Photo credit: The Associated Press
Days before he was selected to serve as national security advisor for the incoming Trump administration, retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn appeared to walk into Trump Tower alongside Breitbart News national security editor Sebastian Gorka. Both Gorka and Flynn have made virulent and offensive anti-Muslim comments and blamed “political correctness” for terror attacks.
An Associated Press photographer captured Gorka walking by Flynn ahead of a November 14 meeting at President-elect Donald Trump’s transition headquarters in New York. On November 17, news reports indicated Flynn had been offered the position of national security advisor.
According to his biography, Gorka “is a frequent guest lecturer at institutions such as the FBI, the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (Fort Bragg), is lead instructor for US Special Operations Command's Combating Terrorism course, and recently briefed the National Intelligence Council (ODNI) and the CIA.” It says he is also a regular commentator at Fox News and other networks. During the presidential election season, Federal Election Commission filings indicated that Gorka was paid by the Trump campaign for “policy consulting.”
During his media appearances, Gorka has repeatedly pushed the inflammatory conspiracy theory that President Obama is sympathetic to Islamic terrorists.
In August, Gorka appeared on Fox News to defend Trump’s claim that Obama was the “founder” of ISIS, asserting that ISIS did not exist until Obama took office in 2009 -- even though the group is a rebranded version of 12-year-old predecessor Al Qaeda in Iraq. Gorka called Trump’s false statement “absolutely right,” before claiming that actions taken during the Obama administration “were put in place … to help this former Al Qaeda franchise become a trans-regional insurgency with more than 80,000 fighters today.”
In June, after a gunman who swore allegiance to ISIS killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, FL, Gorka appeared on Fox News to claim the massacre “in part was facilitated by the policies of this administration, President Obama and Secretary Clinton, that have allowed political correctness into the threat assessment.”
In an April column at Breitbart News, Gorka blamed Obama for veteran suicides, writing that following World War II, veterans “didn’t eat the barrel of a 1911 [handgun]” because “their President, their commander, told them, ‘This is a war against evil, and what you are going to see may be nasty, but it’s okay, guys, you’re on the side of Right.’ We don’t say that any more.”
Gorka has also engaged in conspiratorial anti-Muslim smears, including speaking at a conference whose organizers asserted that “Islamists have been brought into the innermost circles of America’s national security institutions.” After the Washington National Cathedral hosted an event with two Muslim groups in 2014, Gorka wrote an article at Breitbart News with the headline “Muslim Brotherhood Overruns National Cathedral In DC." The piece asserted that “if a place of worship is used by Muslims for their prayers, that territory subsequently becomes part of Dar al Islam, sacred muslim (sic) land. Forever.”
Flynn, who was forced out of his position at the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 after he clashed with senior officials, is similarly fixated on the supposed link between “political correctness” and anti-terror efforts. According to The Daily Beast, “Flynn has said ‘political correctness’ has prevented the United States from confronting violent extremism, which he sees as a ‘cancerous idea that exists inside of the Islamic religion,’” and Flynn “authored a book that argued the U.S. government ‘has concealed the actions of terrorists like [Osama] bin Laden and groups like ISIS, and the role of Iran in the rise of radical Islam….'” Like Gorka, Flynn has also made public anti-Islam statements, including writing on social media, “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”