Report: Schumer "Embedded" Everytown Staffer In Senate Judiciary Committee

[Charlie T Waite]

A new story from the New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer is getting a lot of attention today for bringing to light the suspected decline in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s mental faculties, with lots of unnamed “senior Congressional sources” and former aides to the California senator detailing problems with Feinstein’s short-term memory and her increasing inability to fulfill her job duties.

Mayer provides quite a few examples of Feinstein’s decline in her lengthy report, but gun owners and Second Amendment supporters will find this passage particularly interesting.

According to several sources, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Minority Leader, was so worried that Feinstein would mismanage Barrett’s confirmation hearings that he installed a trusted former aide, Max Young, to “embed” in the Judiciary Committee to make sure the hearings didn’t go off the rails. He had done the same during Kavanaugh’s confirmation as well. Schumer brought Young in from the gun-control group Everytown to handle strategy and communications and serve as Schumer’s “eyes and ears” on Feinstein, as one Senate source put it. Schumer’s office declined to comment.

Just imagine for a second the amount of outrage that would come from the Left if the New Yorker reported that Mitch McConnell had brought in the chief of public affairs for the NRA to “embed” in the Senate Judiciary Committee in order to handle strategy and communications as well as keep eyes and ears on Sen. Chuck Grassley during the confirmation hearings for Kavanaugh or Barrett.

“The gun lobby is running Congress!” they’d scream. It would be a huge news story, and one that the media wouldn’t drop until they’d exhausted their outrage over the behind-the-scenes machinations of the NRA and the GOP leadership.

Mayer, on the other hand, reports Schumer’s embedding of a gun control activist in the Senate Judiciary Committee as just another interesting factoid related to Dianne Feinstein’s mental faculties, and you know as well as I do that the media is going completely ignore this particular anecdote in Mayer’s lengthy story.

Max Young isn’t just some Everytown intern. He’s the Chief Public Affairs Officer for both Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action as well as a former staffer for Schumer. This is as swampy as it gets, in other words. It’s a legitimate news story in and of itself, but the media hasn’t and won’t cover it that way.

In fact, the only press outlet to report on Schumer bringing in Young at the time was Politico, and they failed to mention Max Young’s day job in their brief report.

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee is starting to staff up for the confirmation hearing, with both sides of the aisle adding more than 20 staffers. Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have added eight additional counsels. Ashley Schapitl, a former Judiciary staffer, and Max Young, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will help with communications for Judiciary Democrats.

A “former staffer” to Schumer, not “the head of public affairs for Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action.” Did Politico reporter Melanie Zanona and her editors not realize that Young is a higher up at the biggest gun control group in the country, did they find that fact unimportant, or did they think it would be inconvenient to Democrats if it was revealed that Chuck Schumer was bringing in a gun control activist on a temporary basis in an attempt to derail Barrett’s nomination?

It’s not like Max Young’s day job was a big secret, so I’m sure the folks at Politico were well aware of Young’s role at Everytown. My guess is that they simply ignored Young’s full-time employer because it would have been a distraction at a time when Democrats wanted all eyes on Barrett and her views.

This is a good, if painful, reminder of how gun owners can expect gun control issues to be covered over the next four years. The supposedly objective media aren’t our friends, and the bias they bring to their job can reveal itself in a variety of ways; including failing to provide their audience with important information.

The only reason that this isn’t a huge story is the fact that the parties involved are Democrats and gun control activists. Flip the script and replace Schumer and Everytown with McConnell and the NRA and the howls of outrage would still be echoing through the halls of the Capitol.