It struck many people as odd that Trump's powerful director of presidential personnel, the man in charge of hiring executive staff, vetting and doing background checks, hasn't actually submitted the official paperwork for his own background check, contrary to precedent and the law. Well, seems there are some very good reasons for that, including that he might not be who he says he is and might be from Russia instead.
Source: NY Post
WASHINGTON — One of the most powerful men in the Trump administration, tasked with vetting thousands of staffers, hasn’t been fully vetted himself, The Post has learned.
Sergio Gor — the director of presidential personnel who recently convinced President Trump to yank an Elon Musk-endorsed nominee for NASA — has yet to submit official paperwork about his own background needed for a permanent security clearance, according to multiple sources.
Gor, 38, is in charge of picking about 4,000 executive-branch staff to implement Trump’s agenda — and he’s done so by poring over old tweets, political donations and remarks to ensure loyalty to the president.
But three administration insiders told The Post that the vetter-in-chief has not turned in his Standard Form 86, or SF-86 — a more than 100-page set of questions required for officials who need security clearances.
Gor claims to have grown up in Malta, an island country south of Italy, but there are no official records of him being born there. When the NY Post asked him about this, "Gor declined to divulge his birthplace to The Post, other than to say it was not Russia." Sort of a red flag right there. And perhaps he wasn't born in Russia, but the Soviet Union. The timeline tracks.
How Gor got a security clearance, even an interim one, without filling out the SF-86 is also a mystery.
An SF-86 “is the first step in receiving a security clearance. Everyone — EVERYONE — fills one out, even if they’re not going into a role that will ultimately need an activated clearance [such as] random comms people, administrative staff [and] legislative affairs,” a fourth source said.
Curious and curioser.
Brian Krebs, an intrepid cyber sleuth did some digging and came up with some pretty damning circumstantial evidence about Gor. His LinkedIn post was removed because it contained personal emails but here is the gist of it from a poster at Daily Kos.
Investigative cybercrime reporter Brian Krebs is a big deal in investigating cybercriminals, especially Russian cybercriminals. He found something very interesting by searching data breach records:
Gor once used the rather unique and long password: 961649507273 for his email address, sergio.gor@gmail.com,
Coincidentally, that same password was used with a few other email addresses, including:
sgoryachev999@rambler.ru
goryachev-sergey@yandex.ru
sergio-gor@yandex.ru
sergio-gor@qip.ru
goryachev-sergey@ya.ru
goryachev-sergey@list.ru
goryachev-sergey@gmail.com.
In case you don’t know, .ru means domains were registered in Russia. And the odds that someone with a very similar name would use the exact same and rather odd password is vanishingly small.And one more thing: goryachev-sergey@yandex.ru has multiple entries in Russian government databases for a Sergey Anatolyevich Goryachev, DOB, Nov. 20, 1980, phone +79689210000. This person appears to have lived in Saratov, RU and has a tax ID number.
And another interesting detail from people who claim to have known him as he grew up on the island of Malta. via The Shift
Sergio Gor is also fondly remembered in his hometown of Cospicua (Bormla), Malta, where he lived for about 10 years.
Members of the Cospicua community, who spoke to The Shift on the condition of anonymity, recalled a young foreign couple of Eastern European descent who settled in the city with their three-year-old son in the late 1980s.
A 70-year-old resident of Cospicua said: “As soon as I saw Gor on TV recently, I was certain he was the Maltese boy we called the ‘Russian boy’ in our neighborhood. That’s how we referred to Sergio, even though he may not have actually been Russian.”
🧵 Director of White House Office of Presidential Personnel is suspected of being a Russian spy.
"Sergio Gor" appears to actually be Sergey Goryachev from Saratov, Russia.
Investigative journalist Brian Krebs discovered some damning information. pic.twitter.com/fYwzVEO91h— Igor Sushko (@igorsushko) June 20, 2025
UPDATE: Although it's likely that Gor was born in Russia, the man identified above as Sergey Goryachev does not appear to be Gor after all.
As exciting this may seem at first glance, It doesn't check out. The Goryachev from Russia is a different person. He happens to use a very similar Gmail address to that used by Gor, which sent OSINT researchers down a false path. https://t.co/fx2zbhcu6I
— ChristoGrozev@bsky.social (@christogrozev) June 20, 2025
