New report exposes a Trump administration staffer’s ‘crude and sexist’ tweets

Last month, longtime GOP strategist and media consultant Michael Caputo was appointed assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Caputo’s new position is inspiring additional media scrutiny of the 58-year-old Republican, and journalists Andrew Kaczynski and Nathan McDermott — in an article for CNN’s website — report that Caputo “repeatedly directed crude and sexist comments toward women in now-deleted tweets” in addition to making racist remarks.

On Twitter, according to Kaczynski and McDermott, Caputo described “several women” as “dogface” and “made crude insinuations and sexist comments aimed at former FBI attorney Lisa Page prior to joining HHS.” Caputo has been a strident defender and ally of President Donald Trump, and he has attacked Page as a “jezebel” and a “notorious homewrecker” and railed against her for exchanging anti-Trump texts with FBI agent Peter Strzok (with whom she had an affair) when they were investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

But now that he has a prominent position in the HHS, Caputo is deleting many of his older tweets. According to Kaczynski and McDermott, Caputo has  “erased nearly his entire Twitter history prior to April 12.”

“The prominent communications position puts Caputo in a central role in coordinating the federal government’s message on the coronavirus pandemic,” Kaczynski and McDermott explain. “CNN is publishing his deleted tweets to give a full picture of Caputo’s views.”

Caputo described Democratic consultant Alexandra Chalupa as a “nutty hag.” And according to Kaczynski and McDermott, Caputo also “made racist and derogatory comments about Chinese people, said Democrats wanted the coronavirus to kill millions of people and accused the media of intentionally creating panic around the pandemic to hurt Trump.”