A senior Trump political appointee at the Department of Homeland Security suggested in 2017 that the real threat to the United States’ national security is the growing danger posed by anti-fascists.
In a July 2017 email obtained by HuffPost, DHS senior policy adviser Katharine Gorka justified her successful push to revoke a $400,000 grant to Life After Hate, a group founded by former extremists that works to guide people out of the white nationalist movement.
Asked by then-Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly for other “counter-hate groups” the department could work with, Gorka replied, “It would also be important to get the data on the actual threats right now because my understanding is that the far-left groups (Antifa, or anti-fascist) are currently on the rise.”
According to other emails HuffPost obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, Gorka had pushed the DHS to cancel Life After Hate’s grant because the founder had once tweeted, “fuck you, asshole” at President Trump. The tweet represented inappropriate “vulgarity and lack of professional maturity,” Gorka noted.
The emails obtained by HuffPost also show Gorka working to gather sufficient “material” to cancel a separate grant for the Muslim Public Affairs Committee. The ultimately successful justification: people think they are terrorist sympathizers.
The DHS official is the wife of former White House advisor Sebastian Gorka, the swashbuckling ex-Fox News fixture who thinks Democrats are trying to “take away your hamburgers.” Gorka raised eyebrows in 2017 for wearing an outfit associated with a Nazi ally’s group to one of Trump’s inaugural balls.
Both Gorkas were best known before entering the Trump administration for publishing books on jihad and running a fringe think tank promoting the threat of Islamist extremism.
Read the full report at HuffPost.
