The Times, in response, claimed to have known about the tweets - and said they were simply Jeong imitating racists. 

"Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers." -NYT

Except this was quickly dispelled after several tweets of Jeong's in which she drops casual bigotry such as "fuck white women" out of the blue were caught by other Twitter users.