to receive full security clearance. Gorka left the White House in 2017 because, he said at the time, he believed could better serve Trump from outside of government.
“[G]iven recent events, it is clear to me that forces that do not support the MAGA promise are – for now – ascendant within the White House,” Gorka wrote in an August 2017 resignation letter. “As a result, the best and most effective way I can support you, Mr. President, is from outside the People’s House.”
“Regrettably, outside of yourself, 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. This was made patently obvious as I read the text of your speech on Afghanistan this week,” the letter continued. “The fact that those who drafted and approved the speech removed any mention of Radical Islam or radical Islamic terrorism proves that a crucial element of your presidential campaign has been lost.”
In response to Gorka’s appointment, former National Security Adviser John Bolton said that the counterterrorism pick is a “con man.”
“I wouldn’t have him in any U.S. government,” Bolton told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “Fortunately it’s not the highest position he had been mentioned for but I don’t think it’s going to bode well for counter-terrorism efforts when the senior director is somebody like that. This is why obviously everybody is now focusing on the top jobs but the questions of who are the deputy secretaries, who are the undersecretaries, is going to tell us a lot about who is actually running the government.”