It made the headlines when the Obama administration hired Sam Brinton as the deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the U.S. Department of Energy. In other words, a fairly high-level nuclear guy. On paper, Sam Brinton, an MIT-credentialed nuclear engineer, looked good. In real life, he’s a way out there “genderfluid” man who believes in pretending to be a puppy for sexual reasons. Now, he’s alleged to have stolen a woman’s suitcase at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport (“MSP airport”).

It's hard to express just how strange Sam Brinton is. He shaves his head and swans around in women’s clothes:

New high-ranking official in Biden’s Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy. You can’t make this stuff up! Sam Brinton. Please read text below… pic.twitter.com/KgbJtROIC4

— Kathleen O'Boyle (@oboyle_kathleen) February 10, 2022

He's also a proud “pup handler,” an identity (because leftists always have “identities,” the more, the better) that sees him and his sex buddies dress up like puppies and their owners for fun. It’s unclear if real dogs are involved.  

Brinton is so passionate about his self-acknowledged “kink” that he’s lectured on the “Physics of Kink” at the University of Wisconsin. He’s also a member of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an old-time 501(c)3 drag group that mocks Catholicism, where he rejoices in the name of “Sister Ray Dee O’Active.”

Now, to that list of outré behaviors, we can add “accused luggage thief.” AlphaNews, a Minnesota-based online news outlet, reports that Brinton was charged with felony theft after he allegedly stole a woman’s luggage at the MSP airport. The alleged facts in the criminal complaint (set forth below) are straightforward:

Image: Sam Brinton (the bald guy). Twitter screen grab.

Brinton flew into MSP from D.C. He did not check any luggage before the flight. A flight from New Orleans arrived at MSP at roughly the same time. A woman on that New Orleans flight had checked her navy-blue Vera Bradley roller bag. The criminal complaint does not say what was in the bag, but the woman has asserted that the bag and its contents were worth approximately $2,325. When the woman went to collect her bag from the baggage area, it wasn’t there.

According to the complaint, surveillance footage shows Brinton removing a bag from the luggage carousel and removing the luggage tag, which he placed in his purse, at which point he “then left the area at a quick pace.” The woman whose bag was stolen viewed the surveillance video and said that the bag Brinton took was her bag.

The complaint further alleges that Brinton went from the airport to an Intercontinental hotel, where he was observed checking in with the blue bag. Two days later, he was back at MSP airport to fly back to D.C, and he had the same bag with him. Apparently, he also took the bag with him on a trip to Europe, returning with the bag on October 9.

The police phoned Brinton when he returned from the trip and asked him outright if he “took anything that did not belong to him.” At that point, according to the complaint, Brinton’s stories kept changing.

Version One: “Not that I know of.”

Version Two: “If I had taken the wrong bag, I am happy to return it, but I don’t have any clothes for another individual. That was my clothes when I opened the bag,”

Version Three: He wasn’t being “completely honest.” He took the bag by accident because fatigue made him think it was his. Once he realized what he had done, he “got nervous” and didn’t “know what to do.” Because he was worried that some might think he “stole the bag,” he left the women’s clothes in the hotel. He hung onto the bag, though, because it would have been weird to abandon it.

The police told Brinton how to get the bag back to Delta, so it could be returned to the woman, but the complaint, which was filed at the end of October, says that the woman still didn’t have her bag. Additionally, the police contend that they did not find the women’s clothes in the hotel room.

Brinton, his attorneys, and the Department of Energy have all declined to comment. They might have to say something as of December 19, when Brinton is due to appear in court.

Currently, all we have are allegations. However, Brinton’s alleged statements seem like a perfect plotline for an old I Love Lucy episode, one in which Lucy responds hysterically and, therefore, comedically to inadvertently taking the wrong luggage. However, it’s not funny when a person in charge of one aspect of America’s nuclear energy sector, is alleged to have acted like Lucy Ricardo. Most people would immediately phone the airline and say, “Whoops! How can I make this right?” According to the complaint, though, that’s the one thing that doesn’t seem to have occurred to Sam Brinton.