Biden campaign distances from staffer’s past anti-police tweets

Joe Biden’s presidential campaign is seeking to distance itself from anti-police comments made by a recently hired campaign staffer in Arizona, who also has a history of sexist tweets.

That staffer is Michael Ramirez, 32, who penned on a now-deleted account years ago about how he enjoyed rattling feminists, according to the Arizona Daily Independent.

Ramirez reportedly showed hostility toward law enforcement in 2012 after the U.S. Supreme Court voted on Senate Bill 1070, Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law.

“I wish a police officer would ask me for my papers. I would tell him to go f— himself,” he wrote in 2012.

The campaign issued a statement noting it had been alerted of Ramirez’s past posts and that he issued an apology and regretted his former comments.

“The views expressed in these years-old tweets don’t reflect the views of the Biden Campaign or the Arizona Democratic Party. Michael has apologized to the campaign staff for this and is regretful of his actions,” the statement said.

Arizona is seen as a swing state in the coming presidential election. The state has been in the GOP column in every presidential race since 1996, but Biden has been leading in several polls in the state this summer. 

Ramirez works for the Biden campaign as a digital organizing director. Ramirez began working for the Biden campaign earlier this month and previously worked for Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, operating as field director.

He had criticized the Supreme Court’s upheaval of the provision requiring police to inquire about the legal status of those who are reasonably suspected of being in the country illegally.

The Arizona Republic reported that a similar case happened in the state last year surrounding a Republican Party volunteer, Shialee Grooman, who had a history of tweets using derogatory terms for Black people and Hispanics.

Grooman apologized for her remarks last year, saying that the statements she made in high school were not reflective of the person she has grown to be.