[The MAGA-friendly artist is already on the ballot in Colorado,
Oklahoma, and Vermont. What’s next?] [[link removed]]

REPUBLICANS ARE BENDING OVER BACKWARDS TO HELP KANYE WEST’S 2020
CAMPAIGN   [[link removed]]

 

Ryan Bort
August 14, 2020
Rolling Stone
[[link removed]]


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_ The MAGA-friendly artist is already on the ballot in Colorado,
Oklahoma, and Vermont. What’s next? _

Rapper Kanye West speaks during his meeting with US President Donald
Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on
October 11, 2018, SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

 

Ready or not, Kanye 2020 is happening.

The producer-turned-rapper-turned-[unclassifiable] is already on the
ballot in three states, and is navigating various filing requirements
and legal challenges to get a bubble next to his name in a handful of
others. But myriad questions remain unanswered about the Wyoming
resident’s slipshod run at White House.

One of those questions: Why?

Another good one: How?

The former is largely unanswerable, maybe even to West himself. He
certainly wants attention (which he’s getting). He certainly wants
to capitalize financially on said attention (which he is doing
[[link removed]]).
But is some other, more Machiavellian motive at play here? Could
West’s last-minute decision to run for president be a heave to help
his fledgling friend remain in office? When _Forbes_ pointed out to
West last week
[[link removed]] that
with no real chance to win, his campaign was only serving as a
spoiler, West replied: “I’m not going to argue with you, Jesus is
King.”

The intrigued thickened this week, when _The New York
Times_ reported
[[link removed]] that
West recently met with Jared Kushner
[[link removed]], Trump’s
son-in-law-turned-political handyman, in Colorado. When the paper
asked West about the rendezvous, he tweeted that he is willing to do a
live interview about it, and that he and Kushner “discussed Dr
Claude Anderson’s book Powernomics.” On
Wednesday, _Forbes_ reported
[[link removed]] that
not only did West meet with Kushner over the weekend, the pair talk
“almost daily,” which is pretty damn weird.

Regardless of whether Kushner or some larger combination of pro-Trump
forces coaxed West into running for president, there’s no doubt
that Republicans [[link removed]] are
not only welcoming his run, they’re actively facilitating it —
presumably out of a belief that he would siphon voters away from Joe
Biden. After all, if it weren’t for third-party candidates
[[link removed]] like
Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, Trump may have have lost Wisconsin in
2016.

This brings us to the question of “how,” the answer to which, for
now, seems to be through a bunch of GOP
[[link removed]]-affiliated operative-types
scrambling to amass signatures and file paperwork in states across
America.

WHAT’S GOING ON IN WISCONSIN?

The most prominent example of fuckery came earlier this month, when
Lane Ruhland, a GOP election lawyer, was filmed scurrying up to the
election commission building in Madison, Wisconsin, to drop off
signatures for West.

Not only is Ruhland a GOP election lawyer, she represented the Trump
campaign in a lawsuit against a Wisconsin television station that
aired an anti-Trump ad paid for by Priorities USA, a Democratic PAC.
If one of Trump’s lawyers filing paperwork for another 2020
candidate sounds to you like it could be a conflict of interest,
you’re not alone. Last week, the Campaign for Accountability filed
a complaint
[[link removed]] alleging
that Ruhland may have violated her “ethical obligations” as a
member of the Wisconsin bar. “Bar rules are clear,” CFA Executive
Director Michelle Kuppersmith said in a statement, “lawyers can’t
represent two parties with adverse interests.”

Ruhland’s efforts haven’t secured West a spot on ballots in the
swing state just yet. She filed the papers in Madison _14
seconds_ after the 5 p.m. deadline, which, according to local
officials, invalidates them. West’s campaign responded in a
complaint
[[link removed]] by
arguing that the “statutory provision does not distinguish between
minutes and seconds,” and as long as the signatures were filed
before 5:01 p.m., they should be valid.

There’s also the issues of whether the signatures themselves are
valid. According to two complaints against West’s move to get on the
ballot in Wisconsin, they are not. West’s campaign ran into the same
issue in ILLINOIS
[[link removed]] and NEW
JERSEY [[link removed]], where he
will not be appearing on the ballot after declining to counter
challenges over the validity of the submitted signatures.

According to the _Milwaukee Journal Sentinel_
[[link removed]],
Ruhland isn’t the only GOP-affiliated figure to be helping West in
Wisconsin. The paper identified at least five of his electors in the
state have Republican ties and/or are known Trump supporters. The
party’s reported goal in the state is to rally 107,000 votes for
West, the same total Libertarian Gary Johnson pulled in four years
ago. Trump won the state by less than 25,000 votes.

West’s status in Wisconsin is pending a review by the state’s
election commission.

What are Republicans doing to get West on the ballot in other states?

Ruhland isn’t the only Republican operative to pull a few strings
for West.

In OHIO, West’s paperwork was filed by a law firm
[[link removed]] that
since 2015 has received more than $80,000 in legal consulting fees
from the House and Senate Republican campaign committees. According
to the _Times_
[[link removed]],
West is also being helped in Ohio by a company called Let Voters
Decide. One of the company’s executives, Mark Jacoby, was arrested
in 2008 on voter fraud charges stemming from work he did for the
California Republican Party.

Let Voters Decide is also giving a hand to West
in ARKANSAS and WEST VIRGINIA. According to _New York_ magazine
[[link removed]],
one of the campaign’s contacts in the former state is Gregg Keller,
a strategist who once ran the American Conservative Union and was at
one point under consideration to be Trump’s 2016 campaign manager.

In COLORADO, West’s bid has been aided by Rachel George, a
Republican operative who emailed at least one other Republican
operative asking for “the most random favor”: to serve as one of
the nine electors necessary to get West on the ballot in the state.

“The campaign contacted me last night asking me to help them find 9
registered voters to sign Kanye’s Presidential Electors’
Acceptance of Nomination form,” George wrote in the email, which
was published by Vice News
[[link removed]].
“It is due tomorrow, so I’m under a bit of a time crunch and
trying to start by asking people who I know understand this stuff a
bit.”

Despite the “time crunch,” West wound up making it onto the ballot
in Colorado. Four of his nine electors are current or former GOP
operatives, according to ABC News
[[link removed]].

In VERMONT, where West is on the ballot, Chuck Wilton, a Republican
who was originally signed on to be one of West’s three electors in
the state, was replaced by Bradford Boyles, a former chair of the
Rutland County Republican Party, according to NPR
[[link removed]].
“I have no knowledge of what Republican leadership is doing to help
or not help Kanye,” Boyles told NPR. “My choice here is
independent of any national party’s efforts.”

Vermont, Colorado, and Oklahoma are the only states where West has
secured a spot on the ballot. His campaign is trying to chip away at
challenges in Ohio, Arkansas, Missouri, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
He’s thrown in the towel in Illinois and New Jersey. In the states
whose filing deadlines passed before or just after his July 4th
announcement, he never had a chance. But there are plenty of states
where the deadline has yet to pass, and where West should have a
reasonable shot at securing a spot on the ballot next to Trump and
Biden. That’s assuming, of course, he doesn’t run into more legal
challenges, which all of this last-minute wheeling and dealing has
done a pretty good job of attracting so far.

Not only is West toeing the line of legality in his last-minute
attempts to get on as many ballots as possible, the very existence of
his campaign may be illegal. In a blog post
[[link removed]] circulated on Thursday, legal
expert Rick Hansen argues that West could be violation of campaign
finance law simply by running. If it can be proven that West is in
some way coordinating with the Trump campaign (his conversations with
Kushner at least suggest as much, as does common sense), then he is
prohibited from spending over $2,800 of his own money on his campaign,
$2,800 being the limit for money spent supporting a candidate while in
coordination with that candidate. Any of West’s own money spent on
the campaign and exceeding $2,800, then, would be considered an
illegal campaign contribution … to Trump.

But though there are any number of legal challenges that could hinder
West’s 2020 bid, this doesn’t appear to be one of them. “Nothing
is likely to happen to West in the near term that would stop his
candidacy on legal grounds,” Hansen writes. “An FEC complaint will
languish for years, and I hardly expect DOJ headed by Bill Barr (who
has done everything to help President Trump’s political aims) to
come out and go after West in real time.”

WHAT IS THE WHITE HOUSE SAYING?

While West seems to be working hand-in-hand with a network of
Republican figures across the country, some with connections to Trump,
the White House has, of course, denied any involvement. So has Trump,
who is starting to field questions about West’s campaign now that
the GOP’s role in it is starting to come to light. He’s pled
ignorance.

“I like Kanye very much, but no, I have nothing to do with him
getting on the ballot,” the president told reporters last week.
“We’ll have to see what happens. We’ll see if he gets on the
ballot. But I’m not involved.”

He’s certainly interested, though. In the days following West’s
announcement last month, Trump wrote in a tweet that it “shouldn’t
be hard” for West to steal some of the black vote from Biden. (A
Politico/Morning Consult poll
[[link removed]] released
Wednesday found that West has only 2-percent support among
African-American voters.)

When pressed about his conversations with West, Kushner told reporters
on Thursday said that they’re simply good friends. “Kanye’s been
a friend of mine for … I’ve known him for about 10 years,” he
said. “We talk every now and then about different things. We both
happened to be in Colorado, so we got together and we had a great
discussion about a lot of things. He has some great ideas for what
he’d like to see happen in the country, and that’s why he has the
candidacy that he’s been doing. But again, there’s a lot of issues
the president [has] championed that he admires, and it was just great
to have a friendly discussion.”

When asked whether they discussed the campaign, Kushner didn’t deny
it.

“We talked about policy,” he said.

See more stories by Ryan Bort.
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