A government watchdog group accused the Biden-Harris administration of violating federal ethics requirements by allowing controversial communications official Tyler Cherry, whom the administration recently promoted to White House associate communications director, to delete social media posts from his verified government account on X and subsequently make the account private, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
According to a complaint filed on Tuesday by Protect the Public's Trust and obtained by the Free Beacon, Cherry, who had been the communications director for the Interior Department, deleted nearly 2,500 posts from his verified government X account and blocked the account from public view immediately after he landed the top role in the White House's communications office in June.
For months, Cherry has faced criticism over now-deleted social media posts in which he accused Israel of occupying Palestinian territory, attacked police officers as racist and likened policing to slavery, blasted the "capitalistic police state motivated by explicit and implicit racial biases," argued that the Republican Party is focused on "white grievance politics," and repeatedly boosted the "Russiagate" conspiracy theory during the Trump administration.
"Cheersing in bars to ending the occupation of Palestine—no shame and f— your glares #ISupportGaza #FreePalestine," Cherry said in one July 25, 2014, tweet. Cherry appears to have made that post in response to the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, which began that July after Hamas militants in Gaza launched a series of missile strikes on Israeli targets.
Cherry was first hired by the Interior Department as press secretary in January 2021 after stints with President Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign, left-leaning consulting firm SKDK, and progressive news outlet Media Matters for America.
In 2022, the New York Times published a fawning article about Cherry's same-sex wedding, which Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland officiated.
On June 23, 2024, the same day he began deleting past posts and shortly after the White House hired him, Cherry issued a statement on X apologizing for those posts. "Past social media posts from when I was younger do not reflect my current views," he wrote. Because he locked his account shortly thereafter, that apology statement is no longer public.
Even though Cherry's posts were public and reported on in October 2023, he was promoted twice—once in December 2023, when he was named the Interior Department's communications director, and once when the White House hired him to lead climate policy communications. Cherry doesn't appear to have ever been punished—he continues to serve as White House associate communications director, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Cherry's X account was ultimately given a gray government checkmark in November 2021, months after he was hired by the Department of the Interior. The checkmark means the account must stay under the control of the agency. As posts on an official government account, Cherry's tweets also may be official federal records that must be brought under records management control by the National Archives and Records Administration.
"The department leadership's apparent failure to enforce, or negligence in enforcing, rules regarding the preservation of federal records may have not only allowed an official department social media account to leave the control of the agency, in violation of the agency's obligations as described by [the National Archives and Records Administration], but also may, as a result, have allowed federal records to have been destroyed when Mr. Cherry deleted the nearly 2,500 posts on that account," the complaint stated.
The complaint represents the Biden-Harris administration's latest potential ethics snafu. And it comes weeks after the Interior Department's watchdog issued two successive reports determining that former deputy Interior secretary Tommy Beaudreau and Bureau of Land Management principal deputy director Nada Culver violated ethics rules while serving at the agency.
"The department failed to control a social media account and allowed its posts to be destroyed, possibly in violation of federal records laws," Protect the Public's Trust director Michael Chamberlain told the Free Beacon. "But why did Interior leadership permit this account to obtain verification as a government account, and to be representative of the department, in the first place?"
"It contained posts that, aside from being controversial, are contrary to the Biden-Harris administration's stated agenda," Chamberlain continued. "The fact that Mr. Cherry saw fit to delete his old posts and issue a statement essentially disavowing the more controversial ones is evidence that he or someone above him belatedly realized they were a problem."
Chamberlain added that such apparent ethics violations appear to be "business as usual" for the Department of the Interior under Haaland's leadership. His group's complaint argued that Cherry's promotions indicate that the Interior Department endorses the views Cherry expressed in the posts.
Protect the Public's Trust's Tuesday complaint called for the Interior Department's inspector general to open an investigation into the matter. It also included a series of questions for agency leaders about how they enforce ethics rules and compliance with federal records laws.
The Department of the Interior declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.