J.D. Vance’s Senate Office Fires Lead Counsel Who Posted About Drug Use on Reddit
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s office has fired key financial policy adviser Aaron Kofsky. Recently WIRED Investigation discovered that Kofsky had posted multiple posts on Reddit over the years about using a variety of drugs, including cocaine and opiates, and called Vance a “Trump shoe licker.”
WIRED prepared a story on the news and asked Kofsky for comment Monday morning. Not long before his assigned deadline, he transferred Politico’s Morning Money newsletterreported that he had left Vance’s office. “It has been an honor to serve Senator Vance and the people of Ohio over the past two years,” he told Politico, adding that he is “grateful that the dark times in my life are far behind me.” ”.
Kofsky continued, “Look, I certainly did wrong, but we have reached an unprecedented level of absurdity that this amount of work would go into defaming an employee of America on run out of.” He went on to question WIRED’s motives for publishing the piece, 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 stupid Reddit posts got exposed,” he told WIRED. “I would like to note that those posts were written in a spirit of humor and did not hurt anyone.”
Vance’s office declined to comment.
Under the username PsychoticMammal, Kofsky posted about his use of cocaine, opiates, kratom and more for more than a decade. He writes about experiencing withdrawal symptoms when trying to use tianeptine, or “gas station heroin,” and kratom. He advises other users how to smuggle drugs through TSA checkpoints 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 1 to 10.
As recently as January, Kofsky posted a video from a Senate committee hearing of Vance questioning a former Drug Enforcement Administration employee about nitazene, or manufactured opioids. Kofsky posted the video to several drug-related subreddits, including r/Opioid_RCs, r/Drugs, r/Opiates, and r/ObscureDrugs.
“What a surprise! Politicians know about nitazene. Ohio Senator J.D. Vance asked the witness about Nitzenes. Is it just me or is this a super surprise? Like I’m confused how did this guy even hear of Zenes? I can’t imagine any of his colleagues knowing 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, in my case mainly through attempts to self-medicate against the effects,” Kofsky said in a statement to WIRED last month. of epilepsy and epileptic drugs”. “I deeply regret posting these comments. I’m not proud of this and I’m embarrassed that it was announced this way, but I’m grateful to say that part of my life is behind me.”
Kofsky played a key role in shaping Vance’s banking and financial services policies. He wrote “most of the language” for Vance’s proposal to regulate cryptocurrencies and consulted with several crypto companies on his policy, according to Politics.
“I am an asset to Vance’s office,” he said, “and will be an asset to whatever organization I work for next.”
Just before publishing this story, Kofsky brought to X to share his version of events.
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