One of the things that made Donald Trump’s presidential cabinet so unusual was the sheer volume of scandals. As regular readers know, at least four members of the Republican’s cabinet were referred to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution over the course of three years — a dynamic without precedent in American history.
One of the four was Ryan Zinke, who continues to stand out as … special.
As we’ve discussed, Zinke’s tenure as secretary of the Interior was almost cartoonishly provocative: The Montana Republican came under 18 different investigations before resigning under a cloud of controversy. In December 2018, The New York Times published a round-up of controversies surrounding Zinke, and it was a strikingly long list. Media Matters also put together a timeline of the former Interior secretary’s “questionable actions,” and that list was even longer.
It was against this backdrop that Zinke decided to run for Congress, and as the Associated Press reported, this week, he won a GOP primary.
Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke won an unexpectedly tight race Thursday to become the Republican nominee in the race for a new U.S. House seat representing western Montana, a victory that comes after days of hand-counting ballots in one county. Zinke defeated former state Sen. Al “Doc” Olszewski by just over 1,600 votes out of 84,500 cast in the race, or 1.9 percentage points, according to preliminary numbers.
Zinke’s primary victory comes just four months after the Interior Department’s inspector general concluded that the Republican misused his office and lied to investigators about his involvement in a Montana land deal.
The fact that the race was this close nevertheless came as something of a surprise. Given Zinke’s high public profile — he’s a former Montana congressman and former state senator, in addition to having served in Trump’s cabinet — when he launched his candidacy, it was widely assumed that he’d do very well. Instead, he struggled, both with allegations of wrongdoing and with residency questions: Zinke’s wife, for example, designated a home in California, not Montana, as her primary residence. For roughly 42 percent of Republicans in Montana’s newly drawn 1st congressional district, his record wasn’t a deal-breaker. Zinke will now face Monica Tranel, an attorney and Olympic rower, in a general election — in a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the U.S. House in a quarter of a century. As for Zinke’s competition for the title of Most Scandal-Plagued Member of Trump’s Cabinet, former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is also on the comeback trail, running for the U.S. Senate in Oklahoma, despite a lengthy list of his own scandals.
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."
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