Sebastian Gorka’s Wife Helped Torpedo Funding For Anti-White Supremacist Group
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
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.
Did you know that only 2% of Forward readers donate to support our nonprofit newsroom? That 2% make it possible for millions to read the Forward without a paywall or subscription — removing any barriers to the full and fair Jewish story.
But while the Forward is free to read, it isn’t free to produce. Big stories — like deep dives into the antisemitism data, political scoops or reporting trips to college campuses — take months of research and fact-checking. All while we keep you informed of what you need to know each day.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Forward Publisher & CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
