Note: The newsletter will pause until Tuesday due to the Fourth of July holiday.
Lanhee Chen has a few confessions to make.
The Republican candidate for California state controller, who will face off against Democrat Malia Cohen in the November general election, told me in an exclusive interview on Thursday that he did not vote for Donald Trump for president in either 2016 or 2020 — and doesn’t plan to support Trump if he runs in 2024. “There are a lot of people who I believe would be better for the job than the former president,” he said.
Chen has taken pains to distance himself from Trump — in an April interview with CalMatters, he described the Jan. 6, 2021 siege on the U.S. Capitol as an “abomination” and “an attack on democracy” — but has never before publicly revealed whether he voted for the former president.
So why now, a few weeks after the June 7 primary when California voters made him the top vote-getter for controller?
“He’s still an issue in our politics,” Chen told me. “I’ve been watching these hearings that have been going on, on what happened on January 6th … and I think it’s disgusting. The more I look at it, the more disgusted I am with the kind of behavior we saw that day from people. … I believe that the former president bears some culpability for what happened on January 6th, and I think now we’re discovering the extent of…
