White House Official Tracked Down and Fired Over Insulting Tweets 208
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.'"
Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
It does not have to be against the law to criticize your employer for your employer to fire you over it. Your employer can fire you for just about any reason they like. Government as employer? Might take longer, but amass enough paper against you and eventually you go away. However, if your employer is the government you could easily be subject to jail and fines if you say the wrong things in the course of your criticism (not saying that applies in this case).
I can't believe ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who needs grounds? Employment at will - you can fire anyone as long as you are not firing him for belonging to a protected category, like being over a certain age. And of course, you CAN fire someone for anything, just do not tell anyone why.
As for precedent, beer companies have fired their drivers for always drinking a competitor's brand, and that's a lot less damning in my book. And yeah, it was perfectly legal.
Re:Flash forward a few years (Score:2, Insightful)
Read his posts. He's another left-wing obama bot who's been partially disillusioned, but still believes the same lies. He'll be on MSNBC in two years.
Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter? (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is that a normal employer would have no reasonable way of discovering the employee's identity. But with the NSA, Obama can find anyone in his staff who complains, and deal with them harshly, privacy be damned.
Re:Inside the Bubble (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and thanks to ubiquitous NSA spying, they were able to catch this dastardly man and put a stop to his treacherous activities. Aren't you glad Obama has the NSA to find out anyone who criticizes him?
Re:Speaking of dodging questions. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
He got fired, not imprisoned (Score:5, Insightful)
Dunno about you, but if I were to make comments like that where I work, I expect the boss to say something like 'I see you're really unhappy here, so why don't you take this box and clean out your desk'. Why is this a big deal? It's not like he got jail time out of it.
Everyone loses when we vote Repiblicrat (Score:5, Insightful)
While firing the unprofessional jerk after he was outed is perfectly defensible (I have no problem with it at all), the government did get caught working against America's interests again:
Why THE FUCK was the government spending time investigating this? And why the fuck is this not a big secret?
The BushBama whitehouse is seriously confused about what the country needs from its government, and over the last 12 years they have just gotten repeatedly more brazen and open about it. Is it simply that really, nobody cares?
I pay taxes in order for you to funnel them to obscurely-overbilling contractors for substandard work, so that they can then divert a portion of their obscene profits to the re-election campaigns of the people in congress and administration, who make the funneling happen. That is why we have government: to give crooks a non-violent outlet for their greed and need to victimize society. A few billion dollars here, a few billion dollars there .. we have a strong economy and can sustain that.
But I don't pay taxes for you people to spend it tracking tweets. That's not what government is for! All these crooks need to get out of the surveillance game and back into mainstream profitable corruption. And we voters should insist upon it. Please, everyone: stop voting Republicrat.
Obama Administration Shill Alert (Score:5, Insightful)
Any time Benghazi comes up, it's imperative for shills to employee "but-but-but-Bush!"
Re:Inside the Bubble (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter? (Score:5, Insightful)
The story here isn't that he was fired. It's that the Whitehouse investigated him. He didn't accidentally leak his identity to some private sector reporter who put it in their article, and then the president saw it in a newspaper. They spent time and money on trying to figure out the identity of a totally irrelevant and unimportant Twitter user over a bunch of totally irrelevant and unimportant tweets. Like, this was important to them.
At least Pepsi would be able to somewhat justify such an expenditure, since their marketing really is so important, and all Pepsi stockholders would agree that marketing is a good use of funds. But what say America's "stockholders," about our new "marketing counter-intelligence" program?
They guy wasn't even saying stuff analogous to "USA sucks for tourists. Foreign tourists should take vacations somewhere else and spend their money there instead of in USA." or "You should buy used F-16s from Israel instead of from USA." He was just talking shit about shit. There's no legitimate reason for the government to have been working on this.
Re:I can't believe ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not able to attribute the quote but it goes something like this- "you see a person's true face when they are wearing a mask..."
Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you get caught because you screwed up somehow, that's perfectly understandable. But if you get caught because the country is spying on all its citizens with a program that would make the Stasi proud, then there's much bigger problems, for everyone.
Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you sure about that? What grounds would you fire such a person under? Is it against the law to criticize your employer?
It is not against the law for an employer to fire an employee for criticizing him/her/it. Freedom of speech is not required to be defended within the premises of a private entity, nor does it give you ABSOLUTE IMMUNITY from the consequences of your actions. If you cannot make that distinction, you are an ignorant fool.
Consider this, if you work for an employer, and you tweet "my employer sucks", do you honestly believe you are immune from getting fired (even if indeed your employer sucks)?
The only things you cannot get fired for are already stipulated in federal and state laws. The typical protections against labor discrimination regarding gender, age, race, religion, political affiliation, retaliation over obeying the law, sexual harassment, and other protected statuses that emanate from them.
The list sorely misses some important ones (say, sexual orientation), but that is not to say that bad mouthing or publicly criticizing your employee (or doing anything that gives a "bad" image, something that will most likely be in the employment agreement that you willing signed) should be protected against getting fired for it. That is just silly.
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
We fire a guy for insulting tweets, but....
- We don't fire people for the Fast & Furious illegal gun running op.
- We don't fire people for the IRS scandal.
- We don't fire for the lies to the public regarding Benghazi
- We don't fire for the absolute disaster that is the Obamacare implementation
It's nice to see that our priorities are in order. It's also obvious that this administration is extremely thin skinned and cannot take any amount of criticism. They view their political enemies as a first priority and everything else be dammed.
Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter? (Score:3, Insightful)
So what did it cost to find him? (Score:4, Insightful)
"After a probe that included an investigation into Joseph’s travel and shopping patterns – parsed from over 2,000 tweets - lawyers from the White House counsel’s office confronted Joseph and ordered him to leave the executive complex, according to two sources familiar with the situation."
There's your tax dollars at work. Money well spent, I'd say. /sarcasm.