Report: WH official sacked for tweets

A White House national security official was fired after being outed as the author of an anonymous Twitter account critical of fellow administration officials, the Daily Beast reported Tuesday.

Jofi Joseph, a director in the nonproliferation section of the National Security Staff at the White House, was reportedly posting to the @natsecwonk Twitter account secretly.

{mosads}Posts to that account routinely criticized decisions made by the Obama administration and featured personal attacks on top officials. The account was recently deleted.

In posts archived by the Daily Beast, the @natsecwonk account referred to top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett as a “vacuous cipher” and suggested Huma Abedin, a top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was “wearing beer goggles” when she met her husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.).

The same post suggested the Weiner pairing was “almost as bad” as the marriage between U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power and former Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein.

A White House official on Tuesday night confirmed to The Hill that Joseph no longer worked at the White House but declined to elaborate further.

Joseph’s alleged snark also extended to Republicans. In one post, he ridiculed former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s “white trash family.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney refused on Wednesday to provide any details about Joseph’s departure, simply acknowledging that he was an employee of the State Department who was no longer employed in the administration.

More generally, Carney said that White House employees were not permitted to launch a social media account without specific approval.

“You can’t go on Twitter and sign up for an account unless its authorized through White House equipment,” Carney said.

According to a biography on the website of Princeton University, where
he obtained a graduate degree, Joseph had served in the Obama
administration since 2009. Before that, he served as Sen. Bob Casey
Jr.’s (D-Pa.) principal adviser on foreign policy, national security and
homeland defense issues, and as a staffer for the Senate Foreign
Relations committee when it was chaired then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.).

Joseph also worked for the Department of State and the Congressional Budget Office.

— This story was updated at 1:42 p.m.