NEW TRUMP ADVISER: HOMOPHOBE, PARANOID, ELECTORAL FELON?

Hi, I'm back. Thanks again, Yastreblyansky, Tom, and Crank -- great work while I was away.

I see that yesterday President-elect Trump appointed another member of his foreign policy team:

Donald Trump has selected K.T. McFarland to be his deputy national security adviser, the president-elect's transition team announced.

McFarland, a Fox News analyst, served as an official in the Reagan White House. She also unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in New York in 2006.

McFarland has a few small skeletons in her closet. First, there's this, which might be a felony:

Just-announced Republican Senate hopeful Kathleen McFarland ... a Reagan administration official in the early 1980s, has maintained two voting addresses since 1996: at her posh Park Avenue home and at her family's stunning second home on a small island near Southampton, according to the records.

She pingponged her vote from Manhattan to Southampton in various years, casting her ballot from the Ram Island address in 1998 and 1999, but voting from Park Avenue in 2000 and 2001.

She skipped the 2002 and 2003 elections, and then it was back to voting in Southampton in 2004, according to the records.

State law makes it a felony to be registered at two addresses during the same election cycle, according to state Board of Elections spokesman Lee Daghlian.

"When you change the place you've been voting, a new registration has to be filed, showing that you've changed your address," Daghlian said....

That was revealed in 2006, when Hillary Clinton was running for reelection to the Senate and McFarland was just starting her unsuccessful campaign for the seat. That year we were also told that she's a touch paranoid (or she might have just been joking):

A Republican challenger to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is bizarrely claiming that the former first lady has been spying in her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons, witnesses told The Post yesterday.

Former Reagan-era Pentagon official Kathleen “KT” McFarland stunned a crowd of Suffolk County Republicans on Thursday by saying:

“Hillary Clinton is really worried about me, and is so worried, in fact, that she had helicopters flying over my house in Southampton today taking pictures,” according to a prominent GOP activist who was at the event.

“She wasn’t joking, she was very, very serious, and she also claimed that Clinton’s people were taking pictures across the street from her house in Manhattan, taking pictures from an apartment across the street from her bedroom,” added the eyewitness, who is not involved in the Senate race.

Suffolk County Republican Chairman Harry Withers, who hosted the reception in East Islip, confirmed McFarland’s paranoid statements.

“Yes, she said that,” Withers told The Post.

McFarland spokesman William O’Reilly responded that the GOP hopeful was just kidding around with her far-fetched claims.

“It was a joke, and people laughed,” O’Reilly insisted.

McFarland had a gay brother, and she was not good to him:

The eldest of four, KT had a brother here in New York City who had followed her to George Washington University and then worked as an analyst. “Ummmm. He was sick and then he died,” is all she would say when pressed. Michael Troia had AIDS; his obituary listed three “companions.”

KT ... couldn’t abide his sexual orientation. Shortly after she discovered Mike had AIDS, she wrote her parents lengthy, angry, almost Gothic letters in which she outed her brother, blamed her father for his troubles as well as those of her and her other siblings, and cut off contact with her parents. “Have you ever wondered why I have never had anything to do with Mike and have never let my daughters see him although we live only fifteen minutes away from each other?” she wrote. “He has been a lifelong homosexual, most of his relationships brief, fleeting one-night stands.”

In the same letter, she accused her father of physical abuse, which she said she'd become aware of as the result of recovered memories. She blamed the abuse for her brother's homosexuality. (Her father and mother have denied that the abuse had taken place, as has a surviving brother, who said, “If I had one word to describe my sister, it would be ‘evil.’”)

Oh, and she did a bit of résumé padding prior to that Senate run:

When Kathleen Troia McFarland stepped forward as a Republican challenger to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, she was a relatively obscure figure with two intriguing claims to fame: She had worked on President Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" speech and had been the highest-ranking woman at the Reagan Pentagon.

But interviews with former Reagan administration officials and a review of documents show her claims were not entirely accurate. Though she helped write the "Star Wars" speech, its most famous passage -- the one that announced the anti-ballistic missile program -- was actually written by the president himself and his top national security advisers, according to two senior advisers to Mr. Reagan and a review of the literature and news articles of the period.

And while Ms. McFarland, who is known as K. T., was a close confidante of Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, serving as his speechwriter and spokeswoman for several years, there were two women with higher ranks in the Pentagon during virtually her entire time there, according to information provided by the Pentagon and the McFarland campaign.

But she has actual relevant experience, which is more than you can say for many Trump appointees, though I'm sure Trump hired her in large part because she's been a Fox News analyst. She's been on "the shows"! That's what Trump thinks is the best source of policy expertise, or at least the expertise that can be digested without, y'know, reading.