Dan Katz's Eggplant Emoji Venmo Transaction Is Leading to Some Tough Questions

In case you weren't already aware, the Trump administration is not exactly putting a huge premium on digital security. The most high-profile example of this trend so far has been the discovery of a Signal group that included a journalist and some incredibly sensitive war plans.

Throughout the administration to date, though, reporters have also been finding Venmo accounts for various administration officials, many of which contain public histories of every transaction they ever made. While most of these transactions are anodyne, some have locked on to one in particular and are wondering what it means. Here's what we know.

According to reporting in Wired, Dan Katz, the chief of staff of the Treasury Department, had a public Venmo account where his transaction history was viewable, and you could also gain access to his wife's account. The most alarming part of Katz's Venmo history, though, was the fact that there was a 2018 transaction where he sent a payment to someone and added an eggplant emoji in the notes section.

Putting emojis in the notes line of a Venmo transaction is common practice, so Katz could have been messing around with his use of the emoji.

As many people are likely aware, though, the eggplant emoji is typically used to stand in for male genitalia, which left some wondering whether Katz had used Venmo to pay for sex. We can't say for sure whether that was the meaning behind the emoji or not, though.

Eggplants don't have a single, unified meaning on Venmo, although the most common one is undoubtedly the one referenced above. Whether Katz was just messing around or this was something a little more real is impossible to say from just looking at his Venmo history.

All we know for sure is what's in the account, and what's in the account suggests that Katz paid someone in 2018 and thought that an eggplant would be an appropriate description.

Regardless of what exactly the eggplant emoji might mean, what seems clear is that the account information should not be accessible to the public. Venmo leaves that setting on by default, but it's not hard to turn it off, and you would think that a member of a presidential administration would know that every public record they have would be scrutinized by journalists, and with good reason.

Sometimes, someone has to accidentally add you to a Signal chat in order to find out about secret war plans. Sometimes, though, all you have to do is search Venmo for members of the administration to find things that are interesting. They might not quite rise to the level of bombing plans, but an eggplant emoji is worth plenty of stories on its own, regardless of whether it means what we all think it might.