John Bolton offered a brutal assessment of Sebastian Gorka, Donald Trump’s controversial pick to be a deputy assistant to the president and the senior director for counterterrorism, as he reacted to the president-elect’s announcement on Friday.
“Well, Sebastian Gorka is a con man,” said Bolton, a former national security adviser under Trump, in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
“I wouldn’t have him in any U.S. government. Fortunately, it’s not the highest position he had been mentioned for. But I don’t think it’s going to bode well for counterterrorism efforts when the NSC senior director is somebody like that.”
Gorka, who briefly served as a deputy assistant to the president in Trump’s first term, made headlines in March 2017 following a report on his membership to a Hungarian far-right group with historical ties to Nazi Germany. He later denied that he was a member of the group.
He notably has a history of controversial comments — particularly his Islamophobic views — and once served as an adviser to Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s far-right prime minister and authoritarian leader that Trump has praised as “fantastic.”
Gorka was recently a contender to be Trump’s pick for deputy national security adviser, Politico reported last week, before Alex Wong eventually got the nod from the president-elect.
Trump, in a statement on Friday, described Gorka as a “tireless advocate for the America First Agenda and the MAGA Movement.”
Bolton told Collins that the people Trump picks to be deputy secretaries and undersecretaries is going to tell Americans “a lot about who’s actually running the government.”
“Well, I tell you, he needs a full-field FBI background investigation about his educational claims and things like that,” said Bolton, who described Gorka as the “perfect example” of someone who owes his position “purely” to Trump.
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He continued, “He doesn’t display loyalty, he displays fealty and that’s what Trump wants. He doesn’t want Gorka’s opinions. He wants Gorka to say, ‘Yes sir.’ And I am fully confident that’s exactly what will happen no matter what it is Trump says.”