The Labor Department announced Wednesday that it was was rehiring Wage and Hour Division official Leif Olson, who resigned on Tuesday following a Bloomberg report alleging that he had written anti-Semitic posts on his Facebook account.
The department said a probe by the department had cleared Olson.
“On Friday, August 30, 2019, Senior Policy Advisor of the Wage and Hour Division, Leif Olson offered his resignation and the Department accepted,” the department said in a statement. “Following a thorough reexamination of the available information and upon reflection, the Department has concluded that Mr. Olson has satisfactorily explained the tone of the content of his sarcastic social media posts and will return to his position in the Wage and Hour Division.”
Olson was alleged in an article by Bloomberg Tuesday to have written anti-Semitic posts. “Trump Labor Department’s new sr adviser Leif Olson posted on Facebook that Jewish media ‘protect their own.’ In response to my request for comment on Olson’s anti-Semitic post, @USDOL says they’ve accepted his resignation,” Bloomberg writer Ben Penn tweeted Tuesday.
However the alleged evidence of anti-Semitism, a 2016 Facebook post by Olson regarding then-Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan defeating a conservative primary challenger, Paul Nehlen, appeared to be satirical, not serious. The Bloomberg report drew criticism across the ideological spectrum.
“Trump Labor official Leif Olson has resigned due to a putatively anti-Semitic Facebook post. But if you read the post, it appears to be mocking anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” tweeted liberal New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait.
