Washington (AFP) – US Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll on Wednesday directed West Point to rescind an offer for a former cybersecurity agency chief to hold a prestigious position at the elite military academy. The announcement came a day after far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer took aim at the hiring of Jen Easterly, a former US Army officer and West Point graduate who served as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) during President Joe Biden’s administration.
“The United States Military Academy terminates the gratuitous service agreement with Ms. Jen Easterly. She will no longer serve as the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in the Department of Social Sciences,” Driscoll wrote in a memo he posted on X. The memo requested an “immediate top-down review” of the academy’s hiring practices and also directed it to “immediately pause non-governmental and outside groups from selecting employees,” without indicating if that had happened in Easterly’s case.
The document did not specify why her job offer was being rescinded. But chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell responded to Driscoll’s post on X with one saying that “we’re not turning cadets into censorship activists. We’re turning them into warriors & leaders” — an apparent reference to allegations from some conservatives that CISA engaged in censorship on behalf of Biden’s administration.
On Tuesday, Loomer — known for claiming that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job — described the hiring at the Defense Department as “horrendous” and asked why Easterly had been offered a job. “Why are Biden holdovers who worked to silence Trump supporters under Biden getting elevated to high level jobs under the Trump admin?” she wrote. Though she holds no official position, Loomer wields significant power, and is reported to have successfully pushed for the dismissal of several senior US security officials she deemed disloyal to the president.
While serving as chief of CISA — the agency charged with ensuring the security of US elections — Easterly said that claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 vote were false, rejecting assertions by Trump and his allies. “We do have some portion of the American public that does not believe in the legitimacy of the 2020 election — despite all of the extensive evidence,” she said in 2022. Easterly also later stated there was no evidence that malicious actors “changed, deleted or altered votes or had any material impact on the outcome” of elections in 2018, 2020, or 2022.
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