JD Vance's Senate office fires key aide who posted on Reddit about drug use

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance's office has fired key fiscal policy adviser Aaron Kofsky. A recent WIRED investigation found that Kofsky posted extensively on Reddit over a period of years about using various drugs, including cocaine and opiates, and called Vance a “Trump bootlicker.”

WIRED had prepared a story on the news and asked Kofsky to comment by Monday morning. Shortly before his deadline, he forwarded Politico's Morning Money newsletter, which reported that he had left Vance's office. It has been “an honor to serve Senator Vance and the people of Ohio these past two years,” he told Politico, and he is “grateful that the dark time of my life is well behind me.”

Kofsky continued, “Look, I definitely messed up, but we've reached an unprecedented level of absurdity when so much work goes into denigrating an America First employee.” He went on to question WIRED's motivations for publishing of the article and said, “There’s something else going on here.”

According to Kofsky, he was suspended and subsequently fired on October 16, the same day WIRED published its report. “I'm sure it was ultimately because these silly Reddit posts were exposed,” he tells WIRED. “I would like to note that these posts were written with good humor and did not hurt anyone.”

Vance's office declined to comment.

Under the username PsychoticMammal, Kofsky posted for more than a decade about using cocaine, opiates, kratom, and many others. He wrote about withdrawal symptoms when trying to use tianeptine, or “gas station heroin,” and kratom. He advised other users on how to transport drugs through TSA checkpoints without getting caught. In one post, Kofsky listed all the medications he had tried up to that point and rated them on a scale of 1 to 10.

Just in January, Kofsky released a video of a Senate committee hearing in which Vance questioned a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent about nitazene, or manufactured opioids. Kofsky posted the video on several drug-related subreddits, including r/Opioid_RCs, r/Drugs, r/Opiates and r/ObscureDrugs.

“Surprising! Politicians know about Nitazenes. Ohio Senator JD Vance is asking witnesses about Nitzenes. Is it just me or is this super surprising? Like I'm just confused as to how this guy heard about Zenes? I can't imagine that one of his colleagues knows something about it,” Kofsky wrote on the video in r/ResearchChemicals.

Kofsky appears in the background of the video.

“Like millions of Americans, I have struggled with drug use, which in my case was primarily an attempt to self-medicate against the effects of epilepsy and epilepsy medications,” Kofsky said in a statement to WIRED last month. “I deeply regret posting these comments. I’m not proud of it and I’m embarrassed that it’s being made public in this way, but I’m grateful to be able to say that part of my life is behind me.”

Kofsky played an important role in shaping Vance's banking and financial services policies. According to Politico, he wrote “much of the language” for Vance's cryptocurrency regulation proposal and consulted with a number of crypto firms on their policies.

“I have been an asset to Vance’s office,” he says, “and will be an asset to whatever organization I end up at next.”

Shortly before publishing this story, Kofsky went to X to share his version of events.

Follow all of WIRED's coverage of the 2024 presidential election here.