A senior White House official has been dismissed after he was discovered to be the man behind hundreds of mysterious tweets attacking the Obama administration, including some of President’s top aides.
The official, Jofi Joseph, a director dealing with non-proliferation at the National Security Council, had been surreptitiously tweeting under the moniker @natsecwonk right from February 2011, said The Daily Beast, which first reported the curious development.
The authorities finally caught up with Joseph last week and sacked him after determining that he was “the mystery Tweeter who has been tormenting the foreign policy community with insulting comments and revealing internal Obama administration information for over two years”.
There was no immediate statement from the White House, while the Twitter account in question has been shut down. Joseph (40), an alumnus of Princeton and Georgetown universities has previously worked in the State Department and at US Congress, was in line for a senior position at the Pentagon. Until recently, he was part of the administration's team working on negotiations with Iran.
His “insulting comments” did not spare some of the big names of team Obama, including his close friend , Valerie Jarrett, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes and Secretary of State John Kerry. He commented: “I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me.”
“Joseph’s snark was not confined to his Obama administration colleagues. He also took aim at senior Republican figures and lowly GOP Hill staffers,” The Daily Beast said, referring to his tweets against “Sarah Palin and the rest of her white trash family”, conservative journalists and staff of former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Joseph is now apologising for his actions. In an e-mails statement to Politico, he said: “It has been a privilege to serve in this administration and I deeply regret violating the trust and confidence placed in me.”