White House Deputy Assistant To The President Sebastian Gorka seemed to suggest to the BBC that a military conflict with North Korea was a distinct possibility. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Gorka: 'Nonsensical' for Tillerson to discuss military matters

White House aide Sebastian Gorka said Thursday that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was out of line with remarks he made a day earlier assuring Americans that military action against North Korea is not imminent, telling BBC radio that it was “nonsensical” for the nation’s chief diplomat to speak on military issues.

“The idea that Secretary Tillerson is going to discuss military matters is simply nonsensical,” Gorka said in the interview, which was reported by The Washington Post. “It is the job of Secretary Mattis, the secretary of defense, to talk about the military options, and he has done so unequivocally…That is his mandate. Secretary Tillerson is the chief diplomat of the United States, and it is his portfolio to handle those issues.”


Aboard his aircraft Wednesday en route to Guam, the U.S. territory in the Pacific that North Korea threatened this week to destroy with an “enveloping fire,” Tillerson told reporters that “Americans should sleep well at night” and that “I do not believe that there is any imminent threat.”

The secretary’s efforts to tamp down rhetoric came after a warning from President Donald Trump, who said North Korea would face “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it continues to threaten the United States.

Contrary to what Tillerson said, Gorka seemed to suggest to the BBC that a military conflict with North Korea is a distinct possibility. Asked by an interviewer whether North Korea should expect an attack if its actions are understood as threatening, Gorka seemed to imply just that.

“If you threaten a nation, then what should you expect — a stiffly worded letter that would be sent by courier?” he said. “Is that what the U.K. would do if a nation threatened a nuclear-tipped missile launched against any of the United Kingdom’s territories?”

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert declined on Thursday to directly address Gorka's comments because she said she became aware of them only shortly before the daily news briefing and had not personally heard them.

She said that Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis have a "good, close, cooperative relationship" and that the secretary of state had not spoken about U.S. military capabilities. But she also emphasized that Tillerson's words as secretary of state carry significant weight.

"I think that everyone has clearly heard what Secretary Tillerson's forceful comments have been and continue to be on the issue of DPRK and on other countries as well," Nauert said, using an abbreviated version of North Korea's official name. "He's a cabinet secretary. He's the fourth in line to the presidency. He carries a big stick."

Gorka, in an emailed statement sent Thursday via a White House spokesman, said media interpretations of his comments as undercutting Tillerson's remarks represented a "deliberate distortion of my comments and yet another example of fake news."

"I was clearly stating that it is absurd for reporters to try to press the secretary of state to give answers on military issues," the statement said. "Secretary Tillerson’s answers to such questions are always gracious and thoughtful — a reminder of why he has been so effective in his role as the president’s top diplomat. There is no daylight between the president’s diplomatic and military teams, and any suggestion otherwise is either misinformed or willfully misleading."

Speaking on Fox News Thursday afternoon, Gorka pushed back on the assertion that he said Tillerson was out of line, instead placing blame on journalists.

“I was admonishing the journalist of the fake news complex that are forcing our chief diplomat into a position where they’re demanding he make the military case for action when that is not the mandate of the secretary of state,” Gorka said.

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Gorka continued to say journalists should “hand in their credentials” if they don’t know the difference between the secretary of state and the secretary of defense.

“They have no idea what they’re talking about and if they think that’s a story, they’re not journalists,” Gorka said.

Mattis, in remarks to reporters en route to Seattle on Thursday, seemed to back up Tillerson's Wednesday comments, responding with a flat "no" when he was asked if people in Guam should be concerned by North Korea's threat.

In a portion of the interview reported by BuzzFeed, Gorka also compared North Korea’s threats against the U.S. to those of Nazis against European Jews in the years leading up to the Holocaust. He relayed an anecdote that he said came from a survivor of the Holocaust, who said the lesson he had learned from the ordeal was that “when a group of people repeatedly says they want to kill you, sooner or later you should take them seriously.”

“North Korea has said they wish to annihilate the United States and use nuclear weapons. Sooner or later someone should take them seriously,” Gorka said. “The Clinton administration did not do so. The Obama administration did not do so. That stopped on January the 20th. We are not giving in to nuclear blackmail any longer.”

Nahal Toosi and Negassi Tesfamichael contributed to this story.

