Coordinator on Global Anti-Corruption Richard Nephew is seen here during a 2019 hearing.
Susan Walsh/AP
Richard Nephew wants you to know that he’s in on the “Rich Nephew” jokes.
Nephew was named to a top anti-corruption post at the State Department on Tuesday.
On Twitter, he wrote that the jokes were “straight up hilarious and had not occurred to me until now.”
Bob’s your uncle and, yes, Richard Nephew has heard all of your jokes about his name.
That was until Secretary of State Antony Blinken named the international sanctions expert to effectively become a new anti-corruption czar on Tuesday, making one of Washington’s top graft hunters Rich Nephew.
“Alright, I’ve heard a *lot* of “nephew” jokes in my time, but this is straight up hilarious and had not occurred to me until now,” Nephew wrote on Twitter in response to MSNBC Hayes Brown pointing out that the juxtaposition of name and title was, well, rich.
Brown wasn’t the only one to point out that Nephew’s name and the post made for a perfect punchline that just made sense.
“I think that we can all agree that it’s funny to put ‘Rich Nephew’ in charge of your anti-corruption efforts,” the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy chimed in. “This is something we can all still unite around, yes?”
In all seriousness, rooting out global corruption has been a major policy goal for the Biden administration. President Joe Biden himself has made reining in graft a major peg in his broader push for a worldwide democratic revival in the face of autocrats amassing power.
“Corruption threatens United States national security, economic equity, global anti-poverty and development efforts, and democracy itself,” Biden said last June.
Before Blinken tapped Nephew for his current role, he was working as a deputy special envoy for Iran. During the Obama administration, Nephew served as the sanctions expert on the team negotiating the Iran nuclear deal.