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 that’s 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 ‘behavior’ of DCHobbyist amounted to criminal acts,” FP said, noting that “interacting with escorts can be a security risk… it can easily lead to blackmail and worse.”
Officials in Washington are trying to determine if any of Joseph’s Twitter posts were derived from classified information that might have been provided to him by his wife, Carolyn Leddy, a senior staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, FP also reported.
In a statement sent by email to Politico, Joseph admitted to being behind the acerbic tweets on @natsecwonk, saying he regretted “violating the trust and confidence placed in me" by the Obama administration.
“What started out as an intended parody account of DC culture developed over time into a series of inappropriate and mean-spirited comments. I bear complete responsibility for this affair and I sincerely apologize to everyone I insulted," Politico quoted Joseph as saying.
Joseph did not reply to a query from Politico about whether he was also the man behind @DCHobbyist.
A check on Twitter confirmed that both Twitter feeds have been taken down.
