Sebastian Gorka was photographed during the January inaugural ball wearing a medal that foreign policy news site LobeLog later identified as a symbol of membership in the Hungarian Order of Heroes. The group, known as Vitézi Rend in Hungarian, collaborated with the Nazi government during World War II, according to the State Department. Members of the group are ineligible for American visas.
Gorka did not respond to LobeLog’s request for comment. He later told Breitbart that the medal belonged to his late father, Paul Gorka, who “was awarded a declaration for his resistance to a dictatorship.” The Forward followed up with a series of reports alleging that Sebastian Gorka spent years immersing himself in far-right, anti-Semitic political organizations in Hungary, and is a sworn member of the Vitézi Rend. Gorka ignored requests for comment on the article, and instead issued a denial to a friendly reporter at Tablet after The Forward published the allegations.
Three Democratic senators on Friday called on the acting deputy attorney general and the secretary of homeland security to investigate whether Gorka, who was born in the United Kingdom, “falsified his naturalization application or otherwise illegally procured his citizenship” by failing disclose membership in the banned Hungarian group. The senators cited The Forward’s reporting.
Gorka did not address the documented ties between the Vitézi Rend and Nazi Germany in his interviews with Breitbart and Tablet ― and neither outlet brought them up. He has written at length about his father’s suffering under the Nazis during World War II and under the subsequent Communist government in Hungary, but he hasn’t explained how his father came to be a member of a group with Nazi ties.
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