Did Gorka Lie About British Military Service?

Image by Getty Images

By Daniel J. Solomon May 3, 2017

White House aide Sebastian Gorka has been linked to a neo-Nazi group in his native Hungary. Now it seems like he might have lied about his military service in the United Kingdom, where he was raised.

According to BuzzFeed News, the British Ministry of Defense has no evidence that Gorka worked in the 1990’s on counterterrorism and threat evaluation in northern Ireland, a role that he has claimed in multiple interviews.

The government agency told BuzzFeed that the reserve intelligence unit that Gorka worked for was composed of those who had special language abilities, and that it was unlikely it would deploy Gorka – fluent in Hungarian – to northern Ireland, where there was no language barrier issue.

Gorda refused to comment to BuzzFeed on his British military service, telling the site it was “because I am a government employee and have to get it cleared.”

Gorka, a national security aide who previously worked at Breitbart News, is rumored to be leaving the White House this summer, following the Forward’s enterprise reporting on him, but the White House hasn’t said anything definitive about that possibility.

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO