Chris Crucial: How to destroy your political career, in 1 easy book

PLUS: Democratic Congressman indicted!

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1. Kristi Noem implodes

Ambitious politicians write books all the time. It’s a vehicle to get on TV to talk about yourself and all of your many accomplishments — not to mention your future plans.

Usually these books are utterly forgettable. You tell a few stories about how you overcame some hardship. You express your desire for people to have more money and more freedom. You detail your years of charitable giving to the Human Fund.

It’s a box-checking exercise. No more, no less.

Or, in the case of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, way, way less.

You are — if you are a regular reader of this newsletter — already familiar with Noem’s admission in her forthcoming book that she shot a 14-month old puppy because the dog had killed some chickens and was misbehaving. (She also said she “hated” the dog and it was a bad hunter.)

Which is bad! Horrible even!

But it turns out that’s not the only problem in Noem’s book.

Apparently she also writes that as a member of Congress from South Dakota, she had the chance to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. And that, as governor, she was set to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron but it wound up being canceled.

Neither of those things apparently happened. Here’s the Dakota Scout, an independent journalism site in the state, on the discrepancies:

Neither account has been verified by congressional travel documents or outside sources reviewed by The Dakota Scout. And The Scout confirmed with the French president’s office that Macron never had a meeting scheduled with Noem.

The alleged meeting with Kim Jong Un is especially eye-raising to North Korea analysts and congressional staffers.

“It’s bullshit,” remarked a longtime, high-level Capitol Hill staffer who worked on the House Armed Services Committee during the period in which Noem says she met Kim. That staffer was among a dozen staffers interviewed by The Scout who said they had no knowledge of the meeting, or who said Noem had never mentioned it before.

Noem appears to be admitting that she, er, misremembered. “We’ve been made aware that the publisher will be addressing conflated world leaders’ names in the book before it is released,” a spokesman for the governor told POLITICO.

But, like, that makes no sense? Because how do you “conflate” writing, in some detail, about meeting with the head of North Korea? Like, either you did or you didn’t, right? And it’s pretty hard for me to believe that that is the sort of thing someone would forget about or misremember?