For his entire seven-month tenure in the White House, Sebastian Gorka was allegedly a wanted man — in Hungary.
Hungarian police issued an arrest warrant for Gorka on Sept. 17, 2016, just weeks before Trump was elected, according to the Hungarian police’s website, Buzzfeed News reported Thursday. Gorka worked as a deputy assistant to the president before leaving the White House in August, though his exact duties were often unclear. During his time there, he even met with Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó.
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Few details are available about the warrant. According to Buzzfeed’s review of the Hungarian police website, Gorka’s wanted for “firearm or ammunition abuse.” He’s a noted firearm enthusiast, who police said tried to bring a 9mm pistol through a checkpoint at Reagan National Airport in 2016, according to the Washington Post.
It’s legal to own a gun in Hungary, though few people do, compared to other developed countries.
The Hungarian outlet 444, which first reported on the warrant, also noted that the incident that generated the warrant could have occurred as early as 2009. It’s unclear why Hungarian police would have waited to issue the warrant.
A spokesperson for the White House didn’t immediately reply to a VICE News request for comment. In an email, Gorka said of the report, “News to me. Especially since the so-called incident BuzzFeed quotes occurred a year after I left Hungary, but #FAKENEWS outlets like VICE will likely run with it given your political agenda.”
Prior to his departure from the White House, Gorka was a frequent source of controversy in an already-tumultuous administration. He once told MSNBC that an August explosion at a Minneapolis mosque might be a “fake hate crime” and wore medals belonging to the far-right Hungarian group Vitézi Rend to President Donald Trump’s inaugural ball. The group has ties to the Nazi party, and multiple leaders of the party have reportedly claimed that Gorka and his father both belonged to the group.
Gorka said, however, that he wears the group’s merchandise in tribute to his father.
