Rand Paul: Don't punish federal workers who used Ashley Madison
Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul said Tuesday that government workers who were outed by hackers as members of AshleyMadison.com - a website created to facilitate extramarital affairs - should not face punishment.
Before he could register that opinion, though, he had to figure out what the heck "Ashley Madison" is.
"I keep seeing that headline, but I'm terrible - I don't know what it is," he confessed to a Washington Post reporter when he was asked about the hack of the risqué website, which exposed the contact information of millions of its users.
The senator asked, "So, she has done something illicit?"
After Paul was given the rundown on Ashley Madison and the hack, he replied, "I don't know if adultery is against the law still. In some states, there are old laws against adultery, but I think if we start going after people and locking people up for adultery we're headed for a bizarre world."
"My wife will be happy that I'd never heard of this website," he later added.
The Post previously reported that up to 15,000 federal workers' emails may have been exposed in the hack, and the paper raised the possibility that the employees could face punishment. People with a military email address, for example, may have broken the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and other federal employees could be found guilty of conduct unbecoming of their station.
The Ashley Madison hack has already caused several high-profile embarrassments, exposing Sam Rader, a well-known Christian blogger, and Josh Duggar, a former Christian activist and star of a TLC reality show, as paid users. Authorities are also investigating several reports of extortion and suicide in the wake of the hack.