Gorka was simply misunderstood, Breitbart columns and headlines declared. They knew, because as the Breitbart News national security editor he had written articles that attacked former President Obama (“Obama’s Reign of Error: How America Lost Its Way and Is Losing the War Against Jihad”), provided fodder for Donald Trump’s attacks on Obama and on fellow Republicans (“The Real Threat: The JV Team in the White House” and “Rand Paul: It’s America’s Fault”) and defended Trump’s most controversial statements (“The Donald v. NATO: He’s on the Money”).
A close associate of Breitbart boss Steve Bannon, Gorka came to the White House with Bannon, was installed as a member of the Strategic Initiatives Group that Bannon and First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner set up, and was charged with providing the president with advice and counsel on “irregular warfare, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism.” When the outcry over Gorka’s presence in the White House rose, amid new revelations about his troublesome ties to extremist groups and dubious academic credentials, New York congressman Jerrold Nadler declared: “There should be zero tolerance for anyone working anywhere in the Administration who shares the offensive views propagated by the organizations to which Mr. Gorka has been associated,” and there was talk in early May that Gorka would be removed from his role at the White House and assigned new duties elsewhere in the administration. But he got a reprieve. “Trump and Bannon ‘Personally Intervened’ to Save Seb Gorka,” announced the Daily Beast on May 5. “Seb Gorka’s job as a White House national security aide was on the line; lucky for him he has friends in the highest places.”
While Bannon remained in position as the Trump White House’s “chief strategist,” Gorka was sticking around as the “irregular warfare” strategist, with a place at the table when the vital decisions are made about issues of war and peace, diplomacy and international relations.
Giving Gorka so powerful a position, explained the Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe, signaled “a radical break” with the stance of the Republican and Democratic administrations and foreign-policy experts of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama eras in Washington. Bush and Obama emphasized respect for Islam and recognized terrorism as an affront to the values of the vast majority of Muslims, while Trump and his associates veer toward a view that focuses on what they see as “the Islamic doctrinal and scholarly roots of jihadist terror.”
Gorka has contributed mightily to the development of Trump’s most extreme positions, with his book Defeating Jihad and with Breitbart essays that ripped Bush and Obama preachments that poverty, alienation and geopolitical factors must be taken into account by those who would combat terror. “That story is not one of America failing to provide jobs for the world’s needy, or the lack of community outreach in America,” wrote Gorka. “It is a story of Islam under attack by the West, a perpetual Holy War against the infidel until the House of Islam—Dar al Islaam—covers the world and all live under sharia in a new Caliphate.” Newsweek says that Gorka’s “views on the ‘global jihadist movement,’ as he calls it, align with a small cadre of right-wing observers who depict Islamist militants and extremists as being driven principally by passages from the Koran, rather than by government repression, or sectarian, tribal, political or economic factors.”
Gorka’s writing appealed to Trump, but has long unsettled experts on terrorism.
“He doesn’t understand a fraction of what he pretends to know about Islam,” explains Mia Bloom, a former fellow at Pennsylvania State’s International Center for the Study of Terrorism who now teaches at Georgia State University and who has written extensively on ethnic killing, suicide bombings and terror. Adrian Weale, a former British Intelligence Corps officer, says Gorka “has never been an operational practitioner of counter-terrorism.”
The man who has been referred to as Trump’s “Jihad whisperer” “does not speak Arabic and has never lived in a Muslim-majority country,” according to the Washington Post. Nor has he been a contributor to the leading peer-reviewed scholarly journal in the field, Terrorism and Political Violence. “Gorka has not submitted anything to the journal in the last five or so years, according to my records, and we have never used him as a reviewer,” explained Lawrence P. Rubin, the associate editor. “We would not have used him as a reviewer because he is not considered a terrorism expert by the academic or policy community.”
Asked about Gorka by the Post, Cindy Storer, a former CIA expert on the relationship between religious extremism and terrorism, said: “He thinks the government and intelligence agencies don’t know anything about radicalization, but the government knows a lot and thinks he’s nuts.”
Nuts? Perhaps. After assuming his position in the Trump White House, the presidential advisor found the time to track down the phone number of an actual terrorism expert, who had criticized Gorka on Twitter, and berated the man for more than twenty minutes.
Powerful? Unquestionably. And that’s what raises concerns not merely about Gorka’s anti-Muslim ranting and raving but also about his linkages to groups such as Vitézi Rend, whose members the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual explains “are presumed to be inadmissible” to the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Bruce Einhorn, the former Justice Department official who now teaches nationality law at Pepperdine University, explained to the Forward that Gorka’s refusal to respond to its legitimate questions about his own past—and about his connections to groups that have been linked with Nazism—were indefensible.
“Gorka is part of an administration issuing travel bans against countries and people as a whole,” says Einhorn, who served for a number of years as deputy chief for the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was charged with tracking down Nazis and Nazi allies who entered the United States illegally after World War II. “For someone who is part of this effort to not answer your question [about his membership in Vitézi Rend] and yet support what’s going on in the West Wing where he works is the height of hypocrisy. The administration that makes so much of protecting us from extremists while looping the guilty in with the innocent should at least require its officials tell the truth.”
— 6 —
THE LEOPARD THAT DID NOT CHANGE HIS SPOTS
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III
Attorney General of the United States
What can be said about Jeff Sessions that has not already been said by Dr. David Duke?
When Donald Trump announced that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was his pick to serve as the eighty-fourth attorney general of the United States, the former Imperial Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and longtime head of the National Association for the Advancement of White People (“a Klan without robes”) hailed the selection as “Great!” and expressed his hope that “Sessions as AG will stop the massive institutional race discrimination against whites!”
Trump’s selections of Sessions, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and now-former national security advisor Michael Flynn for top posts were, Duke said, “the first steps in the long and arduous project of taking America back.”
“Sessions has been hated for years by the Jewish-dominated media for his opposition to massive immigration into America and for the fact that he has dared to publicly oppose the massive, institutionalized racial discrimination against white people called affirmative action,” explained Duke, a former Republican state legislator, gubernatorial nominee and U.S. Senate candidate, who counseled Trump’s pick for attorney general to use his confirmation hearing to “expose the blatant media and political blather of ‘equal rights and opportunity’ when white people face destructive anti-white affirmative action racist policies that dominate major corporations, Federal, State, and city governments, colleges and educational institutions.”
Duke then went back to his day-job work of defending his choice for president (“Jewish Supremacist, anti-White filth, Rob Reiner, viciously attacks and disrespects President Trump live on MSNBC,” “American hating, Cultural Mar
xists pushing, rabble rousing slob, Michael Moore, once again goes on television to disrespect President Trump,” “Can Donald Trump & Vladimir Putin together overthrow Zionist Globalist Hegemony?”) and revisiting the staples of his advocacy: Holocaust denial, portraying immigrants as criminals and asking “Why isn’t Hillary Clinton in jail yet?”
When Sessions was confirmed as the new head of the U.S. Department of Justice, however, it was time once more for Duke and his fellow “white nationalists” to celebrate. The former imperial wizard posted a huge photo of the new attorney general with the message “Law & Order, welcome back.”
What made Duke so enthusiastic about Sessions? Why did white-nationalist websites like the Daily Stormer (“the newest up and comer in the heated competition to rule the hate web,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which notes that the online publication was “named for prominent Nazi Julius Streicher’s virulently anti-Semitic weekly newspaper the Stormer”) respond to Trump’s nomination of Sessions by declaring “It’s like Christmas” and hail Senate approval of Trump’s top lawyer with the headline “Jeff Sessions Confirmed: We are One Step Closer to Complete Control”?
After all, Sessions says, “I detest the Klan.” The former senator is quick to remind folks that he once co-sponsored a Senate bill to honor Rosa Parks. And in his answers to questions posed by the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding his nomination, he wrote that prosecuting an Alabama Klan leader for murder was one of the “ten most significant litigated matters” he had “personally handled” in his career. (A nice sentiment, even if Atlantic magazine senior editor Adam Serwer would note after an extensive review of the case that “in seeking to defend Sessions from charges of racism, Sessions’s allies, and even Sessions himself, seem to have embellished key details, and to have inflated his actual role in the case, presenting him not merely as a cooperative U.S. attorney who facilitated the prosecution of the two Klansmen, but the driving force behind the prosecution itself. The details of the case don’t support that claim.”) How to sort this out?
Let’s turn to Coretta Scott King, the widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., for some insight. When Sessions was nominated by Ronald Reagan to serve as a federal judge for the Southern District of Alabama in the mid-1980s, Mrs. King, a native Alabaman, penned a poignant letter to then–committee chairman Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator who ran for the presidency in 1948 as the head of the segregationist States’ Rights Democratic Party ticket.
“I write to express my sincere opposition to the confirmation of Jefferson B. Sessions as a federal district court judge for the Southern District of Alabama,” she began, before explaining that “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters. For this reprehensible conduct, he should not be rewarded with a federal judgeship. I regret that a long-standing commitment prevents me from appearing in person to testify against this nominee. However, I have attached a copy of my statement opposing Mr. Sessions’ confirmation and I request that my statement as well as this letter be made a part of the hearing record.”
What Coretta Scott King’s statement explained was that “Mr. Sessions’ conduct as U.S. Attorney, from his politically-motivated voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal violations of civil rights laws, indicates that he lacks the temperament, fairness and judgment to be a federal judge.”
In particular, she detailed one of those transgressions: a 1984 prosecution of allies of her late husband “for assisting elderly and illiterate blacks to exercise [the] franchise” that the Voting Rights Act was intended to protect. “The actions taken by Mr. Sessions in regard to the [1985] voting fraud prosecutions represent just one more technique used to intimidate Black voters and thus deny them this most precious franchise. The investigations into the absentee voting process were conducted only in the Black Belt counties where blacks had finally achieved political power in the local government. Whites had been using the absentee process to their advantage for years, without incident. Then, when Blacks, realizing [the absentee process’s] strength, began to use it with success, criminal investigations were begun.”
Mrs. King explained that “in these investigations, Mr. Sessions, as U.S. Attorney, exhibited an eagerness to bring to trial and convict three leaders of the Perry County Civic League including Albert Turner despite evidence clearly demonstrating their innocence of any wrongdoing. Furthermore, in initiating the case, Mr. Sessions ignored allegations of similar behavior by whites, choosing instead to chill the exercise of the franchise by blacks by his misguided investigation. In fact, Mr. Sessions sought to punish older black civil rights activists, advisers and colleagues of my husband, who had been key figures in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. These were persons who, realizing the potential of the absentee vote among Blacks, had learned to use the process within the bounds of legality and had taught others to do the same. The only sin they committed was being too successful in gaining votes.
“The scope and character of the investigations conducted by Mr. Sessions also warrant grave concern. Witnesses were selectively chosen in accordance with the favorability of their testimony to the government’s case. Also, the prosecution illegally withheld from the defense critical statements made by witnesses. Witnesses who did testify were pressured and intimidated into submitting the ‘correct’ testimony. Many elderly blacks were visited multiple times by the FBI who then hauled them over 180 miles by bus to a grand jury in Mobile when they could more easily have testified at a grand jury twenty miles away in Selma. These voters, and others, have announced they are now never going to vote again.”
That was a heartbreaking prospect for Albert Turner, who was known in southern Alabama as “Mr. Voter Registration.”
When Turner died in 2000, at the age of sixty-four, a long New York Times obituary recognized him as “a civil rights leader and adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” who “helped lead the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, on March 7, 1965.” Recalling the “on-the-frontlines” role that Turner played on that “Bloody Sunday,” when “peaceful protesters… were beaten, chased and tear-gassed” by stick-wielding Alabama state troopers,” Alabama civil rights lawyer J. L. Chestnut told the Times: “Whenever there was something of unusual danger, and nobody wanted to, you could count on the fact that Albert and John Lewis would lead it.”
“I really do not know of a single individual in Alabama who has given more to the political progress of African-Americans in this state than Albert,” Chestnut said of the civil rights champion who had served as Dr. King’s field director in Alabama.
Only deep in the story, almost as an aside, was mention made of the prosecution of Turner by Sessions.
“With his wife, Evelyn, Mr. Turner was cleared of voter fraud in the 1980’s, when prosecutors charged them with altering absentee ballots collected from rural blacks,” read the obituary, which also noted that afterward the Sessions prosecution collapsed when a biracial jury quickly returned a not-guilty verdict. The takeaway message came from Turner, who said at the time of his acquittal: “The indictments come because blacks have gotten too well organized for political empowerment in the Black Belt of Alabama. They didn’t spend a million dollars because they think a few old folks’ ballots were changed.”
This was what Coretta Scott King wanted senators to recognize about Jeff Sessions. “I urge you to consider carefully Mr. Sessions’ conduct in these matters,” she wrote back in 1986. “Such a review, I believe, raises serious questions about his commitment to the protection of the voting rights of all American citizens and consequently his fair and unbiased judgment regarding this fundamental right.”
Observing that giving Jeff Sessions authority over cases involving civil rights would “irreparably damage the work” of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proved to be a damning indictment in 1986. Recollections of the Turner case—and testimony from an African American
assistant U.S. attorney that Sessions had called him “boy,” made racist remarks, referred to the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Defense Fund and the National Council of Churches as “un-American” and joked that he thought Klan members “were O.K. until I found out they smoked pot”—caused even GOP members of the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee to distance themselves from the nominee. Faced with united opposition from the NAACP, the Urban League, the American Jewish Congress, the National Council of Churches and the 185 coalition members of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the committee voted 10–8 to reject Sessions, and he withdrew his nomination. “This sends notice to the Justice Department and others making recommendations for Federal judges that the Senate and the committee is taking its constitutional responsibility seriously,” said Elaine Jones of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. “It is not a rubber stamp.”
In that moment, yes, but not necessarily forever.
After the 1986 debacle—in which his own testimony appeared, at many turns, to do him as much harm as that of others (attempting to deny accusations that he had said the “NAACP hates white people” and called the civil rights organization a “commie group and pinko organization,” he told the committee: “I am loose with my tongue on occasion and I may have said something similar to that or could be interpreted to that…”)—Sessions got himself elected as attorney general of Alabama in the “Republican wave” election year of 1994. Two years later, he won the U.S. Senate seat of retiring Senator Howell Heflin, who as a member of the Judiciary Committee in 1986 had cast an agonized vote against the Sessions nomination. Explaining the rare opposition of a senator to a home-state nominee, Heflin said that he had “read and reread the transcript” of the confirmation hearing and finally determined that “a person should not be confirmed for a lifetime appointment if there are reasonable doubts about his ability to be fair and impartial.”