I'm shocked, shocked, that one of Donald Trump's advisers may be an anti-Semite:
Allegations of anti-Semitism have surfaced against one of Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisers....
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.
Daniel Meyer, a senior official within the intelligence community, described Schmitz’s remarks in his complaint file.
“His summary of his tenure’s achievement reported as ‘…I fired the Jews,’ ” wrote Meyer, a former official in the Pentagon inspector general’s office whose grievance was obtained by McClatchy.
... In his complaint, Meyer said [John] Crane [another former top Pentagon official] 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.
Wow.
There's more at the Daily Wire:
Meanwhile, David Tenebaum, an Amy engineer at the Tank Automotive Command (TACOM) in Warren, Michigan, mentioned the accusations against Schmitz in a letter this week to Acting Pentagon Inspector General Glenn Fine. He asserted current and former Pentagon officials had perpetuated an anti-Semitic culture. His attorney’s letter read, “The anti-Semitic environment began under a prior Inspector General, Mr. Joseph Schmitz.” Tenenbaum was labeled an Israeli spy by the Army, which launched a criminal investigation; Bridget Serchak, a Pentagon inspector general’s office spokeswoman, concluded in 2008 that Tenenbaum had been singled out for “unusual and unwelcome scrutiny because of his faith” as an Orthodox Jew.
Some of you may know this about Schmitz:
Schmitz's sister is Mary Kay Letourneau, the Washington state teacher who served more than seven years in prison after a 1997 conviction for rape after having sex with a sixth-grade pupil with whom she had two children. After Letourneau's release from prison, she and the former pupil, now an adult, married each other.
But Dad was also a tad notorious:
His father was the ultraconservative Orange County congressman John G. Schmitz, who once ran for president but whose political career ended after he admitted having an affair with a German immigrant suspected of child abuse.
The elder Schmitz, who also served in the California state senate, wasnot a good person:
As a national director of the John Birch Society, Mr. Schmitz became well known for his slick tongue and conservative beliefs. He outraged many when he suggested that if President Richard Nixon wanted to go to communist China, he shouldn't come back.
Mr. Schmitz received 1.1 million votes when he ran for the presidency in 1972 representing the American Independent Party. He was the replacement candidate for Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who had been paralyzed after being shot by a would-be assassin....
In 1978, Mr. Schmitz returned to the California Senate representing Newport Beach and again made headlines for suggesting Martin Luther King was a "notorious liar." He also gained notoriety for calling feminist attorney Gloria Allred a "slick, butch lawyeress." A lawsuit she filed resulted in a $20,000 judgment against him and a public apology.
And, yes, he was an anti-Semite, as this story from 1982 makes clear:
The Rules Committee of the State Senate approved a resolution “deploring” the anti-Semitic remarks of Sen. John Schmitz, an ultra-conservative Republican, and “disassociating” the upper chamber from them.
... That action was taken after Schmitz, a former member of the John Birch Society, issued a press statement on the letterhead of the Amendments Committee in which he assailed supporters of abortion rights as “bulldykes,” “queers,” and “a sea of hard, Jewish and (arguably) female faces.”
Schmitz said that some of the women at the abortion hearing had identified themselves as Jewish. “They can come and identify themselves as Jewish women and when I do, suddenly that’s anti-Semitic,” he said. “Anti-Semitic is where they, the Anti-Defamation League (of B’nai B’rith) and those in league with them, what they define it as and they defined it as using the word Jewish in a non-adulatory manner.”
Schmitz added, “What you’ve got is political terrorism going on. You’ve got the Anti-Defamation League terrorizing the rest of the Jewish community and you’ve got the Jewish community terrorizing everybody else.”
Some apples fall far from the tree. I suspect this one didn't.
Crossposted at No More Mr. Nice Blog
