White House staffer Seb Gorka went off during a tense debate with CNN anchor Brianna Keilar — after Keilar grilled him for overly “focusing” on the trans identity of the Minnesota school shooter.
In a heated interview on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, Gorka — who serves as senior director for counterterrorism under President Donald Trump — took serious issue with Keilar accusing him of “missing the bigger picture” by focusing on the shooter, Robin Westman, identifying as a trans woman.
“You know, 96% of attackers — when you’re looking at the US Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center, looking at 172 mass attacks in the US between 2016 and 2020 — 96% were non-trans men,” Keilar said. “So I know you’re focusing on this shooter being trans. The shooter was trans — and that is certainly of note. But are you missing the bigger picture here when you zero in on that instead of more broadly these school shooters as an epidemic and you perhaps miss the through line that connects them all?”
“Well, no, because your facts obfuscate two things,” Gorka argued. “You are using data based upon the predominant gun violence – which is gang-on-gang violence with zero ideological content. If you remove all of that, the gang violence on the streets of Chicago, LA, Detroit, then you come down to a much smaller data set. So it’s like those who
“So don’t conflate different data sets just to make a political point. There was an ideological content to this attack. That’s what terrorism is. It’s not because somebody didn’t get the drug deal they wanted. It is an ideological message.”
Keilar narrowed down the data to the criteria that Gorka wanted.
“By CNN’s count, when you look at 32 school shootings since 2020, in which you have four or more people who have been killed — so these are the larger school shootings — only three of 32 of those shootings were committed by transgender shooters,”
Gorka was unmoved — and he proceeded to attack Keilar’s network.
“Yeah, forgive me if I don’t go with CNN stats, OK?” Gorka said. “CNN has proven itself to be wholly inaccurate in all kinds of things for the last 10 years — perpetrators of the Russia, Russia hoax and that we didn’t have an open border. So please forgive me if I didn’t take your stats for
“It’s simple math,” Keilar said.
“No, it’s not, it’s distortions!” Gorka shot back “You are distorting the facts! Let me be clear. In just a couple of years, we have seen seven mass shootings involving people of transgender nature, or who are confused in their gender, seven in just the last couple of years! …I’m going to stick with the facts and not CNN’s pseudo facts.”
But Keilar challenged Gorka’s claim — citing a list which has been circulated by MAGA influencers on X, which identifies seven recent school shooters as trans or non-binary.
“We can’t stick with your facts because they’re not accurate,” Keilar said. “In one of ones which you posted, there was no evidence that he was trans. In another, the individual is known within his family by male pronouns, he used anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.”
The fiery battle continued from there — which you can watch above, via CNN.