And could someone at the Department of Energy concede that scrutiny of applicants for agency positions needs to be handled much better?
It was a little more than a year ago that President Biden was being saluted for “making history” by hiring Sam Brinton to be the deputy assistant secretary of spent fuel and waste disposition in the office of nuclear energy for the Department of Energy.
The former DOE official has now pleaded no contest to stealing luggage from the Las Vegas airport and been ordered to pay $3,670.74 in restitution for the stolen luggage and clothes and given a 180-day suspended jail sentence.
It would be nice if someone, anyone associated with the U.S. Department of Energy could just concede, “This was not a good hire. We screwed up, and we will scrutinize applicants for positions like this more closely in the future.” The Biden administration has not said anything about Brinton, insisting that Brinton was not an administration appointee.
Brinton announced the hiring on Twitter in January 2022. Brinton was working in the office by late June, and on June 29 added, “to clarify, I am not a Biden appointee (despite what was reported) and instead serve as a career employee in the Senior Executive Service – I intend to be serving my country in this role through many many presidencies.” Members of the senior executive service “serve in the key positions just below the top presidential appointees,” according to the Office of Personnel Management.
When Brinton was hired, however, a whistleblower contended the hiring selection was swayed by “political influence.”
A whistleblower complaint in February alleged that “undue political influence and preferences were applied” at DOE to hire Brinton, according to the publication RadWaste Monitor. The complaint said Brinton had little government experience for a such a senior role.
Brinton’s resume includes working at the country’s first nuclear waste management and disposal startup company, as well as leading one of the first major national consensus reports on the topic of consent-based siting at the Bipartisan Policy Center. They also have experience fighting for LGBTQ youth as a former vice president at the Trevor Project.
“There’s been a lot of people who are quite upset that don’t think that I am quite as qualified as others,” said Brinton. “I respond with multiple graduate degrees from MIT, a decade of working in nuclear policy and the strongest enthusiasm for working in nuclear waste out of anybody.”
On July 6, about a week after announcing the start in the new position, Brinton was recorded on video stealing a woman’s luggage from a carousel at Las Vegas’s Harry Reid International Airport, “wearing a white t-shirt with a rainbow atomic nuclear symbol on the front.” Then in October, Brinton was charged in Hennepin County, Minn., with felony theft for stealing a woman’s luggage from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport.
Brinton went on a leave of absence by November, and by December the Department of Energy fired him, or “them,” as Brinton prefers.
Other gay activists raised questions about Brinton’s past accounts of conversion therapy. Wayne Besen, the founding executive director of Truth Wins Out, contended, “While this is a personal calamity for Brinton, the fallout faced by the LGBTQ community could have easily been avoided. The red flags regarding Brinton were overwhelming and obvious to all who cared to see them. Unfortunately, some of America’s top LGBTQ activists and organizations were willfully blind to Brinton’s shortcomings.”
Perhaps there are other genderfluid individuals, or individuals known for “activism in kink subculture,” as Yahoo Life characterized Brinton, who would make fine employees of the U.S. Department of Energy. If you’re really good at preventing safety problems at nuclear plants, the U.S. government or private nuclear-energy companies could probably use you, no matter what you like to do in the bedroom. But it is now painfully clear that Brinton is a troubled individual who is prone to kleptomania so brazen and shameless, we must wonder if some part of Brinton wanted to get caught.
That Yahoo Life headline back in February 2022 declared, “New Biden Dept. of Energy hire is a nonbinary drag queen — ‘an asset,’ say queer activists.” Well, no, that didn’t turn out to be true; Sam Brinton was more of a liability than an asset. It would be preferable if someone in our government could just come out and say so, instead of averting their eyes and pretending not to notice.