The Sordid Past Of Trump's Advisors

Donald Trump sure seems to be surrounding himself with some pretty sleazy advisors these days. First there was the hiring of Steve Bannon of Breitbart News to be his new campaign CEO. I have still yet to have anyone explain to me how a campaign CEO is any different from a campaign manager. Perhaps he gets paid ten times as much for doing the same job. His sordid record at Breitbart is well-known but perhaps less known is his less than stellar stint at Biosphere II. In recent days, it has also been revealed that Bannon was charged with domestic violence back in 1996 although the case was subsequently dropped. Bannon has also some serious tax problems as well as a civil lien imposed on him as recently as 2011. And now the latest revelation is that he is actually committing voter fraud by illegally registering to vote by using a vacant house due for demolition in Florida as his residence. Bannon apparently rented a couple of properties in Florida in which his divorced wife lived and which he also listed as his primary residence. At the same time, apparently, he was actually a resident of Laguna Beach, California and was registered to vote there up until 2014. Josh Marshall surmises that Bannon's use of the Florida residence was probably a tax dodge as Florida has no state income tax. It will be interesting to see if that turns out to be the case. On the other hand, Republicans can find a silver lining in this, as we actually may have uncovered a real case of voter fraud. But I doubt it - it is hard to imagine Bannon voting in person in Florida and California on the same day, although I suppose he could have taken advantage of early voting and/or absentee ballots to actually vote twice. Maybe that's why Trump is constantly hitting the theme of a "rigged" election - because Bannon has explained how it's done.

On Friday, it was also announced that former Chris Christie aide Bill Stepien has been brought in by the Trump campaign to enhance their get-out-the vote efforts. Stepien is probably a name that most people would outside of the New York area have never heard of but he was apparently an instrumental figure in the Bridgegate scandal that helped doom Chris Christie's campaign. That scandal involved shutting down lanes on the George Washington Bridge so that traffic would be forced through Fort Lee, New Jersey whose mayor had refused to endorse Christie. At the time, Stepien was Christie's campaign manager in his gubernatorial re-election campaign. He was also having an affair with Christie's deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly, whose email to the Port Authority that it was "time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" linked the closures to Christie and his staff. Stepien was essentially thrown overboard by Christie due to the scandal as it became clear that, even if he did not know about the closures beforehand, he certainly condoned them after the fact. And a recently released contemporaneous text indicates that Stepien may have been much more involved than just after the fact. In any case, the trial regarding Bridgegate starts in about three weeks and you can be sure that Stepien's name will come up frequently and he might even be called on to testify as could Chris Christie. That's just the kind of publicity a campaign needs in the weeks leading up to an election.

Finally, there is Roger Ailes. His disgraced departure from Fox News as a serial sexual predator has been fully documented here and elsewhere. But he is now apparently an important strategist in the Trump campaign, despite Kellyanne Conway's statement that he "obviously has no formal or informal role with the campaign". I'm not the only one who thinks that Ailes will become more and more important to the Trump campaign as we head into the home stretch after Labor Day. In fact, you can see the Trump campaign making an issue of Hillary's health records as a way to blunt the fact of his not releasing his tax returns. To me, that just reeks of an Ailes' maneuver.

Trump's key advisors now consist of a tax-dodging flame-thrower, a man up to his eyeballs in criminal lane closures in New Jersey, and a serial sexual predator. If Hillary Clinton had advisors like that, can you imagine the daily torrent of media abuse she would be getting. But Trump seems to somehow get away with it, perhaps because he is a continual daily outrage machine. But that shouldn't allow him to not have to answer for his choice of advisors.