In his race to be Kansas’ next governor, Kris Kobach represents the ugliest part of today’s Republican Party. He also sounds a lot like the president.
.. Kris Kobach, the state’s secretary of state — and quite possibly the most pernicious public official in America... This distinction is not conferred lightly. Mr. Kobach has labored for it long and hard, notably in the areas of voter suppression and nativism. He is best known for having been the vice chairman of President Trump’s ugly voter fraud commission, spawned in 2017 to root out the millions of illegal voters who Mr. Trump’s ego pathetically, and falsely, claimed had cost him the popular vote in 2016. The commission was dissolved this January, having failed to find any evidence of widespread fraud, but having succeeded in raising Mr. Kobach’s national profile and cementing his reputation as a master purveyor of Trumpism.Mr. Kobach on Wednesday declared victory at a noon news conference, acknowledging that only 191 votes separated him from Mr. Colyer and that the election result may change as provisional and other ballots are counted. Awkwardly, as the state’s top election official, Mr. Kobach would be the person charged with overseeing any recount of votes. Unless he recused himself, which he has said he would not.Mr. Kobach is running for governor on a promise to “Make Kansas Great Again.” (#MKGA!).. Starting with a failed run for Congress in 2004, Mr. Kobach has regularly sounded the alarm that illegal immigration and widespread voter fraud are destroying this nation. Indeed, he has suggested that fraud played a role in his congressional defeat.A former constitutional law professor with degrees from Yale, Harvard and Oxford, Mr. Kobach’s specialty is concocting creative legal arguments to achieve controversial political ends — such as, say, forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall. (His plan: use a provision in the Patriot Act to track and tax the remittances that undocumented immigrants send home to family members.)He was the brains behind the self-deportation proposal for which Mitt Romney was widely mocked in his 2012 presidential run.
.. As an adviser to immigration hard-liners in Arizona — including the felonious-until-pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio — he helped write the state law that, among other measures, tasked the local police with verifying the citizenship of anyone they had “reasonable suspicion” to believe was undocumented.
.. ProPublica and The Kansas City Star recently detailed Mr. Kobach’s 13-year history of pitching his consulting services to small towns, helping them enact such ordinances. This has been a profitable gig for Mr. Kobach, but not so much for the towns in question, some of which wound up drowning in legal fees after trying to defend measures that ultimately proved unenforceable.
.. His crowning achievement as secretary of state was a law passed in 2011 requiring people to prove their citizenship before registering to vote. Or, rather, it was his crowning achievement until a federal judge this year struck down the law as unconstitutional.
In the course of that case, Mr. Kobach so violated basic courtroom rules that he was held in contempt and, among other humiliations, ordered to take six hours of legal education.
.. he has a flair for the dramatic and isn’t overly concerned with facts.
.. His speeches contain plenty of red meat, such as comparing Planned Parenthood to the Third Reich’s Josef Mengele.
.. Until early 2017, Mr. Kobach spent several years hosting a local call-in show, on which he held forth on such terrors as the “illegal alien crime wave” that he warned was decimating America.
.. He also got a kick out of indulging the dark fantasies of listeners, such as the 2014 caller fearful that the immigration policies of then-President Barack Obama would lead to the “ethnic cleansing” of whites.
.. Then there was the 2015 caller anxious about whether Mr. Obama might one day decree that “any black person accused of a crime, charged with a crime, is not going to be prosecuted.”
“Well, it’s already happened more or less in the case of civil rights laws,” Mr. Kobach soothed. “So I guess it’s not a huge jump.”
.. in Mr. Kobach, Mr. Trump clearly sees a kindred spirit.
Scott Adams: Why Would Putin Meddle in Our Election?
Have you noticed how Michael Cohen stuff has pushed down the Helsinki news conference?
Why would Trump say: I don’t know why he wouldn’t?
Trump was putting his own ego lower than Putins.
Now we know that Trump doesn’t have any confidence problems.
Think of Trump’s statement as a hypnotist.
When he says “I don’t know why he would“, he’s getting to motivation. It wasn’t intended to be factual, but persuasive.
Everyone who has evaluated it as a statement of fact, but it’s talking about Putin’s motivations, which he had just changed.
In the meeting, he had just made a big impact on Putin’s motivations.
There is a tit-for-tat-for-tit-for-tat forever.
If Trump removed his reasons and have him a virtual pardon.
Trump did the same thing with Kim Jong Il, he make a better offer. He took the reason away.
CNN covered story of Putin offer to interview 12 indictments, but it was never plausible.
Don’t Overestimate Trump’s Ability to Knowingly Collude with Russia
It is President Trump’s character that leads me to think he didn’t do it, at least not in a way the impeachment-hungry mob hopes he did.
Oh, I think he’s morally capable of having done it. As a candidate he publicly called on the Russians to (further) hack Hillary Clinton’s server and release the missing emails. He is the one member of his administration incapable of condemning Russian president Vladimir Putin or his regime. Indeed, his instincts are to hail Putin’s “leadership.”
.. Nor do I think Trump surrounded himself during the campaign with people who would have talked him out of collusion (save for then-senator Jeff Sessions).
.. But while they may have been willing to coordinate with the Kremlin, I’m not at all certain they would have been able to pull it off — and keep it a secret. Everything we know about the Trump campaign is that it was a shambolic moveable feast of warring egos, relentless leaks, and summary firings. But we’re supposed to believe that everyone maintained total secrecy about Russian collusion?
.. The man admitted he fired FBI director James Comey to thwart the Russia investigation. Indeed, his blunders are what invited the investigation in the first place.
- .. First: Trump thinks the probe is unfair. He knows he didn’t personally collude and feels unjustly accused.
- Second, it’s a blow to his ego, because he thinks it robs him of credit for what he believes was a landslide victory. (It wasn’t.)
- And third, he fears Mueller might find something else. Perhaps Trump’s not nearly as rich as he claims. Maybe his business practices (or those of his family), particularly with regard to Russia, would not withstand close legal scrutiny. One explanation for why Trump always flattered Putin on the campaign trail is that he thought he would lose the election, so why foreclose future business opportunities?
.. Steve Bannon matter-of-factly told author Michael Wolff: “This is all about money laundering.”.. Tellingly, the president has said he might fire Mueller if he looks into his family’s finances.