Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has been trying to position himself as a somewhat more middle-of-the-road version of his father ahead of a possible presidential bid in 2016. But one of his close aides might prove a bit too controversial for that image to stick.

From 1999 until becoming Paul’s social media director last year, Jack Hunter was a radio host in South Carolina with a decidedly pro-Confederate point of view. He was known as the “Southern Avenger” and wrote on his website of his admiration for John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin.

As far as that moderate image is concerned, Hunter has also said that Paul is “just ‘play[ing] the game,’” according to a report in the Daily Caller.

Hunter also served as chairman of the League of the South, a group that he calls “fairly radical” while denying the Anti-Defamation League’s charge that it is “implicitly racist.” According to the original Washington Free Beacon story on the matter, the group describes itself as “advocat[ing] the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States from this forced union and the formation of a Southern republic.”

Hunter would don a Confederate flag mask while performing his shock jock duties and was harshly critical of Lincoln in particular. He went so far as comparing “believ[ing] in the ideals of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and George Washington” and “at the same time honor[ing] Abraham Lincoln” to “praising Jesus and worshipping Satan.”

Hunter, who co-wrote 2010’s The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Paul, apparently “renounced most of his comments” in an interview with the Free Beacon on Monday. Hunter distanced himself from many of his old radical views while also saying that his job over that period was to say “the craziest things” he could. “It’s not that you don’t mean it – it’s just you express it in ways that does more harm than good,” he told the Beacon.

Responding to the report of Hunter’s past, Paul spokeswoman Moira Bagley said that the senator “holds his staff to a standard that includes treating every individual with equal protection and respect, without exception.”

Former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford touted Hunter’s endorsement in the special congressional election there in May of this year, tweeting a link to the Southern Avenger web site.

While Hunter now says that he no longer believes Lincoln’s assassination was a good thing, he once said that he would make a toast to the assassin on Booth’s birthday every year.