Roughly three months after Breitbart’s “counterterrorism expert” joined the White House, multiple outlets are reporting he’s leaving the White House:
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official told the news agency that Gorka failed to get National Security Council clearance after he was charged with carrying a gun at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last year. The case was dismissed in February after he was ordered the forfeit the weapon and remain on "good behavior" for six months.
Gorka held only a temporary, low-level security clearance for material classified at the "secret" level, a senior U.S. official told NBC News, again on condition of anonymity.
This is the easiest clearance there is to obtain and is issued as a temporary measure pending background and security clearance checks — which Gorka had not passed, the official said. This has prevented Gorka from participating in most counterterrorism meetings across the U.S. government and any briefings that go beyond that classification level.
The New York Times reports he will stay with the Trump administration with the other “alpha males”:
Mr. Gorka, a former editor at Breitbart News, a right-wing website, is a friend of Stephen K. Bannon, the onetime Breitbart chairman who is now Mr. Trump’s chief strategist. Mr. Gorka memorably declared that “the alpha males are back” as an assertion of the distance between the Obama administration and the current one.
He has been accused of having links to far-right groups in Europe, and critics of his hard-line views on Islam have accused him of Islamophobia.