One President Donald Trump appointee is learning the hard way that nothing can be private or deleted online.
According to CNN's KFile, William C. Bradford, the Trump-appointed head of the Office of Indian Energy, has been linked to controversial remarks made using the Disqus commenting service. In response, Bradford told KFile that his Disqus account had been hacked for "several years."
"Well, it is a fact: Obama is the son of a fourth-rate p&*n actress and w@!re," reads one comment from Bradford's account, posted on a 2016 article he wrote for the conservative Daily Wire website.
Bradford has denied authorship of the comments and claims they were the result of hacking.
"I cannot 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," Bradford told the KFile.
The comments in question (which are now private) were posted on articles Bradford wrote, and mirror anti-Barack Obama remarks Bradford made publicly. Earlier this year, the Washington Post revealed that he authored tweets calling President Obama a "Kenyan creampuff" and floated the idea of a "military coup" to remove him from office. He also tweeted that he believes "transgenderism [sic] is a mental illness."
When the Post reached out to Bradford, who formerly served as attorney general for the Chiricahua Apache Nation, for comment about the now-deleted tweets, he apologized -- and then deflected by claiming he is a minority himself.
“As a minority and member of the Jewish faith, I sincerely apologize for my disrespectful and offensive comments,” he told the Post in an email. “These comments are inexcusable and I do not stand by them."
This year's online revelations are far from the first times Bradford has been in hot water for bigoted remarks. In 2015, he was forced to resign from his teaching post at West Point for writing a paper claiming American military should target Muslim holy sites "even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage."