Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s office has fired key financial policy adviser Aaron Kofsky. A recent WIRED investigation found that he had posted extensively on Reddit for several years about using a variety of drugs, including cocaine and opiates, and called Vance a “Trump bootlicker.”
WIRED had been preparing a story on the news and had asked Kofsky for comment Monday morning. Shortly before the deadline he had been given, he sent Politico’s Morning Money Newsletterwho reported that he had left Vance’s office. It was “an honor to serve Senator Vance and the people of Ohio over the past two years,” he told Politico, and he was “grateful that that dark period of my life is behind me.”
Kofsky continued, “Listen, I was definitely wrong, but we’ve reached an unprecedented level of absurdity when so much work goes into smearing an America First staff member.” He went on to question WIRED’s motives for publishing the article, saying that “something else is going on here.”
According to Kofsky, he was suspended on October 16, the same day WIRED published its report, and was subsequently fired. “I’m sure ultimately it was because those dumb Reddit posts got exposed,” he tells WIRED. “I would like to point out that those posts were written in good humor and did not hurt anyone.”
Vance’s office declined to comment.
Under the username PsychoticMammal, Kofsky posted about using cocaine, opiates, kratom, and many others for more than a decade. He wrote about experiencing withdrawal symptoms when trying to quit tianeptine, or “gas station heroin,” and kratom. He advised other users on how to transport drugs through TSA without getting caught. In one post, Kofsky listed all the drugs he had tried up to that point and rated them on a scale of one to 10.
As recently as January, Kofsky posted video of a Senate committee hearing in which Vance questioned a former DEA agent about nitazenes, or manufactured opioids. Kofsky posted the video to several drug-related subreddits, including r/Opioid_RCs, r/Drugs, r/Opiates, and r/ObscureDrugs.
“Amazing! The politician knows about the Nitzenes. Ohio Senator JD Vance asks a witness about the Nitzenes. Is it just me or is this super surprising? Like he’s confused how this guy had heard about the Zenes?” “I can’t imagine any of their colleagues know anything about them,” Kofsky posted about the video on r/ResearchChemicals.
Kofsky appears in the background of the video.
“Like millions of Americans, I have struggled with drug use, which in my case was primarily an attempt to self-medicate against the effects of epilepsy and epilepsy medications,” Kofsky said in a statement to WIRED last month. “I deeply regret having posted these comments. “I am not proud of this and I am ashamed that it is publicized in this way, but I am grateful to say that part of my life is behind me.”
Kofsky played an important role in shaping Vance’s banking and financial services policy. He wrote “much of the language” for Vance’s proposal to regulate cryptocurrencies and consulted with several cryptocurrency companies on their policies. according to Politico.
“I was an asset to Vance’s office,” he says, “and I will be an asset to whatever organization I end up in next.”
Shortly before this story was published, Kofsky led to to share his version of events.
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