Washington — Last week, The Washington Post reported that William C. Bradford, director of the Office of Indian Energy, had sent a series of disturbing messages from a now deleted Twitter account over the past year and a half before being hired by the Energy Department.

The tweets included ones calling former President Barack Obama a “Kenyan creampuff” and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg a “little arrogant self-hating Jew.”

But the tweet that has generated the most ire, and the loudest calls for his termination, was sent around the anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1942 order authorizing the incarceration of Japanese Americans months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

“It was necessary,” Bradford wrote in February 2016 of the World War II internment program.

In a scathing retort sent to Energy Secretary Rick Perry, five Democratic senators, led by Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii, said: “The internment was not ‘necessary,’ it was ‘wrong.’ ”

“Public officials in leadership positions have the responsibility to serve all Americans regardless of race, gender, and religion,” the senator wrote. “These officials must be held to the highest standards of conduct. Dr. Bradford’s divisive rhetoric has no place in public service.”

In addition to Hirono, senators Maria Cantwell, of Washington; Ron Wyden, of Oregon; Bernie Sanders, of Vermont; and Tammy Duckworth, of Illinois; signed the letter.

According to Chris Lu, formerly a deputy labor secretary and co-chair of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders under Obama, Bradford fits into a pattern of seemingly unvetted officials being hired across departments in the Trump administration, such as Joseph Otting, Trump’s nominee for comptroller of the currency, who reportedly misrepresented having a degree from Dartmouth. (Otting denies that he was trying to imply he had the degree.)

“I have serious questions about his fitness to serve in a senior government position,” Lu said of Bradford. “But it also raises larger issues about the Trump vetting operation.”

From former Labor Secretary Chris Lu:

On the other side of the Capitol, Grace Meng, a Democratic representative from New York and a member of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said on social media on Friday that Bradford had no place at the top levels of government.

Tung Thanh Nguyen, a medical professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and former chairman of Obama’s White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, said that the federal government has acknowledged for decades that there was no real basis for it to detain Japanese Americans during the war.

“Even at the time of the signing of Executive Order 9066 — neither the FBI nor Army or Navy commanders questioned the loyalty of Japanese Americans nor thought that a Japanese invasion was likely,” Nguyen said of Roosevelt’s internment order. “The U.S. government acknowledged this when President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 to apologize and compensate more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated.”

Under Bradford, that office, normally in charge of reducing energy costs of Native American and Alaskan tribes and villages, hired C.J. Stewart, a member of the Crow Nation who has advocated for coal mining on that tribe’s Montana reservation, as a fossil fuel expert.

“Coal development on the Crow Indian Reservation is a very vital part of the self-sufficiency of the Crow Tribe,” Stewart told Indian Country Today in 2013.

As part of “Energy Week,” the latest policy-themed week in Trump’s White House, Crow representatives will meet with Trump, according to Reuters.