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Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
molly0xfff@hachyderm.io ("Molly White") wrote:

Crypto Council director Bo Hines has abruptly resigned, to be replaced by Patrick Witt. Like Hines, Witt’s qualifications seem to mostly involve playing college football and losing elections. Witt has also claimed in the past that he was passed over by the NFL because of a sexual assault accusation.

Bo Hines, former director of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets, abruptly announced his departure to return to the private sector. He will be replaced by his deputy, Patrick Witt. Like Hines, Witt’s qualifications also seem to involve playing college football and failing to be elected to Congress [I72] — though Witt spent time during the first Trump administration at the Office of Personnel Management, and then on Trump’s legal team fighting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.2728 Witt ran for office in 2022, with an aborted bid for the Republican nomination for Georgia’s 10th Congressional district and then an unsuccessful campaign to become the state’s Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner. He lost the Republican primary for the latter, despite a Trump endorsement and promises to “keep your insurance from going woke”.27
n 2012, Witt was the subject of a New York Times story after he claimed to have skipped a Rhodes scholarship interview to play in a football game against Harvard, drawing obsequious nationwide profiles for his “apparent choice of team fealty over individual honor”. According to the Times, he chose this story rather than admitting that the Rhodes Trust had rescinded his scholarship candidacy after learning he had been accused by an ex-girlfriend of sexual assault.29 In 2014, he penned an op-ed for the Boston Globe opposing a new sexual harassment policy at Harvard, where he was in his first year of law school. In the op-ed, he claimed the NFL passed him over because of the accusation, adding that he both did not know what the accusation was and that he was innocent of it.c Witt’s Globe op-ed was titled “A sexual harassment policy that nearly ruined my life”.30 I guess he couldn’t have known then that, a decade later, such an accusation would be practically a resume requirement for the Trump administration. c. Witt also claimed in the Globe op-ed that the Times had retracted their story; I could find no evidence of a retraction, and the story remains online. The Times’ public editor, Arthur S. Brisbane, did publish a secondary article questioning the use of anonymous sources in the original story, but wrote, “I’m not in a position to dispute The Times’s finding, although I think the story was handicapped by not having Mr. Witt’s version of the timeline.” (Brisbane also noted t