On Wednesday, the Department of Labor, which had come under fire after reportedly pressuring an employee to resign after he had been unfairly accused by a Bloomberg journalist of posting an anti-Semitic message on Facebook, announced that he would be returning to his job.
Leif Olson, a religious Christian who had clearly intended his messages to mock anti-Semites, resigned last Friday after Ben Penn of Bloomberg had maligned him by accusing him of posting the anti-Semitic messages, twisting what Olson said and reporting him to the Department of Labor. As The Daily Wire’s Josh Hammer wrote in a piece ferociously denouncing Penn for his shoddy journalism and clearly partisan attack:
Penn flagged for DOL a transparently sarcastic Facebook post of Olson’s dating back to the much-ballyhooed August 2016 Paul Ryan/Paul Nehlen Republican primary race in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District … Paul Nehlen, the reader may recall, was a vile alt-right anti-Semite whose failed insurgent bid to supplant Paul Ryan was vociferously backed by Breitbart and other nationalist populist figures. Prior to his later being banned outright from Twitter in 2018 due to serial peddling of Jew-hatred, Nehlen became notorious for promoting on the platform a list of Jewish journalistic conspiracists against him.
After Ryan destroyed Nehlen in the primary, winning 84% of the vote, Olson sarcastically mocked Nehlen and his alt-right supporters. Penn took Olson’s quotes out of context, alerted the Department of Labor, and voila! he had a political scalp. Penn’s motivation seemed clear enough; he tweeted, “Lost in all of this is that Olson was part of a team of political appointees tasked with the heavy lift of drafting wage-hour regulations that are high priorities for Trump White House, business community. They’re now down one adviser.”
Penn was roundly condemned across the political spectrum, as Hammer and Twitchy pointed out. Hammer noted, “Conservatives ought to be up in arms that DOL, a prominent department of the Trump administration, is so unwilling to defend its own appointees against manufactured smear campaigns.”
On Wednesday, the Department of Labor published this:
The U.S. Department of Labor released the following update regarding Senior Policy Advisor Leif Olson of the Wage and Hour Division. “On Friday, August 30, 2019, Senior Policy Advisor of the Wage and Hour Division, Leif Olson offered his resignation and the Department accepted. Following a thorough reexamination of the available information and upon reflection, the Department has concluded that Mr. Olson has satisfactorily explained the tone of the content of his sarcastic social media posts and will return to his position in the Wage and Hour Division.”
Olson humbly tweeted: “I’m grateful to be heading back to work. Thank you, Acting Secretary PatPizzella DOL and WHD_DOL Administrator Cheryl Stanton for the opportunity to continue to serve. And to everyone who reached out, and especially to each of you who risked your own credibility and reputation to defend mine: Jo and I can never thank you enough. Each of you is a blessing, and we hope to bless you in return. Thank you, and thank you again.”