On Wednesday, the U.S. Army rescinded its job offer to a top cybersecurity expert who worked in the Biden administration, after far-right conspiracy theorist and close Donald Trump ally Laura Loomer complained about the appointment.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said in a social media post on Wednesday that he directed the Military Academy at West Point to pull back its offer to Jen Easterly, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), to serve as a distinguished chair of the academy’s social sciences department.
The statement came after Loomer, a hatemonger who frequently peddles misinformation, claimed in a social media post on Tuesday that the hiring of Easterly signaled a “vetting crisis” within the Defense Department. Since January, the Trump administration has fired more than a dozen government employees derided by Loomer, according to a tally from The Daily Beast, suggesting some of the administration’s personnel decisions have essentially been outsourced to one of the least qualified and most extreme figures in the MAGA ecosystem.
Loomer applauded Easterly’s job loss on Wednesday, writing in a post on X that “[a]ll Biden holdovers must be removed from the Trump admin.”
For several years, Trump and his allies have targeted CISA, which launched during Trump’s first term, baselessly claiming the organization's efforts to stop disinformation amount to anti-conservative censorship.
On that note, Loomer earlier this week lobbed bogus censorship allegations at Easterly, claiming she "brought in" Nina Jankowicz to head the Disinformation Governance Board under President Joe Biden. (Jankowicz resigned and the board was put on hold in 2022 after she was targeted with a deluge of far-right disinformation.)
Jankowicz noted the absurdity of Loomer’s attack in a social media post on Wednesday.
“In another episode of ‘we live in the stupidest timeline,’ Jen Easterly, a woman I have (1) never met and (2) did not work for, had her appointment at West Point terminated because Laura Loomer lied about both of us in a tweet,” Jankowicz wrote.
Easterly's termination comes as Trump and his administration have sought to politicize the armed forces and seemingly indoctrinate their trainees with a right-wing worldview. Earlier this year, Trump appointed a slew of MAGA loyalists — including extremist Michael Flynn — to West Point's Board of Visitors, which oversees morale and curriculum, among other things.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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