Kentucky GOP group blames hacker for calling new US firearms regulator part of a "Jewish junta"

When Steve Dettelbach was confirmed last week as the director of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, he became the beleaguered bureau’s first head to pass a Senate confirmation in eight years. For some, the confirmation offered hope of a changing tide in America’s sea of mass shootings.

But a county Republican group in Kentucky saw a different story: that Dettelbach is part of a “Jewish junta” that “is getting stronger and more aggressive.”

The Bracken County Republican Party, representing a rural county with a population of around 8,400 along the Ohio River near Cincinnati, made the comment Friday on its official Facebook page, two days after Dettelbach’s July 12 confirmation.

In calling Dettelbach “a Jewish anti-gun activist,” the county GOP group attacked the two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Rob Portman of Ohio, who voted for his appointment...

A former federal prosecutor and Ohio district attorney who unsuccessfully ran for state attorney general as a Democrat, Dettelbach invoked his Judaism during his confirmation hearing, saying that his experiences “raising Jewish children as a religious minority in this country” and witnessing attacks on synagogues and other sites of worship helped fuel his desire to combat gun violence and hate crimes in America...

Following the deadly 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Dettelbach authored an op-ed describing himself as “a proud American Jew.” He is a member of Park Synagogue in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and sends his children to a Cleveland-area Jewish day school, according to the Cleveland Jewish News.

Leaders at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, the site of the 2018 mass shooting that was the deadliest ever antisemitic attack on American soil, endorsed his appointment. Gun control groups, including Everytown For Gun Safety and the Brady Campaign, also celebrated Dettelbach’s confirmation.

The confirmation hearings unfolded amid several prominent mass shootings, including a white supremacist targeting a supermarket in Buffalo, New York; a teenager targeting an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas; and a man targeting a Fourth of July parade in the heavily Jewish suburb of Highland Park, Illinois.