It stands to reason that Kris Kobach is a very busy man. He is, after all, the elected secretary of state in Kansas, where he’s also running for governor. At the same time, Kobach, a national pioneer in voter suppression, is leading Donald Trump’s outlandish voting commission.
But as it turns out, the Kansas Republican nevertheless has time for a paid side gig at a right-wing website. The Kansas City Star reported overnight:
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 … 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.
Note, while plenty of politicians occasionally publish pieces at a variety of media outlets, this isn’t a situation in which Kobach has simply written an op-ed or two. Rather, the Kansas Republican is a paid Breitbart writer, publishing regular pieces (which, as the Star noted, include “a link to Kobach’s gubernatorial campaign website”).
We are, of course, talking about the same website Steve Bannon famously described it as “the platform for the alt-right.”
It’s tempting to note that there’s a revolving door between Trump World and Breitbart — with names like Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Julia Hahn moving from the far-right site to the White House (and in some cases, from the White House back to the far-right site) — but in Kobach’s case, the door isn’t revolving at all. The Kansas Republican appears comfortable maintaining a role in both simultaneously.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."