Sebastian Gorka’s Wife Helped Torpedo Funding For Anti-White Supremacist Group
Image by Via LobeLog
By Aiden Pink August 15, 2017
A group working to deradicalize white supremacists had been set to receive funding from the Department of Homeland Security until Trump aide Katharine Gorka worked to eliminate its grant.
Gorka, a homeland security official and the wife of controversial White House counterterrorism advisor Sebastian Gorka, was a member of President Trump’s transition team before his inauguration. As the Forward reported in May, she met with Homeland Security officials in December and told them that Trump didn’t agree with the Obama administration’s approach to funding Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs.
Shortly before he stepped down, Obama had awarded $400,000 to Life After Hate, which was founded by former white supremacists and works to help others renounce that ideology. It was the only group in a $10 million funding round focused exclusively on fighting white supremacist violence.
But Trump and then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly ordered a freeze on all CVE funding, and when the department published a new list of CVE grant recipients in June, Life After Hate was no longer listed.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
