Trump’s ‘Voter Fraud’ Chief Is a Hate Group’s Attorney and Now a Paid Columnist at Breitbart

Bannon Brags Breitbart Is ‘The Platform for the Alt-Right’

Kris Kobach is:

• The vice chair of Trump’s “voter fraud” commission, the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity”
• The Secretary of State for Kansas
• A candidate to become the Republican governor of Kansas
• The attorney for the activist arm of an anti-immigrant hate group
• One of the key authors of anti-immigrant bills and laws around the country, like Arizona’s SB 1070 and Alabama’s HB 56
• A paid columnist for the “alt-right” website Breitbart

Yes, Kobach is an elected official and possibly the first to simultaneously be a paid columnist at a national publication. 

“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,” The Kansas City Star reported Thursday evening. (Trump’s former chief strategist is of course Steve Bannon.)

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. 

“I think Breitbart.com appeals to anyone who is Republican or conservative in any way,” Kobach said after disputing claims that the site caters to white nationalists. “It appeals to a broad spectrum of conservative readers.”

Let’s remember, Bannon has bragged that Breitbart is “the platform for the alt-right.”

So it should come as no surprise that Kobach is talking to news channels like MSNBC and Fox News today about wanting Trump to kill DACA, an Obama-era immigration program designed to protect undocumented immigrants who came into the U.S. as children, through no fault of their own. (For the record, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle decimated Kobach’s claims.

Trump is expected to kill DACA any day now, sending over 800,000 undocumented people to countries they don’t remember, some of which are literally called the murder capitols of the world.

Meanwhile, for some inexplicable reason, Kobach’s ties to white nationalism and the anti-immigrant movement are rarely reported, but it’s important Americans know about them.  

In June, here’s how the Southern Poverty Law Center reported on Kobach’s run for governor:

“Kris Kobach, Legal Counsel to Hate Group and Architect of Unconstitutional Anti-Immigrant Laws, Announces Run for Kansas Governor.”

Kobach’s connections to hate groups reaches back to 2004, when he first served as counsel to the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). FAIR’s leaders have historical ties to white supremacists and eugenicists and who have made numerous racist statements and was named a hate group by the SPLC in 2007.

As recently as 2015, Kobach was a featured speaker at a “writer’s workshop” organized by The Social Contract Press, a white nationalist publisher known for resurrecting the obscure racist novel Camp of the Saints. In March of this year, Kobach invited Austrian anti-Muslim activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff to a meeting in Topeka. Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted of hate speech in her native country in 2011 and works closely with ACT For America, the largest anti-Muslim hate group in the United States.

When people wonder why Donald Trump finds it so hard to denounce white supremacists and white nationalists, maybe they should remember that he has close ties to Breitbart – he still regularly calls Steve Bannon, who is back as the head of the alt-right website – and he hires people like Kris Kobach.

The question is, why isn’t the rest of the media highlighting Kobach’s background?

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