Republican vice president JD Vance’s office has fired key financial policy adviser Aaron Kofsky. A recent WIRED investigation found that Kofsky had written extensively on Reddit for a long time about using a variety of drugs, including cocaine and opiates, and called Vance a “Trump boot licker.”
WIRED was covering the news and reached out to Kofsky for comment Monday morning. Shortly before the deadline, he sent Politico’s Morning Money, which reported that he had left Vance’s office. “It was an honor to serve Senator Vance and the people of Ohio for the past two years,” he told Politico, and he is “grateful that a dark time in my life is behind me.”
Kofsky continued, “Listen, I’m really shocked, but we’ve reached an unprecedented level of absurdity where this much work goes into anointing an America First employee.” He continued to question WIRED’s motives for publishing the show, saying “there’s something else going on here.”
According to Kofsky, he was suspended on October 16, the same day WIRED published its report, and then fired. “I’m sure it was ultimately because those Reddit posts were exposed,” he told WIRED. “I would note that those letters were written in a humorous manner and did not harm anyone.”
Vance’s office declined to comment.
Under the username PsychoticMammal, Kofsky has posted about using cocaine, opiates, kratom, and more for more than a decade. He wrote about having withdrawal symptoms from trying to kick tianeptine, or “gas station heroin,” and kratom. Advise other users on how to transport drugs through TSA checkpoints without getting caught. In another post, Kofsky listed all the medications he had tried up to that point and rated them on a scale of 1 to 10.
As recently as January, Kofsky posted a video from a Senate committee hearing on Vance questioning a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent on nitazenes, or manufactured opioids. Kofsky posted the video to several drug-related subreddits, including ir/Opioid_RCs, r/Drugs, r/Opiates, and r/ObscureDrugs.
“It’s amazing! The politician knows about nitazenes. Ohio Senator JD Vance Questions Witness About Nitzenes. Is it just me, or is this really weird? I said I was just wondering how this boy heard about zenes? I don’t think any of their colleagues know anything about them,” Kofsky wrote about the video on r/ResearchChemicals.
Kofsky appears in the background of the video.
“Like millions of Americans, I have struggled with substance abuse, which for me was an attempt to self-medicate with epilepsy and epilepsy medications,” Kofsky said in a statement sent to WIRED last month. “I deeply regret sending these words. I’m not proud of this and I’m disappointed that it’s being announced this way, but I’m grateful to say that part of my life is behind me.”
Kofsky played a major role in shaping Vance’s banking and financial policy. He wrote “much of the language” for Vance’s cryptocurrency regulation proposal and consulted with a number of crypto companies on its policies, according to Politico.
He says: “I was an asset to Vance’s office, and I will be an asset to whatever organization I end up with next.”
Shortly before this story was published, Kofsky took to X to share his version of events.
You can follow all of WIRED’s 2024 presidential election coverage here.
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