At Homeland Security, Anti-Muslim Activist Katharine Gorka Maintained Ties With Islamophobes

Article by Alex Emmons.

"We were concerned when she [Katharine Gorka] joined the administration. What we found is a large number of meetings proving our hypothesis."

The FOIA documents paint a picture of Trump's DHS as heavily influenced by political appointees like Gorka.

Gorka was so central to terrorism policy at DHS that, after then-DHS Secretary John Kelly left in November 2017, Gorka was one of the officials tasked with coordinating between different DHS offices.

In October 2018, Clare Lopez, a far-right activist and longtime top figure at the anti-Muslim group Center for Security Policy, wrote to a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expecting a receptive audience. After all, the recipient of the email was Katharine Gorka  [née Katherine Fairfax Cornell], a former senior adviser in the Department's Office of Policy, whose tenure in President Donald Trump's DHS was itself controversial, in light of her past comments about Islam.

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Sebastian Gorka is a British-born Hungarian-American military and intelligence analyst who served (January 2017 -- August 25, 2017) as a Deputy Assistant to the President in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. Sebastian Gorka, a FOX News contributor from 2017 to 2019, has ties to the alt-right. During his time in the Trump administration, Gorka gave a series of combative interviews with the press in which he defended the administration's positions on national security and foreign policy. Various national security scholars in academic and policymaking circles have characterized Gorka as fringe. Some critics have challenged his academic credentials, his views on Islam and radicalization ...

Sebastian Gorka married Pennsylvania native Katharine Fairfax Cornell  [Katharine Gorka] in 1996 at St. Michael's Roman Catholic Church, Sopron, Hungary. The couple founded the Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security in Budapest, Hungary in 2003.

Katharine Gorka has also been involved with the administration of Donald Trump, first serving on his transition team for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Katharine Gorka then became a policy advisor at DHS on 2017-04-07. At DHS, Katharine Gorka has received attention for her part in defunding Life After Hate -- a group which facilitates deradicalization, particularly of white supremacists.

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Lopez's email echoed a widespread far-right conspiracy theory about Muslim Americans: that national Muslim advocacy organizations, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) are secretly fronts for overseeing terrorist organizations. Lopez was writing to urge the largest federal law enforcement organization in the country to act on the unfounded theory.

"HAMAS is a designated FTO" -- Foreign Terrorist Organization -- "& CAIR is its US branch ... but members of Congress openly support it, even are featured as keynote speakers at its events," Lopez wrote. She warned about CAIR and another American-Muslim group: "We need to understand that this is a domestic insurgency aimed at destruction & replacement of the US Constitution -- please let me know how I can help."

The Southern Policy Law Center describes the Center for Security Policy, where Lopez worked at the time, as a "conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement." It is unclear if Lopez, who was a vice president with the group, remains at the Center of Security Policy; the group no longer appears in many of her public biographies. (Lopez did not respond to repeated inquiries and the Center for Security Policy declined to comment.) But her LinkedIn page lists the center as a current affiliation, describing her role as that of a "thought leader" and "project manager" in the "counterjihad movement."

Lopez's message was obtained by the Washington-based group American Oversight this month as part of a public records request into Gorka's role at DHS. Founded in 2017, lawyers from American Oversight filed suit for her calendars and external communications last year [2019]. The agency began releasing documents earlier this year [2020] and shared a recently released collection with The Intercept.

Because of her record of anti-Muslim comments, Gorka's roles with the Trump administration -- she was an early appointee to the transition team for the Department of Homeland Security -- raised alarm bells among Muslim advocacy groups in the U.S. While it's not clear from the FOIA documents whether Gorka ever responded to Lopez's October 2018 appeal, the email was one among many in the trove that American Oversight says confirmed the worst fears: that Gorka's appointment could have emboldened far-right and anti-Muslim voices to see an ally in Trump's DHS.

Austin Evers, American Oversight's Executive Director and a former lawyer for the State Department under President Barack Obama, told The Intercept by phone that the group filed the lawsuit to find out what role Gorka had in DHS' policy process and to see whether she was in touch with outside voices on the far-right.

"Katharine Gorka comes from an ecosystem of anti-immigrant, anti-Islam organizations and personalities," Evers said. "We were concerned when she joined the administration that she would bring that network in, and enhance its influence with the power of the United States government. What we found is a large number of meetings proving our hypothesis."

In a statement to The Intercept, CAIR Director of Government Affairs Robert McCaw said, "These messages confirm what we already knew -- Katharine Gorka is an anti-Muslim bigot and conspiracy theorist who openly collaborates with other far-right extremists. Ms. Gorka never had any business serving in the federal government."

A former writer for the far-right website Breitbart, Gorka had used various platforms to air anti-Muslim views in the past. In a 2015 interview, she proposed "shutting down the radical mosques." She had also suggested that the news network Al Jazeera -- a frequent boogeyman of the Islamophobic far right -- should not be allowed to broadcast in the United States.

Though it is unclear if Gorka ever responded to Lopez's October 2018 email, Lopez had indeed maintained a relationship with a sympathetic ally in the highest levels of government.

According to the FOIA documents, Katherine Gorka and Clare Lopez ran into each other earlier in August 2018, when Gorka's husband Sebastian Gorka -- a former Trump White House official and bombastic right-wing personality -- gave a foreign policy address at the think tank Westminster Institute, where Katharine Gorka formerly served as Executive Director. Lopez wrote to Gorka the next day and shared her private Protonmail address. "Great to see you ... last night at Westminster, Katie -- looking forward to following up w/you," Lopez wrote.

After more than two years as a Senior Policy Adviser at DHS, Katherine Gorka became Press Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection last June [2019]. Two months later, she left the Trump administration and now works at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. Unlike her husband, Sebastian Gorka, who has been a vocal presence on right-wing media defending the President, Katharine Gorka (who goes by "Katie") is a more understated presence. Her caution extends to what she puts in government email.

Calendars and emails, however, which were obtained through American Oversight's FOIA request, largely confirm previous news reports that Katherine Gorka was an influential, behind-the-scenes presence on terrorism policy and had a hand in shaping DHS' approach to Countering Violent Extremism programs.

The FOIA documents paint a picture of Trump's DHS as heavily influenced by political appointees like Katherine Gorka, and the revelations come at a time when DHS stands accused of politicizing intelligence to benefit Trump. Last week, the House Intelligence Committee released a whistleblower complaint from Brian Murphy, the former head of DHS' intelligence division, who told the committee that senior leadership had pressured him to inflate the threat of left-wing violence, while downplaying that from white supremacy and Russian election interference.

Shortly after Trump's inauguration in 2017, DHS moved to shift the focus of its Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) grant program. CVE purports to espouse a community-based terrorism prevention effort aimed at preventing all forms of extremist violence in the U.S. Even under President Barack Obama, the effort was criticized for singling out American Muslims for suspicion. As a result, CVE programs grew to be controversial for targeting Muslim American communities for surveillance.

Under Trump, the program appeared to go one step further -- and criticisms deepened, not least because of the involvement of officials like Katherine Gorka.

In 2017, then-DHS Secretary John Kelly altered the distribution of about $10 million in CVE grant money previously allocated to community organizations by the outgoing Obama administration. Among the groups cut were Life After Hate, a nonprofit aimed at de-radicalizing white supremacists. News reports, including a profile in BuzzFeed News later that year, linked Katherine Gorka to the decision.

The calendars obtained by American Oversight confirm that much of Gorka's work in 2017 focused on policy around CVE. Her calendars list a first "CVE grant discussion" on January 24, 2017 -- four days after Trump's inauguration -- and continued to list her as a participant in more than 10 meetings or discussions on CVE between then and the end of March 2017.

Katherine Gorka's calendars show that, throughout the year, she was invited to participate in meetings, discussions, and phone calls on CVE programs, including discussing partnerships with other DHS agencies. For example, Katherine Gorka's calendar shows one October 2017 meeting between staff from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service's Office of Citizenship "to explore partnering on developing CVE programs for children of immigrants." It's unclear if anything came of the meeting.

Katherine Gorka's calendar also lists a February 2017 discussion on "CVE grants and Sanctuary Cities." Again, it's unclear if anything came of the meeting, but the Trump administration would later fight a court battle over whether the Department of Justice can withhold law enforcement grants from sanctuary cities.

The calendars show Gorka also had a hand in other terrorism prevention initiatives at DHS. In late 2017, Katherine Gorka was invited to participate in a meeting on "DHS Screening and use of publicly available information" -- possibly a reference to a later policy change by the Trump administration to start screening the social media pages for refugee and asylum seekers.

Katherine Gorka was so central to terrorism policy at DHS that, after John Kelly left to become Trump's chief of staff in November 2017, Gorka was one of the officials tasked with coordinating between different DHS offices to develop a briefing on terrorism prevention for the incoming Secretary.

While at DHS, Katherine Gorka also frequently corresponded with various people at her soon to be employer, the Heritage Foundation, where she is listed as having a number of meetings during her tenure in public office. One frequent confidant was Robin Simcox, then a terrorism researcher at the Heritage Foundation who authored a report called "The Asylum-Terror Nexus: How Europe Should Respond," which it pushes a similar line to the justifications given by Trump and other anti-immigration activists to the United States's asylum program. [Simcox, who frequently shared his published works with Gorka's official government email address, did not respond to a request for comment made to the U.K.'s Counter Extremism Group, where he is the director.]

Katherine Gorka also used her work email to confide in Heritage Foundation scholars, including about her plans after leaving DHS. In June 2018, more than a year before she left the DHS, Gorka emailed James Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation, asking to talk about "terrorism prevention and life after DHS."  [A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation declined to comment for this story.]

Eighteen months later, she would become Carafano's colleague, when, according to a LinkedIn page, she formally joined the Heritage Foundation.

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