Former White House aide Sebastian Gorka vehemently denied charges from a Democratic congressman that he endorsed a Hungarian neo-Nazi political party during a congressional hearing Wednesday.
Gorka was testifying in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform’s national security subcommittee about the recent campaign against the Islamic State in the Middle East, promoting the Trump administration’s successes on the battlefield.
For 90 minutes, Gorka — a cable news mainstay and eloquent speaker who’s known for his ebullient defenses of Trump — was a subdued figure who spoke as an expert on a panel full of them. But when Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., came to speak, Gorka’s controversial past statements sparked the hearing into life.
Krishnamoorthi immediately brought up the liberal talking point that Gorka is connected to neo-Nazi groups by recalling the Trump White House’s statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The statement made headlines at the time because it did not emphasize that the point of the Holocaust by the German government was to exterminate European Jewry.
Krishnamoorthi pointed to an interview Gorka did in February 2017, and recounted his statement criticisms of the statement for not explicitly mentioning the Jewish people were asinine.
“[You were asked] on CNN if President Trump’s statement was ‘at least questionable’ in being the first such statement in many years that didn’t recognize that Jewish extermination was the chief goal of the Holocaust,” he said. “Your response was ‘it’s a Holocaust remembrance statement, no, I’m not going to admit it because it’s asinine.’”
He then asked if Gorka felt it was asinine that previous presidents had mentioned the Jewish people. Gorka reacted with a disdainful dismissal of the question.
“I don’t know if the good member Mr. Krishnamoorthi is at the wrong hearing, I was invited here to discuss the Trump policies toward the defeat of ISIS,” he said.
“You arrived 75 minutes into this hearing and may have arrived at the wrong hearing,” Gorka said, a jab at Krishnamoorthi as the two men’s tempers rose.
Krishnamoorthi repeated his question multiple times over Gorka as Gorka tried to speak before Gorka finally was able to answer his question.
“The president’s grandchildren are Jewish. How asinine is it to posit that his White House would do anything not to recognize the tragedy of the Holocaust?” Gorka said.
He added, “It was asinine to posit that a Holocaust remembrance statement is not about the Holocaust, yes. It was asinine then and it is asinine now.”
Krishnamoorthi then delved into Gorka’s own past, bringing up a 2007 interview with a Hungarian news source on the growth of a far-right political party in that country called Jobbik.
Krishnamoorthi accused Gorka of saying in an interview the he supported Jobbik — which has been accused of being a neo-Nazi political party — and their formation of militias.
Gorka fired back that he never made that statement and the interview from which Krishnamoorthi was quoting was heavily edited in order to make it sound like he supported the neo-Nazi party.
“I never made that statement. That was a 12-minute interview that had been scurrilously edited down to two-and-a-half minutes,” Gorka said. “That is a lie, sir, on the record. It is a distortion of the facts, I rejected Jobbik and my father, who defended Jews during World War II as a teenager, has been recognized by Rabbi Billet and the Tablet Magazine … as having done so.”
The exchange ended with Gorka telling Krishnamoorthi, “Sir, I reject your absolute smear campaign.”
