A man who referred to himself as a "raging misogynist" in a now-deleted social media post is serving as general counsel to President Donald Trump's Office of Personnel Management, Ja'han Jones wrote for MSNBC on Wednesday.
This comes amid reporting of how OPM, which effectively serves as the federal government's human resources office, has been infiltrated by associates of tech billionaire Elon Musk, who helped bankroll much of Trump's voter outreach operation last year and now heads up the "Department of Government Efficiency" task force.
But this particular individual, Andrew Kloster, has a particular record of controversy, Jones wrote.
For one thing, he quoted a new report on Kloster's history from the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight: "In a [2012] response to a post on The Volokh Conspiracy legal blog, as reported by The Daily Beast, Kloster wrote, ‘Consent is probably modern society’s most pernicious fetish.’ He also has written online [in 2023] that ‘Slaves owe us reparations.’ In 2023 ... he tweeted, ‘I need a woman who looks like she got punched.’"
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Moreover, Kloster assisted far-right former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman in his effort to track down nonexistent voter fraud in 2020 — an investigation even state GOP lawmakers ultimately distanced themselves from — and seemingly endorsed the idea of a civil war if Republican lawmakers were expelled for attempting to overturn the election.
Putting this kind of person in charge of OPM sends a chilling message about what will be tolerated in the new administration, Jones wrote.
"Imagine if you discovered that the HR rep in your workplace had engaged in this kind of deplorable behavior," he concluded. "There would be no reason for you to expect this person to operate with the level of sanity and sensibility needed to run a workplace effectively."
