Sara Jacobs is a 29-year-old Democrat candidate for Congress in California, who, if elected, would be the youngest female member of Congress in the nation. The record is currently held by New York Republican Elise Stefanik, who was 30 years old when she was elected in 2014.
Jacobs would also set the record for the youngest person elected to Congress, and she’d be the first 29-year-old elected to Congress since Henry Clay in 1806. Jacobs is running in California’s 49th Congressional District for the seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA).
Issa is retiring, so Jacobs will have an advantage in that the Republican she’s running against isn’t an incumbent (since incumbents nearly always have an advantage), and she’s running against a Republican in one of the nation’s most liberal States. The only count against her comes from the fact that she over-inflated her resume, wrongly presenting herself as a former Obama Administration policymaker.
“I worked at the State Department under President Obama,” Jacobs said in a January 14 interview with MSNBC. Her campaign website lists her as an “experienced policy-maker, Sara has served in key policy positions at the U.S. State Department under the Obama Administration, UNICEF, and the United Nations. She was also proud to use her expertise to serve as a foreign policy advisor to Secretary Hillary Clinton during her 2016 campaign for president.”
As the NTK Network discovered, however, Jacobs was “a junior employee working for a government contractor and federal regulations prohibited her from making policies,” according to the Union-Tribune.
Jacobs actually worked for 19 months at IEA Corporation, a firm that counts the State Department as one of its clients. She worked in State Department office space alongside government employees, and was involved in projects that focused on security in sub-Saharan Africa.
To make matters worse, Jacobs’ campaign connected the Union-Tribune with her former boss, who makes an appearance in a Jacobs’ TV ad, and her boss, Cindy Huang, blew the whistle on her outlandish claims.
“My understanding of the regulations is that contractors can conduct research and provide advice and recommendations, and ideas, but they cannot be decision makers in the policy process,” Huang told the Union-Tribune.
Jacobs’ campaign has only doubled down, however, calling her misrepresented credentials “the most accurate and transparent” way she could’ve described them. That sounds a lot like “alternative facts” to me.
Do you think Californians will elect her despite this? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
