'This is rather gross': Looks like Bernie Sanders' senior adviser David Sirota has been up to some very shady business

It’s been a while since we’ve heard about David Sirota … what’s that guy been up to? Well, it seems he’s just been hired as a senior speechwriter and campaign adviser for Bernie Sanders. Talk about a match made in socialist heaven!

Bernie Sanders has hired David Sirota, author of this all-time classic, as his campaign's "Sr. Communications Adviser and Speechwriter." pic.twitter.com/dO0GMgp9UZ

— Anthony L. Fisher (@anthonyLfisher) March 19, 2019

Bernie Sanders' new Senior Communications Adviser & Speechwriter David Sirota once wrote a piece lauding Hugo Chavez and touting the "economic miracle" of Venezuela https://t.co/tU893X2Yoo

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) March 19, 2019

And let’s not forget this gem:

"Let's Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is a White American" — the actual name of a 2013 article by Sanders communication bigwig David Sirota

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) March 19, 2019

But it seems our pal David forgot to mention some things. Maybe he was just too excited about working for Bernie that the fact that he’s been working for Bernie just slipped his mind:

SCOOP @davidsirota, just hired as Bernie Sanders' speechwriter and senior adviser, has been quietly writing speeches and advising him for months without disclosing it but while bashing pretty much every candidate in the field: https://t.co/VBSp7dBbyx

— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) March 19, 2019

Was that wrong? Should he not have done that?

Since December, David Sirota has, on Twitter, on his own website, and in columns in The Guardian, been trashing most of Sanders’s Democratic opponents—all without disclosing his work with Sanders—and has been pushing back on critics by saying that he was criticizing the other Democrats as a journalist. He centered many of his attacks on Beto O’Rourke, but he also bashed Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Joe Biden, Kirsten Gillibrand, Michael Bennet, John Hickenlooper, Mike Bloomberg, and even Andrew Cuomo.

…

Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, confirmed in an interview on Tuesday afternoon that Sirota had been in an advisory role prior to his hiring on March 11. “He was advising beforehand,” Shakir said, explaining that Sirota’s informal work for Sanders goes back months, and was meant to be a trial period to see how the senator, who famously likes to write every word that he says himself, would work with a speechwriter.

Sirota deleted 20,000 tweets last night after I contacted him about this, including all of the ones in which he has gone after O'Rourke, Biden, Gillibrand, Booker, Harris, Bennet, Hickenlooper and more.

He said he was doing this as a journalist. Here's a deleted tweet: pic.twitter.com/SIuhKDhyfa

— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) March 19, 2019

But let Sirota be clear: He wasn’t trying to cover anything up or anything like that. It was his “autodeleter,” you guys!

In a brief emailed response, Sirota attributed the scrubbing of his account to having an “autodeleter that periodically and automatically deletes tweets. I started doing this many months ago.” He did not respond when asked if it was a coincidence that the tweets were deleted hours after I contacted him and the morning before he was announced as a Sanders employee. He did not respond to other questions about why he had not disclosed his role with Sanders either on Twitter or on his website, Capital & Main, described as a home for advocacy journalism. Sirota’s ties to Sanders go back 20 years, to when he was Sanders’s press secretary in the House of Representatives. He has always portrayed that role as a past association and nothing more, despite his continuing affinity for Sanders.

Sanders asked his supporters to “do our very best to engage respectfully with our Democratic opponents―talking about the issues we are fighting for, not about personalities or past grievances. I want to be clear that I condemn bullying & harassment of any kind and in any space.”

— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) March 19, 2019

Sirota helped write Sanders' launch speeches while calling people who disagreed with his attacks on others "mentally incapacitated."
I asked Sanders campaign manager @faiz what he made of that, and he said:
“He used those exact words?… I’m sure he regrets the tone.”

— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) March 19, 2019

He regrets getting busted. Not so much the not-disclosing-he-worked-for-Bernie-while-trashing-other-candidates stuff.

This is not cool, @davidsirota. ?

— KarenLMcHalePhoto (@KarenLMcHale) March 19, 2019

Cries of "fake news" are often way overdone, but this doesn't help perception at all https://t.co/EPaj5UTwZg

— Shoshana Weissmann, Sloth Committee Chair (@senatorshoshana) March 19, 2019

so, it's suddenly okay for journalists to jump into political campaigning but not the other way around? https://t.co/HyOxxVPg3q

— siraj hashmi (@SirajAHashmi) March 19, 2019

I’m sure Sirota would be totally cool if another journalist and campaign had this arrangement.

— Reta (@RetaK47) March 19, 2019

Try to imagine Sirota's reaction if, say, a ThinkProgress writer were found to have been secretly advising the O'Rourke campaign https://t.co/dD0yl7Wd2H

— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) March 19, 2019

He’d probably punch them. As is his style.

https://twitter.com/4edges/status/1108097464530165760

Eh, he’s only a disappointment if you didn’t expect him to do something super-shady and disappointing.