President Trump appointee William C. Bradford has resigned as director of the Energy Department’s Office of Indian Energy after being accused of posting offensive comments on the internet about former President Obama’s late mother.
“William Bradford tendered his resignation this afternoon and is no longer with the Department of Energy,” DOE spokesperson Shaylyn Hynes said Thursday.
Mr. Bradford’s departure came hardly 48 hours after CNN linked him to an account on Disqus, an online commenting service, and all but attributed him with penning crude posts last year about the former president and his family.
“Obama was born in Kenya,” the user claimed in a Jan. 2016 post. “The ’birth certificate’ released online 5 years ago is an obvious fake, and every intellectually honest person knows that.”
“Well, it is a fact: Obama is the son of a fourth-rate p&*n actress and w@!re,” the user wrote later that year.
Mr. Bradford declined to discuss the account in question for CNN’s initial report and said he couldn’t “comment on an ongoing federal investigation into multiple cyberattacks and internet crimes committed against me over the past several years, to include email intrusions, hacking and impostors in social media.”
He resigned two days later.
In the interim, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon sent letters to the FBI and the DOE seeking addition information about Mr. Bradford’s hacking claims. Both agencies declined to comment when reached by CNN.
Mr. Bradford made waves earlier this year when The Washington Post attributed him with writing controversial tweets in 2016 involving Mr. Obama’s citizenship and the U.S. government’s internment of Japanese-Americans around World War II. He ultimately accepted responsibility for the comments and called them “inexcusable.”
He similarly caused an uproar in 2015 for writing in an academic paper that the U.S. military should target Islamic holy sites as part of its “total war” on radical Islam. He ultimately resigned from a professor’s job at West Point amid the subsequent backlash.
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