William C. Bradford, a Trump administration appointee who heads the Energy Department’s Office of Indian Energy, resigned Thursday after claiming this week inflammatory comments that appeared to have been made by him online were the result of hacking.
“William Bradford tendered his resignation this afternoon and is no longer with the Department of Energy,” said DOE spokesperson Shaylyn Hynes.
Bradford told CNN’s KFile in a statement on Friday, “I resigned because I reached the conclusion over the previous four months that the best way to serve the President, the USA, and Indian Country would be from a position beyond the constraints I experienced. I look forward to helping make America great again in another role.”
CNN’s KFile reported this week on evidence that suggested that Bradford made inflammatory comments through an account on the online commenting service Disqus. In response to the story, Bradford told CNN’s KFile that he couldn’t comment “on an ongoing federal investigation into multiple cyber attacks and Internet crimes committed against me over the past several years, to include email intrusions, hacking, and impostors in social media.”
The account that appeared to be Bradford questioned Obama’s birth certificate and called the former president’s mother “a fourth-rate p&*n actress and w@!re.”
On Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden sent letters to the FBI and the DOE requesting more information about Bradford’s claim that he was hacked.
In June, following his appointment to the Department of Energy, The Washington Post reported provocative comments Bradford made on Twitter — including calling Obama a Kenyan and saying that the World War II-era internment of Japanese-Americans was necessary. Bradford apologized for the comments at the time in a statement to the Post, calling them “inexcusable.”
In 2015, Bradford resigned as a professor at West Point after penning an academic paper that argued the US military should target Islamic holy sites as part of the war on terror.