Under Secretary of State Tweets Bad Hashtag

Under Secretary of State Rick Stengel tweeted something he didn't intend, deleted it, corrected it, and apologized.

But some Twitter users think it might have been a Freudian slip.

Because the mistaken tweet was deleted, screengrabs provide the only evidence of what it said. But according those screengrabs, the original tweet, said:

".@StateDept. Critical for a full, credible and unimpeded intl investigation of crash. Urge Russia to honor it's commitment. #UnitedForGaza"

Not only is the hashtag related to the Israeli-Hamas conflict in Gaza rather than Ukraine, the subject of the tweet, it reads like support for Hamas in the current conflict rather than Israel, which is America's ally.

Here is Stengel's corrected tweet:



And here is is follow-up apology:



But social media can be merciless, and Obama administration foreign policy detractors were quick to go after the mistake.



National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg shared his own screengrab, and let people know why the mistake was important to note:



Twitter users also gave Stengel — who was managing editor of Time magazine before joining the State Department last year —  grief for saying "May bad" in his apology. One user said he sounded like a 12-year-old rather than a government official.


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