Bannon: Busted, Broken, And Bagged

After everything shifty and grifty former Trump chief strategist, Breitbart editor, and human pile of rumpled failure Steve Bannon was involved with at the Trump regime, the guy finally gets collared for good ol' mail fraud in the end.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was arrested Thursday after being charged with defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors through his “We Build the Wall” fundraising campaign.

Bannon and three associates were indicted in a federal investigation in the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors allege the four defrauded donors by raising “more than $25 million to build a wall along the southern border of the United States,” but some of that money was used for personal gain.
The United States Postal Inspection Service assisted in the investigation.

Others in the indictment are Timothy Shea, a 49-year-old from Colorado accused of owning a shell company, Brian Kolfage, a disabled Iraq war veteran, and Andrew Badolato, who according to his own website was a contributor to Breitbart News, the conservative publication Bannon used to run.

The campaign was intended to raise money to help President Donald Trump fulfill a campaign promise to build a border wall. Instead, prosecutors allege that Bannon and his team profited off the arrangement.

The indictment said the defendants “collectively received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from ‘We Build the Wall,’ which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s public representations.”

“The defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction,” Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement. “While repeatedly assuring donors that Brian Kolfage, the founder and public face of We Build the Wall, would not be paid a cent, the defendants secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle. We thank the USPIS for their partnership in investigating this case, and we remain dedicated to rooting out and prosecuting fraud wherever we find it.”

The White House declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Bannon did not return a request for comment.

Trump of course said he knows nothing about this at all, despite the fact that Bannon and his brick heads constantly said they were raising money for Trump's wall and used that point to specifically raise money, multiple times.

When asked about the pattern of lawlessness in his administration, Trump said that Obama did it too, except the number of former Obama White House officials indicted for crimes is, you know, zero.

PS: Large Adult Son was more than happy to back this.

Donald Trump Jr. praised We Build The Wall and Brian Kolfage at a 2018 event: "This is private enterprise at its finest. Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else. What you guys are doing is amazing.” pic.twitter.com/hOL25JoZPI

— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) August 20, 2020

And of course he knew everyone involved.

This was the White House statement. Besides Don Jr. participation in an event, he does know people involved in the project like Kobach, Bannon, Erick Prince and David Clarke. https://t.co/vl3NJSNQcn

— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) August 20, 2020

Don is lying again because that's what grifters do with effectively unlimited power. They lie and con people out of money daily. They are bad at it, but use Trump's influence and power to get away with it.

Only, they're no longer getting away with it.

The Red Rout Resumes, Con't

The first major Trump regime political casualty of the war with Iran is apparently Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's Senate run in Kansas.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday told Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, that he does not plan to run for Senate in 2020, most likely ending Republicans’ hopes of securing a potentially dominant candidate for the open seat in his home state of Kansas, according to four people briefed on the meeting.

Mr. Pompeo, a former congressman from the Wichita area, has quietly explored a campaign for months. But in the aftermath of the military operation last week that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani of Iran, Mr. Pompeo has told senior party officials that he is ruling out becoming a candidate, according to several people who have spoken with him directly.

Mr. Pompeo still has time to change his mind. The filing deadline for the primary is not until June. However, administration officials who have spoken with him in recent days said he seemed adamant about not entering the race.

Without Mr. Pompeo in the race, Republicans face an unsettled primary that includes at least one candidate, Kris Kobach, whom party leaders fear could imperil their hold on a crucial open Senate seat. Mr. Kobach, who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018, is popular with hard-right primary voters but widely disliked among moderate and independent voters in Kansas.

Several other candidates are competing for the Republican nomination, including Representative Roger Marshall. National Democrats have rallied behind Barbara Bollier, a state senator who left the G.O.P. to become a Democrat a little more than a year ago, as their preferred candidate.

Mr. Pompeo’s decision is a setback for Republicans working to retain their Senate majority in the November elections. Mr. McConnell aggressively courted him for months, and also deployed a number of his lieutenants to make the case that the secretary of state should return to Kansas, which he represented in the House until he joined the Trump administration.

There's no way Pompeo would have been able to leave the State Department with his career intact, and he would have been blasted by questions about why he left in the middle of a war to go run for Senate.

There's a very real possibility now that Kobach wins the primary and loses the general to a Democrat, Barbara Bollier, who has endorsements from both US Attorney Barry Grissom and popular former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.  Pompeo was, up until Friday, the GOP's best hope to keep the seat.  It's still going to be a tough sell, but Kobach has already lost the 2018 governor's race, and there isn't anything to make me think he improved anything heading into November.

Could be a big pickup for Team Blue.

Good Day-O, Pompeo

Trump regime Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wants to escape the nightmare of being the administration's fall guy for Trump's Ukraine scandal (the legal fall guy is still very much going to be Giuliani) and resign so he can run for Senate back in Kansas.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has told three prominent Republicans in recent weeks that he plans to resign from the Trump Administration to run for the U.S. Senate from Kansas in next year’s elections. The problem: how to get out in one piece.

Pompeo’s plan had been to remain at the State Department until early spring next year, the three Republicans tell TIME, but recent developments, including the House impeachment inquiry, are hurting him politically and straining his relationship with Trump.

So Pompeo is rethinking his calendar, say the top Republicans, one who served in the Trump Administration, another who remains in government, and a third who served in several high-ranking posts and is active in GOP politics. The timing of Pompeo’s resignation now will be decided by his ability to navigate the smoothest possible exit from the administration, the three Republicans say.

There is no indication whether Pompeo has discussed his plans with President Trump. Rumors of a Pompeo Senate campaign have circulated for months, and while Pompeo has said repeatedly that he has no intention of running, he has not ruled out a race. Pompeo aides previously have denied he was planning to step down. They declined to comment on the record for this story.

The thinking appears to be that if Pompeo simply resigns, that's punishment enough and he can restart his former congressional career running for the retiring Pat Roberts's seat, plus he figures he'd be doing Kansas Republicans a favor making sure somebody gets rid of Kris Kobach in the primary before he can lose another statewide race to the Democrats.

The actual feasibility of said plan in the wild, well, we're about to see how badly it crashes and burns.

Last Call For The Grift Wall Games

The Trump regime is of course turning a blind eye towards efforts to build a private border land wall near Mexico, because in a couple of centuries they might even be done with it.  And of course, Kris Kobach is neck deep in the con job.

Down a bumpy dirt road, past a dozen “No Trespassing” signs, two amateur sentries in neon safety vests guarded the way to a giant symbol of Trump-era politics rising up from the Chihuahuan Desert.

After one of the guards Armando asked our business and radioed someone called Viper, telling him to “stand down,” we were waved through a makeshift checkpoint and onto the site where supporters of President Donald Trump have built hundreds of yards of border wall on private land overlooking the Rio Grande.

What began in December as a quixotic online crowdfunding effort to get Trump’s promised “big, beautiful wall” built has turned into a physical barrier constructed under the direction of influential right-wing immigration opponents. On Wednesday, its backers demonstrated the wall to a handful of reporters, showing off the structure in all its steel-and-concrete glory ahead of an official ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday.

Its organizers insist their version of the wall is a feasible model for securing hundreds of miles of southern border. Its critics call it a xenophobic scam. The fact that the effort has gotten to this point at all suggests a different and broader truth: That in the Trump era, the line between a surreal stunt and an important political development can be extremely blurry.

On Wednesday, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach offered a tour of the wall — at one point scrambling over crumbling hillside to demonstrate the difficulty of passing the terrain — while negotiating with local officials over a permitting issue that threatened to derail construction.

At the same time, Kobach has been overseeing legal aspects of the project, now housed under a nonprofit called We Build the Wall, he has been negotiating with the White House over a possible appointment as the nation’s actual “immigration czar,” a potential new post that could give him vast influence over the federal bureaucracy.

Last week, The New York Times reported a list of Kobach’s conditions for accepting the job, which included 24/7 access to a government plane and were reportedly viewed as presumptuous by some inside the administration. On Wednesday, Kobach defended those conditions. “If you're serious about solving this problem you've got to have a position that has the authority and the tools to solve the problem,” he told me.
He also said he is “99 percent” certain he knows who leaked the list, though he did not offer any names.

Kobach said he last spoke to Trump about the wall project in the Oval Office three weeks ago, and that the president drilled him on the technical specifications, expressing special interest in their model’s anti-climbing features, a set of horizontal steel plates covering the tops of the wall’s vertical slats. “Are you going to paint it?” Kobach recalled the president asking him.

The wall stands on the same stretch of border where an armed militia group, the United Constitutional Patriots, was recently detaining migrants as they enter the United States. Kobach and other leaders of the wall project said they are not associated with the militias and do not condone armed vigilante action. They argue that putting up walls will put such groups “out of business.”

But his disavowals have not been entirely embraced by the movement. “I don’t support that sort of activity—yet,” said conservative pundit David Clarke, a former sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, who works on public outreach for the project. “I’m real close,” said Clarke, who said that if there is not a more significant migration crackdown by the end of Trump’s first term, he would endorse vigilante action.

There also appears to be some intermingling of the militia group and the wall efforts. We Build the Wall has shared footage shot by the group online, and people associated with the group continue to make appearances at the site of the private wall project, despite intense scrutiny of the militia’s activities.

Everybody in the GOP wants in on the grift, and Kobach is leading the charge.  Never forget that the GOP is all about enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

The mass deportation era that I've been predicting since Trump's election is almost upon us, and Trump is shifting preparations into high gear with plans to appoint a White House "immigration czar"...our old friend, Kris Kobach.

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering adding a “border czar” to his administration, and the individual said to be at the top of the list of potential candidates is Kris Kobach—a Republican who helped author one of the harshest anti-immigration laws in recent history.

“In this administration, it does not surprise me at all. He exemplifies the view of this administration, which is contrary to American history because immigration is very much the story of success in this country,” Joyce White Vance, a former federal prosecutor, told Newsweek on Tuesday.

“Kobach is anti-immigration in the most mean-spirited way possible. And that’s clearly the policy that this administration has chosen to adopt towards immigrants,” Vance added.

According to an Associated Press report on April 1, the White House is looking for someone to spearhead the president’s immigration initiatives amid a surge in migrants crossing the southern border. On the shortlist of possible appointees is Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, and Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia.

While both men are immigration hardliners, Kobach once lent a hand in the creation of Alabama HB 56. The 2011 law is seen as one of the strictest anti-immigration policies in the nation and was once heralded by state lawmakers as an initiative for people to “deport themselves.”

Remember Alabama's "Papers, Please" law?  Kobach helped write it.

The law, officially titled the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, was aimed at curbing illegal immigration. Its net effect was to make the state inhospitable to undocumented immigrants by essentially creating new immigration-related crimes.

Under HB 56, renting a house or giving a job to an “illegal” became a crime. It required state police officers to investigate or detain people based on a “suspicion” that they may be undocumented. Educators were also told to collect information regarding the immigration status of the students and their parents.

“That, of course, tamped down on school participation and school attendance,” Vance said. “If you’re a 7- or 8-year-old kid missing a year of school while that litigation went on, that’s a huge game-changer for the rest of your life. But that was what it was intended to do.”

Vance was serving as a U.S. attorney during HB 56’s passage and successfully challenged key provisions of the law in court in United States v. Alabama. The Obama administration essentially argued that the state could not create its own immigration law that is contrary to federal policy as it would be a violation of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

The law has continued to unravel as many of its most substantial provisions have been blocked in court.

Kobach would be a disaster.  So would Cuccinelli.  Kobach in fact really, really wants to round up the undocumented (and their families) and put them in deportation camps.  Sorry, "asylum seeker processing areas".

But the guy you really have to watch out for is Stephen Miller.

The White House is exploring all executive authorities in existing law that will allow an aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration and legal immigration fraud, senior adviser to the president Stephen Miller told The Daily Caller in an exclusive telephone interview.

“There’s going to be an aggressive effort to utilize every existing authority in statute,” Miller announced, explaining that several authorities exist in immigration laws passed by Congress throughout history, including the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

Miller noted that the White House is “systematically reviewing all authorities that are already on the books, both in terms of cracking down on illegal immigration and […] the abuse of our legal immigration system.” The targeted abuse actions include illegal immigrants who overstay temporary visas, “combatting or addressing legal benefit seeking in the legal immigration system.”

Noting that there are approximately 1 million illegal aliens in the United States with final removal orders that still remain at large — in some cases for several years — Miller gave one example of the type of executive action the administration can take. The presidential adviser noted that existing law has a statute that allows for a “significant financial penalty” for every single day that an alien resides in the country after being ordered removed.
“This law has been on the books for a very long time and has not been utilized. That’s the example of the kind of legal authority that already exists that is the kind of thing we can deploy to restore integrity to the immigration system.”

If you thought concentration camps for undocumented was fun, wait until we have beggar's prison camps for the families who are US citizens who can't afford to pay Miller's fines for their undocumented fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.

I'm telling you guys that this is coming.  Trump's big re-election campaign is going to be "Deport them all" and should America grant him a second term, the round-ups are going to come.  Hell, they'll start before that.

Construction Of A Scam

If you actually cared to know what former Trump chief racist strategist and human slouch/flop sweat elemental Steve Bannon has been up to lately, we'll he's been crossing the country screaming at white people in red states to give him money to build a private border wall, and I see no reason to dissuade stupid racists from losing their money to him.  He was here in Cincinnati on Tuesday playing to a crowd of...dozens...along with fellow racists Kris Kobach and David Clarke.

Even if the federal government doesn't build a wall along the Mexican border, Steve Bannon and a group of conservative activists will build one anyway, as early as next month.

Bannon, who is President Donald Trump's former chief strategist and the controversial right-wing editor of Breitbart, and the leaders of the group called We Build the Wall came into downtown Cincinnati on Tuesday to raise money and promote the effort to build a Mexican border wall on private land with private money.

We Build The Wall organizers chose Cincinnati as the second stop on a nationwide tour despite 1,400 miles separating the Mexican border and Cincinnati. Next stop is Detroit on Thursday.

"I'm in Cincinnati, because the border crisis is in Iowa," Bannon told the crowd of more than 200 people who came to the Hilton Netherland Plaza in Downtown Cincinnati. Some traveled as far away as rural West Virginia. "It's in Ohio. This border crisis is a national crisis."

When it comes to the border wall with Mexico, the country should have the president's back, Bannon said.

"This is a tragedy of biblical proportions," Bannon said. "The answer is not an open border...We can have President Trump's back to do it in the case he can't do it."

Construction on the privately funded wall will start in April, said Brian Kolfage, an Air Force veteran and triple amputee wounded in the Iraq War who founded We Build the Wall.

This is a great scam, frankly.  They can ask for money for decades, and these idiots will be dreaming of the day they can "use" castle doctrine or stand your ground laws to slaughter a truckload of "illegals" or something, and this will never, ever get built.

It's only a matter time before a lot of people go to jail for this, so enjoy the ride, I guess.

The Wall Is Dead, Long Live The Wall

There are pretty much two constants in 2019:

1) The Wall is a scam.

2) Kris Kobach never met a scam he didn't like.

With President Trump’s border wall tied up by his fight with congressional Democrats, and public opinion about the wall mixed, Kris Kobach wants to take matters into his own hands.

Fresh from his defeat in the race for Kansas governor, Mr. Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, is involved in an audacious new project — a privately-funded wall along the Mexican border.

Mr. Kobach, a hard-line ally of President Trump known for his strident stand on immigration, has long advocated a tough border policy.

He is currently an advisory board member of “We Build the Wall Inc.” a nonprofit group that has collected more than $12 million toward the effort. Mr. Kobach says the group has obtained the presidential seal of approval for the private initiative.

President Trump gave the undertaking his “blessing” in a telephone conversation Wednesday night, according to Mr. Kobach.

The White House press office did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Kobach, 52, says the group will begin construction soon on its first section of the wall on donated property, likely in Texas, and that the work can be completed cheaply and efficiently by the private sector.

The private wall idea is an outgrowth of a plan started in December as a GoFundMe campaign by Brian Kolfage, a disabled Air Force veteran living in Florida who says the impetus for his project was mounting public frustration over the government’s failure to reach an agreement on border protection.

After raising nearly $20 million, the organization was forced to contact donors because it hadn’t reached its initial goal of $1 billion. At that point, contributions would be automatically returned to donors unless they opted back in. Mr. Kobach said that efforts to retain contributors had been very successful, with 94 percent of those contacted transferring the money into the new effort.

So basically Kris Kobach saw a small scam, and decided he could make it a REALLY REALLY BIG SCAM instead.  Never let it be said that Republican crooks lack ambition.

In all seriousness, "privatize the wall" was going to happen anyway.  Now we get to see the MAGA types hem and haw rather than donate to this thing.

Last Call For Election Projections

As of 11 PM, it looks like the Dems will take the House back by a decent margin, but the GOP will keep the Senate and pick up a couple seats total. Donnelly and Heitkamp both went down, and the pickups in Texas and Tennessee didn't happen.  Arizona and Nevada will be a long night.

In the governor's races, Kris Kobach lost in Kansas, and Dems picked up New Mexico, Michigan, and Illinois, and it'll be a long night otherwise, but Mike DeWine is going to win in Ohio and that's not a good thing.  Gillum just conceded in Florida.

I'll cover it all in the morning.

Last Call For Counting Coup

Our old friend Kris Kobach is in a razor-thin primary fight for Governor of Kansas with current Governor Jeff Colyer, and with fewer than 100 votes now separating him from his opponent, keep in mind that Kobach has not recused himself as Secretary of State yet, meaning he's technically overseeing his own vote counting and an inevitable recount.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s lead over Gov. Jeff Colyer in the Republican primary has shrunk to only 91 votes after election officials discovered a mistake in the listing for one county’s results in the state’s tally of votes.

The lead is minuscule when compared with the 311,000 votes cast.

The final, unofficial results posted on the secretary of state’s website show Kobach winning Thomas County in northwest Kansas, with 466 votes to Colyer’s 422. But the tally posted by the Thomas County clerk’s office shows Colyer with 522 votes, or 100 votes more, a number the clerk confirmed to The Associated Press on Thursday.

Bryan Caskey, state elections director, said county officials pointed out the discrepancy Thursday following a routine request for a post-election check of the numbers to counties by the secretary of state’s office.

County election officials have yet to finish counting late-arriving mail-in ballots or provisional ballots provided to voters at the polls when their eligibility wasn’t clear.

“This is a routine part of the process,” Caskey said. “This is why we emphasize that election-night results are unofficial.”

Thomas County Clerk Shelly Harms said it’s possible that her handwriting on the tally sheet faxed to the secretary of state’s office was bad enough in the rush of primary-night business that the number for Colyer wasn’t clear.

“They just misread it,” she told The Associated Press.

Colyer’s campaign said Thursday that it had set up a “voting integrity” telephone hotline after it had received “countless” reports of voters experiencing issues at the polls.

Kobach is the state’s chief elections officers and told reporters Wednesday that he knew of no reports of irregularities outside of a long delay in the reporting of results from Johnson County, the state’s most populous county, because of issues with its new machines.

“We’ll certainly be going through the results county by county,” Colyer spokesman Kendall Marr said.

No matter how you look at it, for the most vocal critic of voting procedures in the US, a man who screamed about "massive widespread voting fraud" for years and did everything he could to remove as many Democrats as possible from the voter rolls to be in charge of his own vote count is insane.

But that's the GOP for you.  Anything that actually would be even remotely humbling like this, they could not give less of a crap about.

When Colyer manages to lose, I wonder what he'll do?

I know what Kansas should do, and that's vote for the Democrat in the race, Laura Kelly.

It's About Suppression, Con't

It's been clear for well over a year now, but the "massive Democrat voter fraud" that the Trump regime vowed to find after the 2016 election never existed, and was completed manufactured in order to justify GOP voter suppression efforts.

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of the 11 members of the commission formed by President Trump to investigate supposed voter fraud, issued a scathing rebuke of the disbanded panel on Friday, accusing Vice Chair Kris Kobach and the White House of making false statements and saying that he had concluded that the panel had been set up to try to validate the president’s baseless claims about fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.

Dunlap, one of four Democrats on the panel, made the statements in a report he sent to the commission’s two leaders — Vice President Pence and Kobach, who is Kansas’s secretary of state — after reviewing more than 8,000 documents from the group’s work, which he acquired only after a legal fight despite his participation on the panel.

Before it was disbanded by Trump in January, the panel had never presented any findings or evidence of widespread voter fraud. But the White House claimed at the time that it had shut down the commission despite “substantial evidence of voter fraud” due to the mounting legal challenges it faced from states. Kobach, too, spoke around that time about how “some people on the left were getting uncomfortable about how much we were finding out.”

Dunlap said that the commission’s documents that were turned over to him underscore the hollowness of those claims: “they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he said in his report, adding that some of the documentation seemed to indicate that the commission was predicting it would find evidence of fraud, evincing “a troubling bias.”

In particular, Dunlap pointed to an outline for a report the commission was working on that circulated in November 2017. The outline included sections for “Improper voter registration practices,” and “Instances of fraudulent or improper voting,” though the sections themselves were blank as they awaited evidence, speaking to what Dunlap said indicated a push for preordained conclusions.

“After reading this,” Dunlap said of the more than 8,000 pages of documents in an interview with The Washington Post, “I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.” 

It wasn't just about validating Trump's false claims of "widespread" voter fraud by "illegal immigrants", it was a moneymaking opportunity for Republican grifters like Kobach, who is now the leading GOP candidate for Kansas governor in Tuesday's primary.

Kris Kobach likes to tout his work for Valley Park, Missouri. He has boasted on cable TV about crafting and defending the town’s hardline anti-immigration ordinance. He discussed his “victory” there at length on his old radio show. He still lists it on his resume.

But “victory” isn’t the word most Valley Park residents would use to describe the results of Kobach’s work. With his help, the town of 7,000 passed an ordinance in 2006 that punished employers for hiring illegal immigrants and landlords for renting to them. But after two years of litigation and nearly $300,000 in expenses, the ordinance was largely gutted. Now, it is illegal only to “knowingly” hire illegal immigrants there—something that was already illegal under federal law. The town’s attorney can’t recall a single case brought under the ordinance.

“Ambulance chasing” is how Grant Young, a former mayor of Valley Park, describes Kobach’s role. Young characterized Kobach’s attitude as, “Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time.”

Kobach used his work in Valley Park to attract other clients, with sometimes disastrous effects on the municipalities. The towns—some with budgets in the single-digit-millions—ran up hefty legal costs after hiring him to defend similar ordinances. Farmers Branch, Texas, wound up owing $7 million in legal bills. Hazleton, Pennsylvania, took on debt to pay $1.4 million and eventually had to file for a state bailout. In Fremont, Nebraska, the city raised property taxes to pay for Kobach’s services. None of the towns is currently enforcing the laws he helped craft.

“This sounds a little bit to me like Harold Hill in ‘The Music Man,'” said Larry Dessem, a law professor at the University of Missouri who focuses on legal ethics. “Got a problem here in River City and we can solve it if you buy the band instruments from me. He is selling something that goes well beyond legal services.”

Kobach rode the attention the cases generated to political prominence, first as Kansas secretary of state, and now as a candidate for governor in the Republican primary on August 7. He also earned more than $800,000 for his immigration work, paid by both towns and an advocacy group, over 13 years.

Kobach has made a career of fake voter fraud claims, using it to stoke racial fears, and eagerly using his reputation to recruit help from white nationalists too.

Kobach has been the architect of GOP voter suppression efforts for years now, and it's high time Kansas voters put a stop to his adventures.

The End Of The Voter Suppression Commission, But Not The Fight

I've talked about Trump's Voter Suppression Commission throughout 2017, the efforts by the GOP to create a national voter ID standard and database that would force all states to implement onerous rules to restrict voting as much as possible and disenfranchise millions, possibly tens of millions of poor, elderly, and college voters across the country, mostly Democrats. 

The commission, headed by VP Mike Pence and Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was designed to force states to hand over all voting data to Trump so that the regime could design national legislation to disenfranchise Democratic voters across the country.  But even red states told Kobach to go to hell, first blue states said no way, then red states admitted that the Russians had compromised our election process and decided handing stuff over to Trump was unacceptable.  When it became clear that the effort was about massive voter suppression of Democrats through a federal Jim Crow background check voting law, it became too much for even the GOP to handle. Even red states refused to drop their lawsuits.

And yesterday evening, Trump quietly pulled the plug on Kobach's commission.

President Trump on Wednesday abruptly shut down a White House commission he had charged with investigating voter fraud, ending a brief quest for evidence of election theft that generated lawsuits, outrage and some scholarly testimony, but no real evidence that American elections are corrupt.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump called for requiring voter identification in a pair of Twitter posts because the voting system “is rigged.” “Push hard for Voter Identification!” Mr. Trump wrote.

Mr. Trump did not acknowledge the commission’s inability to find evidence of fraud, but cast the closing as a result of continuing legal challenges.

“Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” Mr. Trump said in a White House statement on Wednesday.

“Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action,” he said.

In fact, no state has uncovered significant evidence to support the president’s claim, and election officials, including many Republicans, have strongly rejected it.

The fight is far from over however.

But Mr. Kobach insisted in an interview that the commission’s work would not end but rather would be transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, one of the federal agencies charged with ensuring election integrity and one that he said critics would find more difficult to target.

As a White House commission, the voter-fraud panel was subject to public-disclosure requirements and other restrictions that Mr. Kobach said opponents of the inquiry had seized on in “a determined effort by the left” to hamstring its investigation. At last count, he said, the panel faced at least eight lawsuits accusing it of ignoring various federal requirements, including one from a commission member, Matthew Dunlap, the Maine secretary of state, that claimed he had been illegally excluded from its deliberations.

“It got to the point where the staff of the commission was spending more time responding to litigation than doing an investigation,” Mr. Kobach said. “Think of it as an option play; a decision was made in the middle of the day to pass the ball. The Department of Homeland Security is going to be able to move faster and more efficiently than a presidential advisory commission.”

Kobach at least will be busy running his campaign for Kansas Governor to replace GOP Gov Sam Brownback, so we may have dodged a bullet for now.  But this isn't going to go away.  I'm betting the goal now is to have voter suppression tactics come down as Homeland Security directives. How quickly that can be accomplished, well, we'll see.

The commission is done, but not the war on voting.  Trump tweeted about the need for national voter ID laws again today, and the effort to protect voting access cannot let up.

We still have a long fight ahead.

Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

The Trump/Russia collusion story certainly is important, but my number one concern going forward remains GOP voter suppression tactics against Democrats.  It's how they won in 2016, and how they plan to keep winning in 2018 and beyond.  And if Democrats won't do anything about it, then voting rights groups and the courts will.

Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson is once again being accused of violating federal elections laws.

Common Cause Indiana in a federal lawsuit filed Friday calls for an injunction to be issued against Lawson, whom the political watchdog group accuses of unlawfully purging voters from state rolls.

Specifically, Common Cause challenges the new "Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck" system that allows election officials to immediately remove voters identified as having registered to vote in another state. The process finds a match based on first name, last name and date of birth. 

Common Cause alleges that the crosscheck system contradicts the protections in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, resulting in "nonuniform, discriminatory and illegal cancellations of Indiana voter registrations." 

For example, one requirement of federal law says a state “shall not remove” a voter from its list of eligible voters due to change in residence unless the voter confirms a change in residence in writing or fails to respond to a notice sent by the state.

The ACLU of Indiana, national ACLU and voting rights group Demos are representing Common Cause in the suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.

I've talked about Crosscheck before: the twisted and flawed brainchild of Kansas GOP Secretary of State (and now Trump voter suppression commission head) Kris Kobach.  Indiana used the flawed system to disenfranchise thousands of Democratic voters in 2016 based on faulty information.  If there's someone with your name and your date of birth anywhere else in America that's registered to vote, both of you could get removed from the voter rolls under Crosscheck.

Now we're seeing lawsuits on this.  That's definitely a good thing, but whether or not they will be resolved in time for the 2020 election is anyone's guess.  And right now through a combination of gerrymandering and voter suppression, the GOP has Congress all but locked down for the foreseeable future, as well as multiple state legislatures.

No wonder then they are trying to get rid of the 17th Amendment and direct election of Senators too, instead putting their appointment in the hands of state legislatures.  If that were the case now, the GOP would have nearly 70 Senators instead of 52.

Getting rid of Trump is certainly necessary, but going forward after his term is even more important.

Check The Vote '17

I don't think most Americans are truly cognizant of the level of danger posed by Trump's "voter integrity commission" scam run by VP Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  They want to make it as impossible as they can for regular Americans and in particular poor, elderly, and young Americans to be able to vote at all without going through the kinds of hassles and hurdles put up in the Jim Crow era. 

I've long been warning about Republicans crafting a federal Jim Crow voting law in the wake of the annihilated Voting Rights Act, and it looks like that proposal will take the form of federal background checks before being allowed to vote in this country.

President Donald Trump’s controversial voting commission will weigh a proposal Tuesday about requiring a background check before a person can register to vote — similar to buying a gun. 

John Lott, the president of the Pennsylvania-based Crime Prevention Research Center, will present the concept when the commission holds its second meeting of the year in New Hampshire. 

Lott’s PowerPoint, which was posted on the White House’s website in advance of the meeting, includes a slide titled “How to check if the right people are voting.” 

He notes that Republicans worry that ineligible people are voting, while Democrats contend “that Republicans are just imagining things.” Lott proposes applying the federal background check system for gun purchases, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, to voter registrations. 

Lott said in a phone call that the background check system, which was established under President Bill Clinton, checks whether a person is a non-citizen and whether they have a felony conviction among other pieces of information to determine their eligibility to own a gun.

Pretty slick move, and it comes with its own strawman: How can stoopid libtards be against background checks for voting when they are the exact arguments they make for background checks for guns?

Lott, who last year published a book called “The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies,” said that Democrats have praised using background checks for guns and questioned why they would oppose using the same system for voting when it’s already up and running. 

“They say it does not impinge on people’s right to self-defense… It shouldn’t be any harm in their eyes to check whether people are eligible to vote,” he said. 

“It just seems like if they believe what they’re saying it seems like a win-win.” 

Dale Ho, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said in an email that only four states permanently ban people from voting for felony convictions. 

“For example, in Kansas, you can register to vote after finishing your sentence (including parole); but the rules on firearms are much more complicated, and have different waiting periods for different kinds of crimes,” Ho said. 

“So it’s not obvious why this would be a helpful idea for voting at all — even if you leave aside questions about practicality and possible burden on voters. Seems more like an attempted (and nonsensical) ‘gotcha’ for liberals rather than a serious suggestion,” he said.

Of course it's a gotcha nonsense argument.  But our entire government in 2017 is built on those, and expect this to become the battle cry of the right on "voter background checks" for a very long time.

The reality though is that this allows the right to frame the argument while Pence and Kobach and company come up with the real proposals that won't get attention until it's far too late.  It's a "win-win" alright...for the GOP.

Fast-Growing Fascism

It's totally strange how the response to the nation's first black Democratic president was the Republican party going full-on authoritarian with white nationalism at its core and seeking to completely undo Obama's entire memory, let alone his presidential legacy.  No surprise then that years of "Democrat voter fraud!" screaming now has a majority of Republicans backing the end of federal elections should Dear Leader Trump declare so.

Slightly more than half of Republicans say they would support postponing the 2020 presidential election if President Trump proposed it to make sure only eligible American citizens can vote, according to a new survey. 

According to a poll published by The Washington Post, 52 percent of Republicans said they would back a postponement of the next election if Trump called for it. 

If Trump and congressional Republicans proposed postponing the election to ensure only eligible citizens could vote, support from Republicans rises to 56 percent. 

Pollsters found 47 percent of Republicans think Trump won the popular vote.

A majority of Republicans, 68 percent, also thinks millions of illegal immigrants voted in the presidential election and 73 percent think voter fraud happens somewhat or very often. 

The poll was conducted from June 5 to 20 among 1,325 Americans. The survey focused on the 650 respondents who said they identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party.

Clinton of course won the popular vote by 3 million or so, but apparently we've reached the point where open fascism and dictatorship is now acceptable to the majority of the voters belonging to the party in power as long as doing so maintains their power.

Needless to say, keep a close, close watch on Mike Pence's "Voter Integrity Commission".  That's where the real voter suppression will be in 2018 and 2020, I fully expect tens of millions of registered Democrats to have their voting registrations purged while Republicans cheer "democracy" in action.

Democracy was overrated anyway, right?

A body politic that elected and re-elected a black president has to be dismantled, of course.  It can never be allowed to happen again.  Trump, Pence, Kris Kobach and the rest of the GOP will make sure that it's all but impossible for the Democrats to win ever again.

Watch.

It's About Suppression, Con't.

Former Obama DoJ civil rights division head Vanita Gupta sounds the alarm over VP Mike Pence and Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach and the Trump regime's "election-integrity commission" and calls it what it is: massive federal voter suppression of Democrats.

The Trump administration’s election-integrity commission will have its first meeting on Wednesday to map out how the president will strip the right to vote from millions of Americans. It hasn’t gotten off to the strongest start: Its astonishing request last month that each state hand over voters’ personal data was met with bipartisan condemnation. Yet it is joined in its efforts to disenfranchise citizens by the immensely more powerful Justice Department. 

Lost amid the uproar over the commission’s request was a letter sent at the same time by the Justice Department’s civil rights division. It forced 44 states to provide extensive information on how they keep their voter rolls up-to-date. It cited the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, known as the Motor-Voter law, which mandates that states help voters register through motor vehicle departments. 

The letter doesn’t ask whether states are complying with the parts of the law that expand opportunities to register. Instead it focuses on the sections related to maintaining the lists. That’s a prelude to voter purging. 

Usually the Justice Department would ask only a single state for data if it had evidence the state wasn’t complying with Motor-Voter. But a blanket request to every state covered under that law is virtually unprecedented. And unlike the commission, the Justice Department has federal statutory authority to investigate whether states are complying with the law. 

These parallel efforts show us exactly how the Trump administration will undertake its enormous voter suppression campaign: through voter purges. The voter rolls are the key. Registration is one of the main gateways to political participation. It is the difference between a small base of voters pursuing a narrow agenda and an electorate that looks like America.

Here’s how the government will use voters’ data. It will create a national database to try to find things like double-voters. But the commission won’t be able to tell two people with the same name and birthday apart. Such errors will hit communities of color the hardest. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of the 100 most common last names. 

Purging voters is part of a larger malicious pattern that states have employed across the country. Georgia and Ohio are being sued for carrying out early versions of what we can expect from the Trump administration.

I can't stress this enough, guys. Tens of millions of people will lose the right to vote before 2020 and most likely before 2018 if the Trump regime's little project comes to fruition here.  Whether or not they can get that right to vote back, well the Trump DoJ will make that as difficult as humanly possible.  The GOP will be able to count on winning elections for decades.  It doesn't take much, either.

We have to fight this with everything we have, or we are lost.

It's that simple.

It's About Suppression, Con't

The Trump regime's plan to assemble a national database of voters under the guise of "voter integrity" has run into not one but two buzzsaws: blue states understand full well that the information will be used for targeted voter suppression purposes, but red states know that voter registration systems have been completely compromised by the Russians.  Neither group trust the incompetent Trump regime and now 44 states have rejected participation in the scheme.

Forty-four states have refused to provide certain types of voter information to the Trump administration's election integrity commission, according to a CNN inquiry to all 50 states. 

State leaders and voting boards across the country have responded to the letter with varying degrees of cooperation -- from altogether rejecting the request to expressing eagerness to supply information that is public. 

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which President Donald Trump created by executive order in May, sent a letter to all 50 states last Wednesday requesting a bevy of voter data, which he notes will eventually be made available to the public.

The problem is nobody trusts the regime with a massive database of personal info, especially since that info has already been shown to be vulnerable.

But the commission, which is chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, seemed to misunderstand voter privacy laws nationwide. Every state that responded to the commission's letter said it could not provide Social Security numbers, for example. Others said they consider information such as birth dates and party affiliations to be private. 

What's more, Kobach asked states to supply the information through an online portal. Many states have rejected this specific request, noting that the commission should file a voter information request through established state websites, as any other party would. 

As of Tuesday afternoon, two states -- Florida and Nebraska -- are still reviewing the commission's request. Another two states -- Hawaii and New Jersey -- have not returned CNN's request for comment. And while six states are still awaiting a letter from the commission, four of them -- New Mexico, Michigan, South Carolina and West Virginia -- have already pledged not to provide voters' private information. The other two of those six states, Arkansas and Illinois, have not released statements ahead of receiving the letter.

A few states have signed on at least.  Sort of.

Just three states -- Colorado, Missouri and Tennessee -- commended Kobach's attempt to investigate voter fraud in their respective statements. 

"We are very glad they are asking for information before making decisions," said Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams, a Republican. "I wish more federal agencies would ask folks for their opinion and for information before they made decisions." 

Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, also a Republican, echoed Williams' sentiment in a statement Friday: "The commission's questions are fair and we will be glad to assist in offering our thoughts on these important matters," he said. "I look forward to working with Sec. Kris Kobach and the commission on its findings and offer our support in the collective effort to enhance the American people's confidence in the integrity of the elections process."

I'm betting state legislators and governors of those states will want to have a word on releasing that data, let alone the voters themselves.

Still, this has to be considered a complete failure by now if Trump can't even get blood red states like Texas and Oklahoma to play ball, or GOP-leaning swing states currently controlled by Republicans like Florida, Ohio, or Wisconsin to pony up data either.

The question now becomes if the regime will compel states to comply or not.

It's About Suppression, Con't

It appears the joke's on Mike Pence and Kris Kobach.  The former Indiana Governor and Trump's running mate and Kansas Secretary of State, respectively, can';t even get their respective states to go along with their voter suppression plan.  Why?  Well, who wants to be responsible for handing over millions of voter records, including Social Security information, to the Russians?

At least 24 states are pushing back or outright refusing to comply with the Trump administration’s request for voter registration data.

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, formed by President Trump to investigate his widely debunked claim that millions of illegal votes cost him the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election, sent letters this week to the 50 secretaries of state across the country requesting information about voters.

The letter, signed by commission vice chairman and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), asked for names, addresses, birth dates and party affiliations of registered voters in each state. It also sought felony convictions, military statuses, the last four digits of Social Security numbers and voting records dating back to 2006, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Hill. 

Many states immediately raised concerns and voiced their opposition to providing the information.

And two of those states?  Kansas and Indiana.

Kobach said Friday that Kansas, at least for now, also won’t be sharing Social Security information with the commission, on which he serves as vice chairman. The state will share other information about the state’s registered voters, including names and addresses, which are subject to the state’s open records laws.

Kobach sent letters on behalf of the commission to every state requesting names, addresses, voting history and other personal information, such as the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers, earlier this week.

Kobach said Thursday that Kansas would provide all the information requested in the letter, but in a follow-up interview Friday, he said the state would not be sharing the Social Security information at this time.

“In Kansas, the Social Security number is not publicly available. … Every state receives the same letter, but we’re not asking for it if it’s not publicly available,” Kobach said.

He did not rule out the possibility of providing that information to the commission in the future.

“If the commission decides that they would like to receive Social Security numbers to a secure site in order to remove false positives, then we would have to double check and make sure Kansas law permits,” Kobach said.

“I know for a fact that this information would be secured and maintained confidentially,” he added in response to security concerns.

But of course he won't do it now, despite assurances that "the information would be secure".  It's because he knows it won't be secure at all, especially given that this is precisely the information the Russian hackers who hit our election and voter registration systems wanted, and that the Trump regime must be considered still compromised by Moscow.  It would be an utter disaster, and Kobach knows it.

They won't even go along with thier own voter suppression scam, because of the chance Putin will use it in other ways.  I'd laugh, but this is how much of a dark comedy America is right now.

Even Texas turned Kobach down.  Hell, Mississippi told him to go to hell.  Crooks we can understand in America.  Traitors on the other hand, well not even the GOP will put up with them, it seems.

It's About Suppression, Con't.

OK folks, as if I haven't stressed this enough over the last almost nine years, now is way past the time to be worrying about Trump's point man on national voter suppression efforts, our old friend Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has asked the state of Connecticut to provide President Donald Trump’s new voter commission with the names, birthdates and Social Security information for that state’s voters going back to 2006. 

Kobach, a former chairman of the Kansas Republican Party and a candidate for Kansas governor in 2018, serves as vice chairman of Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. 

In a June 28 letter, Kobach asked the Connecticut secretary of state’s office to provide it with all publicly available voter roll data, including the full names of all registered voters along with their addresses, dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, voting history and other personal information. 

Kobach’s office did not immediately answer a question about how many states received similar letters. Kobach previously promised that the commission would undertake the most comprehensive study of voter fraud to date. 

Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, a Democrat, said in a statement that her office plans to share “publicly-available information with the Kobach Commission while ensuring that the privacy of voters is honored by withholding protected data.”

“In the same spirit of transparency, we will request that the Commission share any memos, meeting minutes or additional information as state officials have not been told precisely what the Commission is looking for,” she said. “This lack of openness is all the more concerning, considering that the Vice Chair of the Commission, Kris Kobach, has a lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas.” 

Kobach has championed some of the strictest voting laws in the country during his tenure as secretary of state. Those laws have spurred multiple lawsuits.
Last week, a federal judge fined him $1,000 for making “patently misleading representations” about documents he took to a November meeting with Trump that relate to federal voting law as part of an ongoing voting rights case. 

“The courts have repudiated his methods on multiple occasions but often after the damage has been done to voters,” Merrill said. “Given Secretary Kobach’s history we find it very difficult to have confidence in the work of this Commission.” 

Vanita Gupta, the former head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s office of Civil Rights, said on Twitter that the letter proves that Kobach and Vice President Mike Pence, who serves as the commission’s chairman, “are laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple.” 

Kobach’s office denied a request by The Kansas City Star for documents related to the commission last week on the grounds that his office has no documents pertaining to the commission.

Vanita Gupta is right, and Connecticut is not the only state who got this letter demanding voter information for the last ten years.  All 50 states have been asked to do this.  At least three have said no, including to her considerable credit, Kentucky's Secretary of State, Alison Lundergan Grimes.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) said in a statement that he has “no intention” of fulfilling the request, defending the fairness of his state's elections. He also blasted the commission in his statement, saying it was based on the "false notion" of widespread voter fraud in the November presidential election.

“At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression,” McAuliffe stated. 

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla (D) also responded to the request, saying “I will not provide sensitive voter information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally” in the last election.

“California’s participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the President, Vice President, and [Kansas Secretary of State Kris] Kobach,” Padilla stated. 

Kobach is the vice chairman of the voter fraud panel who asked each state for its voter rolls. 

Later in the evening, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) said she too wouldn't offer up the information requested by the panel. 

"The president created his election commission based on the false notion that "voter fraud" is a widespread issue – it is not," Grimes said in a statement Thursday. 

"Indeed, despite bipartisan objections and a lack of authority, the President has repeatedly spread the lie that three to five million illegal votes were cast in the last election," her statement continued. "Kentucky will not aid a commission that is at best a waste of taxpayer money and at worst an attempt to legitimize voter suppression efforts across the country."

And the only reason you would force states to do this is if your "solution" to the issue of "voter fraud" was a "national voter integrity database" ahead of national voter ID legislation that would standardize voting and registration procedures across the country for federal elections.

Keep in mind too that Trump would then have a database of every voter in the country and how they voted for the last ten years.  You can imagine the awesome levels of malfeasance that could occur in the annals of targeting voter disenfranchisement with that type of information.

You can also imagine that there would be no independent oversight of the commission and the conclusions they would draw, which of course would be that America desperately needs "voter registration and identification reform legislation" ahead of 2020...or maybe ahead of 2018.

This is where we lose our two-party system, guys, right here.  Republicans vote, Democrats are mysteriously purged from the rolls, just enough to give Republicans key wins in key locations time and time again.  You don't have to touch a single voting machine in the country to control the outcome if you already know who can and cannot vote in each precinct in America.

Even if you don't believe that Trump got help from this from the Russians the first time around, you'd better believe Kobach is going to push for this to happen by 2020.  Keep a really close eye on this one guys, because your democracy is going to go poof before you know it.

Kobach Chameleon, Con't

Regardless of whether Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach ends up Attorney General or not, he is currently Trump's transition team point man on immigration right now. Just to let you know how truly abysmal the man and his policies are, he's openly talking about bypassing Republicans and Democrats in Congress to build that mythical wall...and to start registering Muslims.

Kobach told Reuters last Friday that the immigration group had discussed drafting executive orders for the president-elect's review "so that Trump and the Department of Homeland Security hit the ground running."

To implement Trump's call for "extreme vetting" of some Muslim immigrants, Kobach said the immigration policy group could recommend the reinstatement of a national registry of immigrants and visitors who enter the United States on visas from countries where extremist organizations are active.

Kobach helped design the program, known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, while serving in Republican President George W. Bush's Department of Justice after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by al Qaeda militants.

Under NSEERS, people from countries deemed "higher risk" were required to undergo interrogations and fingerprinting on entering the United States. Some non-citizen male U.S. residents over the age of 16 from countries with active militant threats were required to register in person at government offices and periodically check in.

NSEERS was abandoned in 2011 after it was deemed redundant by the Department of Homeland Security and criticized by civil rights groups for unfairly targeting immigrants from Muslim- majority nations.

Kobach said the immigration advisers were also looking at how the Homeland Security Department could move rapidly on border wall construction without approval from Congress by reappropriating existing funds in the current budget. He acknowledged "that future fiscal years will require additional appropriations."

Yeah, on top of everything else this asshole came up with the Bush Administration's unconstitutional profiling of Muslims program, and now he wants to bring it back.  But for ten years, we regularly kept tabs on "high-risk" Muslims until the Obama administration put a stop to it.

Trump has said that he not only wants to bring NSEERS back but expand it to include all Muslims in the US, including US citizens. And yes, he wants to build that wall to keep them out.

Kobach is the most dangerous member of Trump's team that I've seen so far, somebody who can make Trump's dangerous immigration rhetoric into reality.

That's a serious problem.

Last Call For Kobach Chameleon

I've talked about Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach a number of times on this blog, and at every juncture he's been on a crusade to disenfranchise as many Democratic party voters as possible in the name of "eliminating voter fraud".  He's the man behind Crosscheck, a compact of red states to compare voter registrations and to toss millions off the voter rolls in 2016. He's been involved in helping to neuter the Federal Election Assistance Commission to keep the federal government from helping to register voters. And in Kansas, he's been behind efforts to misinform Hispanic voters in the state by giving them false information.  Most of all, he's the man behind Arizona's awful SB 1070  "Papers, please!" law that Kobach later tried in Kansas and was struck down by the Supreme Court.

In other words, if the GOP effort to disenfranchise black and Hispanic voters has a face and name, it's Kris Kobach.

So guess whose name just surfaced as Attorney General of the United States in the Trump administration?

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, best known for his very hardline immigration stances, could be President-elect Donald Trump's choice for attorney general. Kobach helped formulate Trump's controversial plan to build a wall along the United States' southern border and crafted an Arizona law that made it a crimeto be in the country illegally and allowed Hispanic people to be asked to "show their papers." 

Phil Kerpen, president of the conservative group American Commitment, tweeted Tuesday that credible sources told him Kobach was the likely choice. But Bryan Lowry, a reporter at Kansas.com, tweeted that a Kobach representative said it was "just chatter" at the moment, signaling nothing was definite just yet.

Kobach is a controversial figure, in large part for his very tough stances on immigration. Kobach has indicated that Trump's immigration stances will immediately shift away from President Barack Obama's efforts to extend rights to undocumented immigrants. Trump has said he would deport between 2 and 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions. Kobach suggested this week that Trump would also deport undocumented immigrants who are arrested but not convicted.

Understand that if Kris Kobach becomes Attorney General, the DoJ's Civil Rights and Voting Rights divisions will be used against people of color at every opportunity, and that I fully expect a national, federal effort to institute GOP voter ID laws nationwide, along with, oh yes, the nation's top cop almost certainly instituting national racial, ethnic, and religious profiling and "stop and frisk" policing.

Oh, yeah, and mass deportations.

Kobach cannot be allowed to be Attorney General, guys.

Period.