Judge dismisses weapons charge against White House aide (Sebastian Gorka) despite guilt

[muriel_volestrangler]

A judge has dismissed a misdemeanor charge a senior White House aide was facing for bringing a handgun to a security checkpoint at Reagan National Airport a year ago.

Sebastian Gorka, a former Breitbart national security editor who now is a deputy assistant to the president, did not appear at the brief court proceeding Friday morning in Arlington County Circuit Court.

Gorka’s attorney, Christopher Oprison, and a prosecutor appeared before Circuit Court Judge William Newman, who dismissed the case under an arrangement that left Gorka with no conviction after he stayed out of trouble with the law for six months.
...
Transportation Security Administration screeners found the gun in Gorka’s carry-on bag when he was preparing to board a flight at National bound for Florida in January 2016. Oprison said Gorka simply forgot it was there.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/sebastian-gorka-charge-dismissed-234603

This armed criminal is now, according to the article, "at the NSC". This presumably means he holds one of the "Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for ..." staff posts Wikipedia lists as 'vacant': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Security_Council#Staff

He has also asserted the White House is going to continue to call anything the media says is 'fake news' until the media learns to love Trump: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/07/politics/kfile-gorka-on-fake-news/index.html

[pkdu]

1. Who hires an Attorney named "OPrison" nt

[rug]

2. !

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. "zero prison" - he lives up to his name (nt)

[Lucinda]

4. Dangerous dude...

[Eugene]

5. He may not be out of the woods yet...

From LBN:

Trump staffer has lied for years about his role as expert witness in Boston Marathon bombing trial

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141697791

[superpatriotman]

6. Draining that swamp

And emptying it into the White House

[Generic Other]

7. You mean this guy?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10028621530

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. Yeah; it looks like he was in British intelligence, Hungary refused him security clearance

and he only became an American citizen in 2012, according to his Wikipedia entry (which gives a book of his as the source for that).

It was in June 2002 that Magyar Nemzet, then affiliated with Fidesz, which had just lost the election, revealed that Péter Medgyessy, the new prime minister of the country, was a counterespionage officer in the 1980s during the Kádár regime. Fidesz naturally insisted on setting up a special parliamentary committee to investigate Medgyessy’s role as a counterintelligence officer. Fidesz recommended Sebastian Gorka as one of its experts on such matters. The other recommendation was Gábor Kiszely, a right-wing historian whose favorite subject was the history of freemasonry. For the job the participants needed security clearance. The National Security Office (Nemzetbiztonsági Hivatal/NH), however, was suspicious of both Gorka and Kiszely. It eventually refused to green light the two experts.

Gorka naturally denied the truthfulness of the media reports. The undersecretary in charge of national security, however, assured the public that, as a precaution, Gorka hadn’t had any opportunity to get to top secret documents in the absence of such clearance. The expert delegated by the government party sailed through the vetting process, but the clearance of Gorka and Kiszely was nowhere. Gorka suspected that the security officials were simply dragging their heels in order to delay matters until the competence of the committee expired in August. To Origo he explained that he had never had anything to do with counterintelligence because he was only “a uniformed member of the British army’s anti-terrorist unit.” As we know from his Wikipedia entry, this was not the case because there we can learn that “at university, he joined the British Territorial Army reserves serving in the Intelligence Corps.” His only duty, he told Origo, was “to measure the possible dangers posed by terrorists,” such as members of the Irish Republican Army. Moreover, Gorka misleadingly renamed his unit “Territorial Army 22 Company” instead of “UK Territorial Army, Intelligence Corps (22),” the correct name, given by Népszabadság at the time and also given in Wikipedia, at least for today.

Now let’s see how László Bartus, currently editor-in-chief of Népszava, the oldest Hungarian-language paper in the United States, remembers Gorka from those days. Bartus was working as a journalist in Hungary at the time. He claims that it was discovered that Gorka had never attended any institution of higher education. This may have been the case in 2002, but it certainly wasn’t true in 2008 when he received his Ph.D. for a dissertation titled “Content and end-state-based alteration in the practice of political violence since the end of the cold war: The difference between the terrorism of the cold war and the terrorism of Al-Quaeda: The rise of the ‘transcendental terrorist.’” His dissertation adviser was András Lánczi, Viktor Orbán’s favorite political scientist, who became notorious after announcing that “What [the critics of the Orbán regime] call corruption in practical terms is the most important policy goal of Fidesz.” More about Lánczi can be found in my post “András Lánczi: What others call corruption is the raison d’être of Fidesz.” I may add that on the dissertation Gorka’s full name is given as Sebastian L. v. Gorka. So, the brief appearance of his name in Wikipedia as Sebastian Lukács von Gorka was not a mistake.
...
Bartus sums up the Hungarian opinion of Gorka: “Then the unanimous opinion was that this man is a fortune hunter and a conman, who wriggles his way in everywhere, where he convinces everybody of his extraordinary expertise, when actually the only thing he is an expert on is extremist incitement. This picture of him among those who knew him in Budapest has not changed since.” Bartus is not surprised that Trump and Gorka found each other since “birds of a feather flock together.”

http://hungarianspectrum.org/2017/02/02/sebastian-l-von-gorkas-encounter-with-the-hungarian-national-security-office/

Fidesz is the right wing party now in charge of Hungary - the furthest right of any governing EU party, The leader Viktor Orban is infamous for stating his goal is "an illiberal state":

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he wants to abandon liberal democracy in favor of an “illiberal state,” citing Russia and Turkey as examples.

The global financial crisis in 2008 showed that “liberal democratic states can’t remain globally competitive,” Orban said on July 26 at a retreat of ethnic Hungarian leaders in Baile Tusnad, Romania.

“I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” Orban said, according to the video of his speech on the government’s website. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of “successful” nations, “none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies.”

Orban, who was re-elected in April for a second consecutive four-year term, has clashed with the EU as he amassed more power than any of his predecessors since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, replacing the heads of independent institutions including the courts with allies, tightening control over media and changing election rules to help him retain a constitutional majority in Parliament.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-28/orban-says-he-seeks-to-end-liberal-democracy-in-hungary

Trump and Bannon's kinda guy, really, so it's not at all surprising Gorka ended up with them.