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Trump’s Commerce Department Just Hired a Lawyer With Ties to White Nationalists

Author Name, ProPublica

2020-05-01 19:13:24

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The Trump administration has just added a lawyer to its staff who has no problem maintaining close ties with racist, far-right extremists.

Within the past week, the Department of Commerce tapped Adam Candeub for an influential role in the National Telecommunications and Information Administration subagency as its deputy assistant secretary, according to an internal email obtained by Mother Jones. The full email is at the bottom of the page.

Politico‘s Cristiano Lima first reported the agency’s hiring of Candeub.

While the email touts Candeub’s credentials as a Michigan State University law professor and his work in the Federal Communications Commission, it leaves off his legal work representing white nationalist Jared Taylor, who founded the New Century Foundation. The organization “purports to show the inferiority of blacks to whites,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Candeub represented Taylor in his lawsuit against Twitter, which banned him from the site in its 2017 crackdown on white nationalists and hate groups. A California state appeals ruled in favor of Twitter in August 2018.

Candeub’s work for Taylor isn’t the only time he’s linked up with white nationalists. The lawyer has published at least four op-eds—in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and US News and World Report—with Marcus Epstein, an antitrust lawyer with a history of working for white nationalists and publishing racist stories on the white nationalist site VDare. BuzzFeed reporters Ryan Mac and Joe Bernstein found that Epstein’s work for VDare includes a story about some comments by Howard Dean entitled “Dean Is Right – GOP Is ‘The White Party.’ So?” and a short little racist riff called “White Refugees And Culture.” The op-eds co-written by Candeub and Epstein weren’t anywhere near as juicy—they were about telecom policy and Twitter’s content moderation practices.

Here are some other Epstein white nationalist highlights from the BuzzFeed piece:

Epstein, who worked for the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, was a key figure in nativist and white nationalist political circles from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s. In 2006, he founded the now-defunct Robert A. Taft Club alongside [Richard] Spencer and Kevin DeAnna, another leading white nationalist. Invited speakers to that club included influential white supremacist Jared Taylor and the journalist John Derbyshire, who would eventually be fired from the National Review in 2012 for a racist column. Epstein also helped run Youth for Western Civilization, a far-right student group, founded by DeAnna and Taylor, whose members included white separatist and neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach.

Candeub declined to tell BuzzFeed if he was aware of Epstein’s racist past.

Mother Jones reached out to the Department of Commerce and the NTIA for comment but has not yet heard back from either.

Here’s the NTIA welcome email:
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