• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, July 20, 2016

OMG LULZ the Feds are totally starting to get this social media thing! All you have to do is take a random, off-the-cuff opinion and just fling it heedlessly into the ether regardless of the consequences, then apologize later! It doesn’t even matter if you’re the government agency for law enforcement and therefore charged with maintaining a strict appearance of neutrality! You have a voice and you go, girl!

Okay, that’s not quite what happened last night, when a careless U.S. Justice Department staffer tweeted a pithy opinion about CNN in the wake of the Melania Trump plagiarism controversy, using the DOJ’s official Twitter account instead of his or her own personal account. The tweet, which was again clearly meant for a PERSONAL Twitter account but instead went out on an OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT AGENCY account, read: “CNN is the biggest troll of them all lmao #petty.”

As we have come to expect, the tweet was swiftly deleted and the DOJ quickly issued an explanation, that a staff member in its public relations department with access to official social media “erroneously used the official Department of Justice Twitter handle to post a tweet that was intended for a personal account.” In case you were wondering, “the tweet does not represent the department’s views and was inappropriate for the Department of Justice’s official account.”

The DOJ added that it is changing its social media policy, and providing extra training to staffers (presumably including how to log out of one Twitter account and log into another). And oh yeah, whoever sent that tweet no longer has access to the official social media accounts.

What’s most disappointing about all this, in my humble op-ed, is that we are going to be deprived of the DOJ’s hot take on current issues, which seem pretty spot-on. After all, the tweet is basically correct: yes, Melania Trump plagiarized, it’s embarrassing and bad for the Trump campaign, now can we please move on?

I for one would appreciate some DOJ sass on any number of trending topics: which side does the DOJ take (in a non-litigatory way) on the still unfolding Taylor Swift-Kanye dispute? Which member of One Direction is the hottest, leaving out Zayn because he betrayed them by leaving? Is Rami Malek from “Mr. Robot” totally hot or weird looking? And who would win if everyone from “Game of Thrones” faced off with everyone from “Orange Is The New Black”?

Oh well. Maybe I’ll ask the Commerce Department.