Are potential appointees to President Joe Biden’s administration convinced that deleting tweets makes their prior statements just disappear?
Poof! There goes a conspiracy theory about Russian collusion. Poof! There goes an ugly tweet where she blamed the United States for their non-existent role in Iran’s downing of a Ukrainian airliner in 2020. Poof! There goes a tweet in defense of Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s remarks about third-trimester abortion, particularly for born-alive babies.
That’s a lot of poofing on the part of Susan Hennessey, the latest addition to the Department of Justice by President Joe Biden. On Monday, Hennessey — now a CNN legal analyst — announced she was joining the administration in a couple of tweets that also announced, rather unsubtly, that her account was getting significantly more boring.4
Things had already been a bit quieter in @Susan_Hennessey’s corner of the world. According to Fox News, she’d been doing a bit of social media fall cleaning since Joe Biden had been declared the victor of the presidential race — one thorough enough in its disposal of old tweets even Marie Kondo would have been like, “OK — settle down, girl.”
On Nov. 16, Hennessey had over 39,000 tweets. By Nov. 29, that was down to 6,000 — 15 percent of her original total. By late January, this was up to about 8,000 tweets, but by then it was time for another KonMari sweep, apparently: By late February, the count was down to 2,300 tweets.
By Monday, Hennessey — a Harvard Law graduate who was a former lawyer with the Office of General Counsel of the National Security Agency and had spent time at CNN and the blog Lawfare — had truly embraced voluntary simplicity, shedding all but 250 tweets. That’s essentially 39,000 tweets gone. Poof!
If Hennessey was indeed taking a page from Kondo — who advises discarding anything that doesn’t bring you joy — here are a few of the digital items that didn’t spark delight in Biden’s DOJ appointment:
Russian Collusion
Hennessey was a big believer in the theory that Russia played a part in getting former President Donald Trump elected in 2016 and that Trump tacitly encouraged it. She also believed (and perhaps still believes) that the Mueller report provided definitive evidence Trump worked with Russia to ensure his election, all in the absence of evidence.
Last year, Hennessey asked her followers what “concrete step” they would take to “help ensure Trump is defeated.” Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist retweeted one of Hennessey’s tweets along with the suggestion she “should be held accountable for perpetrating the Russia collusion hoax with the help of their friends.”
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