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White House Official Tracked Down and Fired Over Insulting Tweets
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "BBC reports that Jofi Joseph, a senior National Security Council staffer who was a key member of the White House team negotiating on Iran's nuclear weapons program, has been fired ... after a months-long probe into a barrage of tweets that included caustic criticisms of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and top NSC officials, especially Ben Rhodes – whom he accused of dodging questions about Benghazi. Joseph, who posted under the now defunct Twitter name @NatSecWonk, gave a lacerating commentary on anything from policy to personal appearance. 'Was Huma Abedin wearing beer goggles the night she met Anthony Weiner,' he tweeted, referring to the scandal-hit former New York mayoral candidate and his wife, a former aide of Hillary Clinton. He tweeted that Mrs Clinton 'had few policy goals and no wins' in the Middle East. He said Chelsea Clinton was 'assuming all of her parents' vices,' and targeted figures such as Republican commentator Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney's wife Ann for their looks and weight. Many in the foreign policy community reacted with shock to the revelation that Joseph was the mystery tweeter because Joseph was well known among policy wonks and his wife, Carolyn Leddy, is a well-respected professional staffer on the Republican side of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 'What started out as an intended parody account of DC culture developed over time into a series of inappropriate and mean-spirited comments,' said Joseph in an apology. 'I bear complete responsibility for this affair and I sincerely apologize to everyone I insulted.'"
Wayback Machine evidently doesn't bother with Twitter, but the page can still (for now) be found on the Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://twitter.com/NatSecWonk
Are you sure about that? What grounds would you fire such a person under? Is it against the law to criticize your employer? You just can't fire people for no reason (well, you're not supposed to.) I mean if an employee is doing their job, performing well, and secretly bashing you on twitter, is that really a legal ground for termination?
The only real issue here is that Obama promised the most transparent administration in history. Instead we have leak after leak showing that it is the most opaque administration. Not to mention corrupt and surprisingly the one area the Administrator isn't incompetent in, is the prosecution of killing terrorist.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
If an employer fired an employee for something like this, I think the employee would have major grounds to sue, not for wrongful termination, but for spying and violation of privacy. Employers don't go to the kind of trouble the Obama Administration went to to discover this guy's identity. From the article: "After a probe that included an investigation into Joseph’s travel and shopping patterns – parsed from over 2,000 tweets..." So they spied on the guy's shopping habits? How'd they do that exactly? If an employer somehow got your bank or Visa/Mastercard to give them access to your shopping information, and also somehow tracked your travel patterns, there'd be hell to pay. But Obama does it and it's just fine apparently. It's highly disturbing that this guy was found out at all; obviously he wasn't intending to divulge his identity, so there had to be some kind of illegal or unethical breach of privacy protections in order to discover his identity.
Anonymity is just security through obscurity... it's nice when it works, but you really shouldn't count on it to do stupid shit.
Just using the tools put in place. Evil, but hardly as evil as using the surveillance state to squash political dissent which received much less mass media attention that this internal witch hunt. Key OWS supporters lost their jobs, were put on no fly and do not employ lists but since they did not have big Washington insider status, they get no press.
The only Congressional report on the events is this one which occurred in 2009, 8 years after the event.
Unlike Benghazi, there was no drumbeat, from any source, on how Bin Laden was allowed to escape, no daily update from Fox on how the most wanted criminal in modern times was allowed to escape, no daily demands for Congressional hearings on the matter. None.
There are no rose colored glasses on this event. There were no investigations, no cries of indignation or threats of impeachment. Instead, there was silence and when pressed, Bush refused to answer any questions. The same way he did when pressed to turn over documents on the 9/11 attack.
You do know Bush turned over 1, ONE, document for the entire 9/11 Commission report. Both he and Cheney refused to appear before any Congressional hearing or provide information to any Congressional member without a lawyer being present and with no documentation of what took place.
Imagine if this administration had done the same thing over Benghazi. The South most certainly would have risen, and the lynchings would have been fierce.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Are you sure about that? What grounds would you fire such a person under? Is it against the law to criticize your employer? You just can't fire people for no reason (well, you're not supposed to.) I mean if an employee is doing their job, performing well, and secretly bashing you on twitter, is that really a legal ground for termination?
Most private-sector jobs in the U.S. are "employment at will". That means employees can be fired for any reason or no reason, as long as it's not for a reason specifically prohibited by federal law (race, gender, etc.) I don't think this is good policy, but it is how things currently work in most places (pretty much all non-union shops). And one reason that it hasn't changed is that most Americans don't realize how bad it actually is: that as workers they essentially have no rights.
Federal civil service jobs are different. A rank-and-file Federal employee can pretty much say anything he/she wants about the government, as long as it's not on the clock. But the most high-ranking staff members at government agencies don't have civil service protections; they are political appointees and are expected to support the administration's goals and objectives. A random clerk processing Social Security claims can tweet all he/she wants about politics, but if the Secretary of State shoots his/her mouth off against the President's wishes, they will soon be "asked to resign".