Sam Brinton is no longer an employee of the Department of Energy, a spokesperson said in a statement to the media Monday.
Photos appear to confirm reports that the “non-binary” energy official in the Biden administration stole a woman’s luggage at the Las Vegas airport over the summer.
8 News Now reported on last week’s felony arrest warrant for Brinton. He had been caught on video stealing a checked bag at Las Vegas’ Harry Reid International Airport in July, two months before allegedly doing the same at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
The report says Vegas police had not successfully identified Brinton, who has been charged with grand larceny, until reading the story about his baggage theft at the Twin Cities airport in September.
From that story, first broken by Alpha News, investigators were able to identify Brinton as the likely suspect, which was only further confirmed after they found a July 6 photo on Brinton’s Instagram account where he was wearing the same shirt as in the surveillance footage.
The victim’s police report claimed $3,670 of stolen property, which included jewelry, clothes, and makeup, per 8 News Now. The value of the bag itself was estimated to be $320.
Brinton is considered one of the first “openly genderfluid individuals in federal government leadership” and has been facing heightened scrutiny since reports of the luggage thefts emerged. One pro-LGBT activist is even questioning the veracity of Brinton’s childhood backstory of alleged abuses at the hands of his father and a conversion therapist.
In a piece recently published by LGBTQ Nation, Wayne Besen claimed Brinton is the only conversion therapy “survivor” he’s ever known who failed to answer “two simple questions” about the therapist’s identity and where the torture may have occurred.
“This basic inquiry was critically important for two reasons. First, to share Brinton’s story, we had to verify if it was true. Second, Brinton’s testimony involved a torture center where hideous abuses were presumably still occurring against children at least as young as 11,” Besen wrote. “If such a place existed, there was a moral imperative to rapidly identify the abusive therapist and contact the authorities to stop the atrocities.”
An MIT graduate who uses “they/them” pronouns, Brinton was initially placed on leave from his post as deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition. It remains unclear if the federal government continued to pay his salary while he was on leave.
Brinton is known to travel frequently for conferences and seminars. When he allegedly stole luggage in Minnesota, he had been traveling for an LGBT engineering conference in St. Paul. Weeks prior to that, he was in Los Angeles to give a talk titled “Spanking: From Calculus to Chemistry” at the LA Leather Getaway.
In addition to the arrest warrant out of Las Vegas, Brinton is facing a Hennepin County court appearance next Monday, Dec. 19, though Brinton’s attorneys have asked for the hearing to be delayed.
Evan Stambaugh
Evan Stambaugh is a freelance writer who had previously been a sports blogger. He has a BA in theology and an MA in philosophy.
