Kris Kobach, Kansas’s secretary of state (the worst in the nation), the architect of the most racist law in modern American history and vice-chair of Trump’s sham voting commission has admitted he has another job: paid writer at Breitbart. From the Kansas City Star:
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is now a regular columnist on the far-right news site run by President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist.
Kobach, a candidate for Kansas governor who is running on a platform of combating illegal immigration, published his first article for Breitbart.com in June — a piece that tied refugees to terrorism.
He has published six more pieces since then and more are on the horizon. Kobach, who previously hosted a talk radio show in Kansas City, said Breitbart approached him about writing a regular column in June.
Running for governor, Kansas secretary of state, podcast host, writer at Breitbart, orchestrating massive voter suppression heading into the 2018 and 2020 election cycles (and beyond). Is there anything this guy can’t do? I mean, except be a decent human being?
As the KC Star notes, former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro admitted Breitbart chief Steve Bannon embraced white nationalists at the site:
5. Under Bannon’s Leadership, Breitbart Openly Embraced The White Supremacist Alt-Right.
Andrew Breitbart despised racism. Truly despised it. He used to brag regularly about helping to integrate his fraternity at Tulane University. He insisted that racial stories be treated with special care to avoid even the whiff of racism. With Bannon embracing Trump, all that changed. Now Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website, with Yiannopoulos pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.
Considering all of Kobach’s work, both in the Kansas state capitol and across the nation, has been dedicated to deporting immigrants and suppressing the vote in minority and immigrant communities, Breitbart seems like a natural fit.
There is another interesting angle to this new side job, it seems designed to bolster his fundraising for the governor’s race in Kansas.
Each of Kobach’s columns has a footnote that mentions his campaign and includes the address for Kobach’s campaign website. It also touts Kobach’s role as vice chairman of Trump’s election commission.
Kobach is the driving force behind Donald Trump’s claim that millions of undocumented immigrants voted in the 2016 presidential election. Kansas gave Kobach the unusual and controversial power to prosecute election fraud. Despite that being the intense focus of his office for two years, Kobach has only been able to churn up two undocumented immigrants voting in Kansas, one of those cases was just filed this week:
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach's office has filed two new criminal election fraud cases, including one alleging that a non-U.S. citizen illegally attempted to vote last year.
The three felony charges filed earlier this month in Johnson County against Sergio Salgado-Juarez marked the second time in two years that Kobach's office has prosecuted a noncitizen for voting or attempting to vote. Legislators gave his office the authority to prosecute election fraud cases in 2015, making him the only top state elections official in the nation with that power.
Kobach also found himself in hot water, once again, with a federal judge this week after it was discovered there were more than 1,000 pages he failed to turn over to the court:
A federal judge on Wednesday tore into President Trump’s voter commission for reneging on a promise to fully disclose public documents before a July 19 meeting, ordering the government to meet new transparency requirements and eliciting an apology from administration lawyers.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of Washington said the Election Integrity Commission released only an agenda and proposed bylaws before its first meeting at the White House complex last month.
But once gathered, commissioners had thick binders that included documents the public had not seen, including a specially prepared report and a 381-page “database” purporting to show 1,100 cases of voter fraud, both from the think tank Heritage Foundation. The group also received a typed list of possible topics to address from the panel vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly stopped just short of calling Kobach a liar:
Kollar-Kotelly said the panel’s after-the-fact argument was “incredible” when it said it did not believe documents prepared by individual commissioners for the July meeting had to have been posted in advance.
This is not the first time Kobach has been accused of misleading a judge. In June, he was sanctioned by a judge and ordered to pay a fine:
A judge has fined Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach $1,000 for misleading the court about the contents of materials he was photographed taking into a November meeting with then President-elect Donald Trump.
“The court agrees that the defendant’s deceptive conduct and lack of candor warrant the imposition of sanctions,” U.S. Magistrate Judge James O’Hara wrote in his ruling.
And this is the guy who Trump has charged with protecting all of your personal voter data information. Data they’ve said will be protected at the White House. This is setting up to be a disaster of epic proportions for our democracy.