Democratic Blue Wave Depends on Vetted Candidates to Unseat Republicans: CA-4 Candidate Jessica Morse’s Record Raises Questions
Honesty in public life has never been as important as it is now, with our Commander-in-Chief routinely lying to the American people. We should be able to trust the people we elect to public office to tell us the truth. Just as we seek to hold Donald Trump accountable for his false and misleading claims, we Democrats must also scrutinize our own candidates and hold them to the highest standards of honesty and integrity.
Unfortunately Jessica Morse, one of the three Democratic candidates here in CA-04, falls short of this standard. She has consistently mislead us by embellishing her record and taking credit for things that she did not do. And she refuses to answer basic questions about her background and her policy positions.
If Democrats are to beat Tom McClintock in November, we must choose a candidate whose exaggerated record and falsehoods are not fodder for the Republican spin machine. Morse fails that test.
As a letter to the Roseville Press-Tribune pointed out last week, Morse claims to be a “national security strategist” when she has never held that title or any senior national security positions. She hasn’t even had a steady job for nearly three years.
There’s no evidence that Jessica Morse ever made strategic decisions about our national security. Her work at the State Department and later at USAID was focused on budgets, rather than on defense or security policy. The time she spent at US Pacific Command was one of three rotations during an entry-level fellowship. I don’t doubt that the budgetary work that Jessica did was important, but I’m dismayed by how she is inflating her record.
Having managed large budgets in the corporate world, I was initially impressed to read that Morse had managed the US government’s $18 billion Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund (IRRF). More recently, the numbers have changed, and Morse has taken to saying that she managed $25 billion when she was just 25 years old.
I began doubting her claims when I learned that she was a temporary government contractor at the time she supposedly “managed” all of this money. Upon further review, I discovered that Ambassador Joseph Saloom was actually the person who managed the IRRF back in 2007, when Morse claims to have been in charge. The IRRF was not even fully under the control of the State Department, making it impossible for Morse to have managed the entire $18 or $25 billion program.
Scouring the reports of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) and the websites of the State Department and USAID, one can find the names of hundreds of officials who had important roles managing the Iraq reconstruction budget. But Morse is nowhere to be found. How, then, can she plausibly claim to have been responsible for $18 to 25 billion?
Then looking into Morse’s claim that she “re-opened” the India-U.S. defense relationship, I found more things that didn’t add up. Morse claims that she “rewrote the entire U.S.-India defense strategy” between 2010 and 2012, while she was the “Advisor” to the four-star Admiral who leads U.S. Pacific Command. Reopening a “frozen” defense relationship between the world’s two biggest democracies would be a monumental achievement. Like Nixon going to China, it’s the sort of thing that only the President or a Cabinet member can do.
That may explain why there’s nothing in the public record to confirm any part of Morse’s story. Jessica Morse isn’t mentioned in a single news article or government document about U.S.-India defense relations, then or now. And everything I’ve read shows that the U.S.-India relationship was alive and well before, during, and after Morse’s time at Pacific Command.
Nor was Morse even the Advisor to the Commander. That specific job title does not exist. The Commander has a Foreign Policy Advisor on their staff, but Morse never served in that role. In 2010–2012, that position was held by Ambassador Marc Wall, a senior Foreign Service Officer and an experienced diplomat.
The list goes on and on. Morse claims that she managed “roughly half” the U.S. foreign aid budget at a time that her title was “budget analyst” — one of seven in an office several levels below the USAID Administrator. She claims that she served on the Congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting even though her name is not among the dozens of other staffers acknowledged in its final report. She claims that she’s running in her home district even though she’s never voted here or even lived here before moving to the district in summer 2017. And she claims to be a Democrat even though she’s been a registered Republican for most of her life.
Jessica Morse’s alternative facts are hugely problematic. The people of the 4th congressional district deserve an alternative to Tom McClintock who can stand up to the intense fire and criticism that they will face from the Koch brothers and the far right. The Democratic Party cannot afford to have a nominee with such serious liabilities. For the good of the party and of our district, Jessica Morse should step aside and let another Democrat represent us in 2018.
