Gender-Fluid Energy Dept. Official Sam Brinton Out After Theft Charges

Sam Brinton, a gender-fluid official at the U.S. Department of Energy, has lost their job after being charged with two luggage thefts at airports.

“Sam Brinton is no longer a DOE employee,” a Department of Energy spokesperson told The Daily Beast, which broke the news Monday. “By law, the Department of Energy cannot comment further on personnel matters.”

Brinton became deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy in June. They had previously worked with the Trevor Project and various think tanks.

Brinton was charged with felony theft in October after being accused of stealing a suitcase and its contents, worth more than $2,000 combined, from baggage claim at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport the previous month. They were placed on leave from the Energy Department. Then in December, they were charged with grand larceny based on accusations of stealing a suitcase and its contents from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas.

“The Las Vegas case had apparently been closed due to a lack of suspects — but officials there managed to match up the surveillance photo to news reports about Brinton’s charges in Minneapolis,” the Beast reports. “It helped that they were wearing a distinctive rainbow atomic T-shirt that investigators were able to match up to a post on Brinton’s Instagram account from the same day.”

Brinton was not a White House appointee, a spokesperson emphasized to CNN. “They are a career civil service employee,” the spokesperson said.

Brinton had been criticized by conservatives long before the theft charges, strictly because of their identity and activism. They delayed announcing their appointment to the Energy Department, they tweeted this summer, because they had received “more than a hundred death threats and more vitriol than I could have imagined.”

Several Republican senators demanded Brinton’s resignation in a letter sent this month to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, CNN reports. “The letter’s lead signatory, Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, on Twitter suggested without proof that Brinton’s hiring to a non-political federal role was part of the Biden administration’s efforts to prioritize ‘wokeness.’”