San Francisco Chronicle

Outspoken Trump defender out of a job

- By Maggie Haberman and Matt Stevens Maggie Haberman and Matt Stevens are New York Times reporters

WASHINGTON — Sebastian Gorka, an outspoken adviser to President Trump, is no longer working at the White House, a senior administra­tion official said Friday.

The official said the president’s chief of staff, John Kelly, had telegraphe­d his lack of interest in keeping Gorka over the past week in internal discussion­s.

Gorka, who had advised the president on national security, demonstrat­ed a penchant for controvers­y. He memorably declared that “the alpha males are back” as an assertion of the distance between the Obama administra­tion and the current one.

He has also been a vocal defender of the Trump administra­tion’s efforts to temporaril­y ban travel from some predominan­tly Muslim countries; he has said violence is a fundamenta­l part of Islam and emanates from the language of the Quran. His hard-line views on Islam have prompted his critics to accuse him of Islamophob­ia.

Gorka, 46, who has also been accused of having links to far-right groups in Europe, declined to discuss the reasons for leaving the White House, but pointed toward excerpts from his resignatio­n letter that were posted Friday by The Federalist website, the Associated Press reported.

Gorka wrote that “the individual­s who most embodied and represente­d the policies that will ‘Make America Great Again,’ have been internally countered, systematic­ally removed, or undermined in recent months.”

Gorka is a former editor at Breitbart News, a rightwing website and a friend of Steve Bannon. Bannon, who was until last week Trump’s chief strategist, has since returned to Breitbart News.

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