23.10 White House Natl. Security Official Fired for Twitter Leaks, Insults
WASHINGTON, October 23 (RIA Novosti) A White House national security official who was reportedly poised to be named to a plum job at the Pentagon has been fired for allegedly insulting top US officials under an anonymous Twitter handle and leaking internal information about the Obama administration, reports published Wednesday said.
Jofi Joseph, an official in the National Security Staff at the White House, was fired last week after being caught as the tweeter behind @natsecwonk, a feed thats been leaking internal information since 2011, wrote Daily Beast reporter Josh Rogin, who broke the story.
Rogin said that, as @natsecwonk, Joseph anonymously directed Twitter barbs at senior administration officials including National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and Secretary of State John Kerry, as well as senior Republican figures and lowly GOP Hill staffers.
Foreign Policy (FP) magazine and Washington politics newspaper, Politico, wrote that Joseph is also suspected of being behind a more salacious Twitter handle, @DCHobbyist, which FP said spouts spicy talk about sex and prostitutes peppered among tweets on the Washington Nationals (baseball team) and bike commuting.
Based on the two Twitter handles, Joseph's case was referred to the Department of Justice to determine if any of the information leaked by NatSecWonk or if the
