The Trump Administration Is Learning to Ignore Their Employees’ Scandals  – Mother Jones

Last week, I reported on the long history of bigoted and xenophobic remarks by Kingsley Wilson, a 26-year-old MAGA enthusiast who’s now a deputy press secretary at the Department of Defense. Following that article and and other outlets’ reporting on Wilson, members of Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Committee, among others, have expressed concern about Wilson’s extreme rhetoric and her fitness for the job.

The response from the White House and the Pentagon has been notable: near-complete silence. With Wilson, as with other recent controversies involving Trump administration officials, the White House and federal agencies are making a clear and somewhat novel choice to ignore them entirely.

Wilson spent years espousing extreme ideas on Twitter and on various podcasts, including promoting the debunked lie that Jewish lynching victim Leo Frank was guilty of the crime for which he was wrongfully accused, an idea that is rarely repeated outside of dedicated antisemitic and white supremacist circles. She also aligned herself with extreme anti-immigrant and nationalist sentiment, repeating a phrase associated with the German far-right, and, on Twitter, advocating to make “Kosovo Serbia again,” a particularly bizarre sentiment for someone who now works for the U.S. government, which supports an independent Kosovo and maintains military forces there. 

Both the ADL and the AJC expressed outrage at her Leo Frank comments, with the AJC calling her “clearly unfit for her role” and the ADL describing itself as “deeply disturbed” and calling for her to retract them. Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth calling for Wilson to be removed from her role. Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Deb Fischer of Iowa also condemned her remarks to Politico, which featured other senior Republican staffers wondering anonymously if she had been vetted. 

The Pentagon didn’t respond to five requests for comment from Mother Jones made over the course of the last week about Wilson’s comments and whether she passed a background screening or underwent other vetting before being hired. Other outlets making similar inquiries reported that a spokesperson referred their inquiries to Wilson herself, who didn’t respond. Both the ADL and Congressman Torres’ office confirmed to Mother Jones that they too haven’t received any response from the Pentagon, except an automated response to an email from Torres’ office, confirming receipt. (When reached for comment, the AJC said it did “not have anything new to share beyond our statement on X.”)

Wilson briefly stopped tweeting from her personal account after her controversial statements started to gain attention last week, she continued sharing only retweets of her professional account. By Tuesday had returned to celebrate President Trump buying a Tesla.

It’s not just Wilson who is holding down an administration job under the cover of silence. The White House was also notably mum on several other scandals involving fresh hires, including Edward Corisitine, the 19-year-old DOGE employee who’s also gone by “Big Balls” online. According to Wired, the company he founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, has several Russian-registered domains, which would have raised red flags in a security review. So might his possible participation in an online hacking forum, where, the outlet reported, someone using a screenname that’s been associated with Corisitine suggested they were seeking help carrying out a distributed denial-of-service attack. The administration also had no response to the fact that, according to CNN and other outlets, Coristine was “terminated” for leaking information to a competitor during an internship at an Arizona cybersecurity company. 

Nor has there been any real response to reporting on Office of Personnel Management spokesperson McLaurine Pinover, who used her working hours to try to launch herself as a fashion influencer, posting outfit videos from her government office as she was tasked with defending the deep cuts that OPM and DOGE have inflicted on the federal workforce.

CNN reported that OPM didn’t respond to a request for comment. OPM did, in a sense, respond to Mother Jones, sending an unsigned email with information that the sender declared to be “off the record.” (For a conversation to be off the record, a reporter and a source must both agree; it cannot be unilaterally invoked.) The email said that Pinover had deleted her Instagram account to avoid being “being flooded with whatever attention might come from that,” and added that she was receiving threats.

There are also two cases that didn’t result in real consequences, but at least kicked off some public comment. When the Wall Street Journal found that DOGE staffer Marko Elez had a history of racist tweets, he did resign—but was brought back after Musk, Trump and Vice President JD Vance all defended the tweets as boyish errors. And when CNN reported that acting State Department official Darren Beattie had repeated false statements about his boss Marco Rubio’s sexuality and called him “low IQ,” Beattie issued a statement to the outlet praising Rubio as “100 percent America First” and professing to be honored to work with him. Ironically, Beattie serves as an acting undersecretary for public diplomacy. 

Beattie’s own career shows that even the previous Trump administration didn’t approach personnel issues this way; he was fired as a White House speechwriter in 2018 after a CNN report catalogued his racist, homophobic and otherwise offensive tweets and revealed that he’d spoken at the H.L. Mencken Club conference, an event regularly attended by white nationalists. In February, Rubio refused to comment to reporters at a press gaggle about Beattie’s past comments and associations, but defended him as someone who was “strongly committed to ending the censorship programs that were being operated out of the State Department” that Rubio said had targeted “American voices.” 

Other Trump administration officials departed the first time around following a variety of scandals, large and small. Two White House staffers, Rob Porter and David Sorenson, resigned after news outlets revealed that both men had previously been accused of domestic violence. Tom Price, who served as HHS secretary, resigned after reporting showed he took charter jets instead of flying commercial; his resignation came hours after Trump said publicly that he didn’t like the “optics” of his pricey travel. And VA secretary David Shulkin left after an ethics scandal involving tickets to Wimbledon and European travel. 

This time, though, most scandals are seemingly passing with little public comment from the White House, Trump himself, or the agencies involved. Coupled with the White House’s promotion of a new state media, a group of ultra-conservative outlets and influencers who are granted unusual degrees of access if they cheer the administration’s every move, a clearer picture is emerging.

The administration, it seems, feels empowered to ignore news they don’t like, lavishly reward pseudo-coverage that paints them in a flattering light, and avoid public accountability for issues that would be messy or embarrassing to deal with.  It’s another irony for an administration that has dubbed itself “the most transparent administration in history,” and it’s unlikely to be the last.