Donald Trump’s outreach to Jewish voters hasn’t gone especially well during the Republican’s presidential campaign. In December, for example, he spoke at a Republican Jewish Coalition forum, where he told attendees, “I’m a negotiator, like you folks. Is there anybody that doesn’t renegotiate deals in this room?”
More recently, Trump used a social-media account to promote a message that included anti-Semitic imagery.
McClatchy reported yesterday on a new, related problem: one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers is facing allegations of anti-Semitism.
Joseph Schmitz, named as one of five advisers by the Trump campaign in March, is accused of bragging when he was Defense Department inspector general a decade ago that he pushed out Jewish employees. […]In his complaint, [Daniel Meyer, a senior official within the intelligence community] said Crane also said Schmitz played down the extent of the Holocaust.“In his final days, he allegedly lectured Mr. Crane on the details of concentration camps and how the ovens were too small to kill 6 million Jews,” wrote Meyer, whose complaint is before the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB).
Schmitz has called the allegations “completely false and defamatory,” and said his accusers are lying.
Still, it’s hardly the kind of story the Trump campaign wants to see right now. What’s more, if Schmitz’s name sounds familiar, there’s a good reason for that.
TPM’s Josh Marshall noted late yesterday that Joseph Schmitz is former Rep. John G. Schmitz’s (R-Calif.) son. The Republican congressman, who died in 2001, has the distinction of having been “expelled from the John Birch Society for being too extreme, racist and anti-Semitic.”
Josh added, “If that’s not enough when George Wallace was shot in 1972, his American Independent Party drafted John G. Schmitz to take his place as presidential nominee.”
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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."