Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Sebastian Gorka’s Wife Helped Torpedo Funding For Anti-White Supremacist Group

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.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

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. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.