Acting U.S. EPA head liked 'racist' photo of Obamas - report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The acting head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency liked a controversial Facebook photo five years ago of then-President Barack Obama that a civil rights group called racist, the Huffington Post reported on Tuesday.

Andrew Wheeler, a longtime Washington insider, has kept a low profile compared to Scott Pruitt, who was forced to resign as head of the EPA in July under a cloud of ethics allegations including that he made staff search hotels for special skin lotion.

In January 2013, when Wheeler was a lobbyist for Murray Energy, a privately owned coal company, he liked an image on Facebook of former President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle that depicted them staring at a banana, said the report, which listed other social media activity by Wheeler that critics said was inappropriate.

Heidi Beirich, the head of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group, called the image of the Obamas “blatantly racist.” She said the people Wheeler interacted with “are just not folks a legitimate person should have anything to do with.”

Wheeler defended his social media use in a statement. “Over the years, I have been a prolific social media user and liked and inadvertently liked countless social media posts,” he said. “Specifically, I do not remember the post depicting President Obama and the First Lady. As for some of the other posts, I agreed with the content and was unaware of the sources.”

The report relied on posts uncovered by American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic political action committee.

In September, Wheeler on his personal Twitter account liked a tweet by a conservative documentary filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza that cast doubt over Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegations against recently confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who had denied the allegations.

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Later that month Wheeler liked a tweet from an editor at the website InfoWars that blamed Twitter’s temporary suspension of actor James Woods on discrimination against conservative views.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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