Welcome to 2016, Jeb Bush.
In the first significant stumble of his nascent campaign, the former Florida governor’s Right to Rise PAC announced that newly hired chief technology officer Ethan Czahor, who co-founded Hipster.com, was out of a job over his old inflammatory tweets and blog posts.
“The Right to Rise PAC accepted Ethan Czahor’s resignation today,” Bush spokeswoman Kristy Campbell said in a statement. “While Ethan has apologized for regrettable and insensitive comments, they do not reflect the views of Governor Bush or his organization and it is appropriate for him to step aside. We wish him the best.”
As BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski reported on Monday, Czahor deleted a number of tweets after it was announced that he was hired at Bush’s organization. By then, Democratic operatives were already passing around screenshots of the posts, and the damage was done.
The most damaging tweets, including one that speculated about which college girls were “sluts” based on their majors, occurred back in 2009, the year Czahor graduated college. Czahor on Monday addressed the material, writing on Twitter, “i deleted some old jokes i made years ago that i no longer find funny or appropriate.” But the story continued the next day as The Huffington Post dug up comments Czahor made on his old college radio show’s website praising Martin Luther King, Jr. for not wearing “pants sagged to his ankles” or “speaking like a rapper.”
The Czahor mess proved an unwanted distraction for Bush as his PAC rolled out a new website giving users’ access to over 250,000 emails from his personal constituent services account during his tenure as governor.
Bush, a 2016 Republican presidential contender, launched the Right to Rise PAC last month, just weeks after announcing he is weighing a White House bid.
Benjy Sarlin
David Taintor