Top Biden DHS official faces ethics complaint over potentially illegal Twitter post
- December 6, 2022
Gabe Kaminsky, Washington Examiner
A top official in President Joe Biden‘s Department of Homeland Security is being hit with an ethics complaint over a social media post that a watchdog group says warrants a federal investigation.
Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under the DHS, posted a Tweet on Nov. 27 that promoted a 2022 book called Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Wired reporter Andy Greenberg. Now, the DHS should investigate Easterly for possibly “violating” ethics rules since federal officials are barred from endorsing “any product, service, or enterprise” through their official “position or title,” alleged Protect the Public’s Trust in a Tuesday complaint to the agency that was obtained by the Washington Examiner.
PPT Director Michael Chamberlain told the Washington Examiner that “you don’t have to be a marketing genius” to see how Greenberg could reap the benefits of a book “endorsement” from a government agency or powerful government official like Easterly.
“With prior experience in government and as the director of an influential agency, which just happens to deal with misbehavior on the internet, Ms. Easterly should certainly have known that such a statement could be troublesome,” he said. “This is yet another example of why the American public’s trust in its government is at an all-time low.”