Jeff Brindle, the executive director of the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission and one of the top campaign finance officials in New Jersey, wrote hateful invective about LGBTQ people in a series of emails, reported the New Jersey Monitor on Friday.
"He’s come under fire recently because of an email he sent to a staffer in October mocking National Coming Out Day," reported Terrence T. McDonald. "State officials said in a memo the New Jersey Monitor obtained this week that the email was a blatant violation of the state’s anti-discrimination policy, and Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration has made moves to oust Brindle over it."
But that's not where it ended, according to the report — emails show Brindle constantly mocked and registered disgust at LGBTQ people in private emails.
"In June, state officials sent a staff-wide email noting it was Pride month and suggesting employees consider adding their pronouns to their email signature. Brindle forward to an unknown person with this comment: 'Give me a break,'" said the report. "To a staffer who shared a story about a gay pride stunt courtesy of Burger King in Austria, Brindle wrote, 'Unbelievable.' He shared a July story from conservative news site Town Hall about a trans woman who impregnated two inmates in New Jersey’s women’s prison. He wrote, 'We truly are living through insane times.' In July, Breitbart wrote about Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas — a transgender woman whose participation in women’s sports made her a nationwide target — not being named NCAA’s woman of the year. Brindle sent the link to a staffer. 'Lia lost this one,' he wrote."
READ MORE: 'We know he's insane': Former Trump pal claims he's 'shriveling away' as pressure mounts
According to the report, he also shared a number of other articles denigrating LGBTQ people from far-right websites.
Garden State Equality, one of New Jersey's top LGBTQ rights organizations, is reportedly calling on Brindle to step down, saying, “is steeped in a toxic brine of biases which has no place in a civilized society.”
McDonald, who previously criticized Murphy's efforts to force out Brindle, acknowledged that this at least merits an investigation by the Election Law Enforcement Commission. "If he’s using his work email to trade anti-LGBTQ stories with staffers, what does that mean about how he treats his subordinates from that community?" he wrote. "What does it say about the overall environment of his office? Is the stuff he says out loud worse than what he commits to writing, in documents he knows can be publicly revealed?"
