Energy secretary says he’ll personally review X posts after military escort gaffe

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Thursday that he is going to personally review his posts on the social platform X after deleting a post about a military escort that the White House disputed.

“My last question for you is, there was the X post the other day that came from the Department of Energy, that talked about a ship safely going through the Strait of Hormuz, that wasn’t true, it caused a lot of market disruption, people lost some money, that tweet was deleted,” Fox News’s Dana Perino said on “America’s Newsroom.”

“As the secretary of Energy, what have you done to make sure that that doesn’t happen again? Are you going to personally approve those posts?” she added.

“Yes I will, and, yeah, that is a miscommunication in our department. I take full ownership of that as the person in charge of the department, very unfortunate, it will not happen again,” Wright responded.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the U.S. military had not yet escorted any oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping lane between Iran and Oman. Her comments contradicted the deleted post from Wright.

“I was made aware of this post. I haven’t had a chance to talk to the Energy secretary about it directly, however, I know the post was taken down pretty quickly and I can confirm that the U.S. Navy has not escorted a tanker or a vessel at this time,” Leavitt said during a White House press briefing.

The Energy Department said its staff was behind the “incorrectly captioned” post.

Shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has been held up for close to two weeks during the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran. Trump said Wednesday that the strait was in “great shape,” but Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, on Thursday asserted that the waterway would remain closed.