A senior Energy Department official tried to delete all of his hateful, racist and misogynist tweets, but the internet remains undefeated.
On Thursday, the Washington Post unearthed and exposed all of William C. Bradford’s—Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy’s Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs—disturbing tweets. And on a scale of Bill Maher to Steve Bannon, Bradford’s tweets hover around Fox News level.
The tweets, most of which were written last year, attack former President Barack Obama’s citizenship, Facebook head Mark Zuckerburg and women in the military.
According to the Post:
Bradford was recently appointed director of DOE’s office in charge of assisting Native American and Alaska Native tribes and villages with energy development. Before joining the department, he was attorney general of the Chiricahua Apache Nation. He has also been a faculty member at the U.S. Military Academy, the National Defense University, the Coast Guard Academy and the United Arab Emirates National Defense College. According to his online biography on the department’s website, he holds a doctorate, a law degree and a master’s in business administration.
Bradford called then-President Obama a “Kenyan cream puff” and continued a widely debunked theory that the greatest president to ever president was not an American-born citizen.
Bradford also pushed a wild claim, pushed by a fake-news website, that then-President Obama wouldn’t leave when his term in office came to an end.
In a February 2016 tweet claiming that Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg instructed Iowans not to vote for Trump, Bradford called Zuckerburg an “arrogant self-hating Jew.”
Braford also said that he believed it was “necessary” to imprison 120,000 people of Japanese descent in the U.S. during World War II.
And in case women were feeling left out of this dirtbag’s hateful rants, he targeted them, too. Bradford condemned female soldiers, saying that they “have no business” being soldiers, and for some reason, he found it necessary to add that he would “shoot anyone that comes for [his] daughters,” the Huffington Post reports.
Bradford admitted that the tweets were his and wrote an apology to the Washington Post.
“As a minority and member of the Jewish faith, I sincerely apologize for my disrespectful and offensive comments,” he wrote. “These comments are inexcusable and I do not stand by them. Now, as a public servant, I hold myself to a higher standard, and I will work every day to better the lives of all Americans.”
Here’s why his apology doesn’t mean anything. He wrote those tweets because he meant them, and is apologizing because he got caught. It’s kind of the politician way, but I must admit that the Trump administration is taking this style of politics to a whole new level.
Read more at the Washington Post and the Huffington Post.