Some historic moments pass in one fell swoop.
President Abraham Lincoln’s reading of the Gettysburg Address lasted only two or three minutes. Last year, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps smashed an ancient record when he swam the 200-meter individual medley in 1 minute and 54.66 seconds.
And then for a brief window on Thursday evening, 330 million Twitter users slid into a world without @realDonaldTrump .
President Trump’s Twitter account — from which he aggressively confronts those who displease him, suggests North Korea “may not be around much longer!” and promotes Trump Tower taco bowls — disappeared.
Twitter intially posted a statement Thursday night saying Trump’s “account was inadvertently deactivated due to human error by a Twitter employee.”
For those few minutes, visitors to Trump’s account were simply met with the message, “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”
“The account was down for 11 minutes, and has since been restored,” the statement read. “We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again.”
But then two hours later, Twitter updated its statement saying that an investigation showed the deactivation “was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day.” Twitter said it would be conducting a full internal review.
[‘DEPORT’: Racist campaign mailers target Asian school board candidates]
Trump has used the account since March 2009. He has tweeted more than 36,000 times and has 41.7 million followers.
Trump has spoken publicly about his reliance on Twitter before. In an interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business Network last month, Trump credited his use of social media as among the reasons he was elected.
“You have to keep people interested also,” he said. “You know, you have to keep people interested.”
Twitter also serves as among Trump’s main tools for deflecting criticisms and attacks. In the same interview, Trump said that “When somebody says something about me, I am able to go bing, bing, bing and I take care of it.”
Trump conceded that those close to him try to steer him away from social media. But he insists on tweeting — spelling errors included — as a weapon against “fake news.”
Trump’s account may have been ”inadvertently” deactivated Thursday, but Twitter has also had to defend its decision not to take down particular presidential tweets.
In a six-tweet thread in September, Trump issues what some took as a threat directed at North Korea.
“Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!” Trump wrote.
As The Post has reported, Twitter prohibits tweets that include violent threats, which some argued was Trump’s intention.
Twitter responded saying a number of factors go into account when evaluating controversial content, including its “newsworthiness” and whether it has “public interest.”
Those tweets confronting North Korea followed other instances where critics called for Trump’s account to be more closely controlled, such as when he tweeted an edited video of himself beating somebody up, the victim’s face replaced by a CNN logo.
And then there are the accounts that Twitter has chosen to suspend. Last month, the actress Rose McGowan took to Twitter to challenge Ben Affleck on his claim that he knew nothing of Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long history of sexual assault and violence towards women.
“You lie,” McGowan wrote in one tweet.
But another tweet led to the temporarily suspension of her account. Despite initially declining to comment on the content of that specific tweet, Twitter later explained that McGowan’s “account was temporarily locked because one of her Tweets included a private phone number, which violates our Terms of Service.”
On Thursday alone, Trump used his account to congratulate the Houston Astros for winning the World Series, call on Congress to “TERMINATE” the diversity visa lottery and announce the nomination of Jerome Powell as the next chair of the Federal Reserve.
Trump was back tweeting at 8:05 p.m., praising the day’s “Great Tax Cut rollout.”
“The lobbyists are storming Capital Hill, but the Republicans will hold strong and do what is right for America!”
It was as if he never left.
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Many Democrats expressed outrage Thursday at allegations from a former party chairwoman that an agreement with the Democratic National Committee gave the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton some day-to-day control over the party early in the 2016 campaign.
Donna Brazile, a former interim chairwoman of the party, says in a forthcoming book that an August 2015 agreement gave the Clinton campaign a measure of direct influence over the party’s finances and strategy, along with a say over staff decisions and consultation rights over issues like mailings, budgets and analytics.
The control was given in exchange for a joint fundraising pledge by the Clinton campaign that helped fund the DNC through the election year, Brazile says.
“This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity,” she wrote in a book scheduled for publication next week, a portion of which was excerpted Thursday in Politico.
Throughout the campaign, the DNC and its then-chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, fiercely denied any suggestion that the party was helping Clinton over other candidates. The presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had criticized Wasserman Schultz for limiting the early primary debate schedule, allowing party money to be used for Clinton fundraising, and briefly cutting off Sanders’s access to the party voter file shortly before the New Hampshire primary after a Sanders staffer inappropriately accessed information.
Some Democrats now say the arrangement is evidence that the concerns were valid. Ray Buckley, the chairman of New Hampshire’s Democratic Party, said that he first learned of the agreement while serving as DNC vice chair in 2016. “The day that Donna discovered this, she called me and I almost passed out,” Buckley said. “We were blatantly misled.”
In response to the report Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a CNN interview that she believed the primary contest between Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders had been rigged. “This is a real problem,” she said. “We have to hold this party accountable.”
President Trump also jumped on the controversy with a tweet on Thursday night that suggested the Justice Department should investigate the “real collusion and dishonesty,” even though Brazile and the Sanders campaign have not alleged criminal activity.
“Donna Brazile just stated the DNC RIGGED the system to illegally steal the Primary from Bernie Sanders,” he wrote.
The current leadership of the party said it would address the problem.
“One of my goals here, as DNC chair, is to make sure that the nominating process for 2020 is a process that’s fair and transparent for everybody,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in an interview with CNBC. “We’re going to set the primary debate schedule well in advance of when we know which candidates will be there.”
Charlie Baker, the chief operating officer of the Clinton campaign, said that in 2015 the campaign agreed to raise money for the parts of the DNC that were going to be most crucial to the general election, including data, research, communications and the like. The agreement also gave the Clinton campaign some say over personnel. If there was a vacancy for a position in one of these departments, the DNC had to consult the campaign on the three finalists but could make the final decision itself.
“We never tried to be presumptuous,” Baker said. “We were literally trying to make sure the DNC had the resources it needed, whoever was the nominee.”
The joint fundraising agreement allowed Clinton to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from individual donors — money that was spread across state parties under federal campaign guidelines. Sanders had a different fundraising model, relying more on small-dollar donations directly to his campaign, and he told the DNC that his campaign was not interested in following the same program.
“The idea that the DNC was willing to take a position that helped a candidate in the midst of a primary is outrageous, and there is no justification for it,” said Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign. “It gets back to the fundamental way that Bernie Sanders was running his campaign, which was to break the stranglehold of big money on politics.”
Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s campaign manager, said in an interview that their campaign was led to believe it had the same joint fundraising agreement as Clinton.
“We were not offered veto power on staff at the DNC, I can tell you that,” said Weaver. “This was a laundering operation. They’d go to fundraisers, they’d get a $350,000 check from donors which was supposed to be divvied up. Instead of disbursing that money, they’d turn around and run a small-dollar fundraising to generate small contributions that went to the Clinton campaign.”
In a September 2015 email obtained by The Washington Post, a lawyer from Perkins Coie, a law firm representing both the DNC and the Clinton campaign, wrote the Sanders campaign with a copy of what was presented as a “standard joint fundraising agreement.”
“This is the same one we have used with other campaigns,” wrote attorney Graham Wilson.
At the end of the same email, Wilson suggested that should the Sanders campaign raise “significantly more” money than was required to pay for the party voter file, then Sanders could have a say in how those funds would be used “to prepare for the general election.”
“The DNC has had discussions like this with the Clinton campaign and is of course willing to do so with all committees raising funds for the Committee,” Wilson wrote.
Weaver said the Sanders campaign decided early on to ignore the joint fundraising program and raise small dollars on its own to pay for access to the voter file. “Who are the wealthy people Bernie was going to bring to a fundraiser?” Weaver asked. “We had to buy the voter file right before the primaries.”
After the election, the effects of the Clinton fundraising effort hit some state parties hard. Jane Kleeb, who took over Nebraska’s Democratic Party in late 2016, discovered that the party had accrued $35,000 in debt for the Clinton campaign.
“Nebraska never even signed the JFA because we . . . didn’t want to be a funnel for, essentially, money-laundering,” Kleeb said. “And now we learn that a small group of establishment Democrats got to determine who our nominee was. That goes against everything that Democratic values are built on.”
Kleeb, who along with Weaver is a member of the Democrats’ post-primary “unity commission,” said the party had made some amends under Perez’s leadership. In his campaign to run the DNC and since, Perez has chastised Wasserman Schultz for turning the party into a vehicle for the presidential campaign.
After Brazile’s book excerpt surfaced, state chairs began calling and emailing each other about a change to the DNC’s rules and bylaws that would forbid any arrangement like the one Clinton got. Buckley and other DNC members suggested that the party should also give DNC members access to its budget, which would have made it clear much earlier how the joint fundraising agreement was affecting the flow of money.
“I will co-sponsor that amendment and vote for it,” Buckley said. “There’s so much reform that has to happen.”
The 2015 agreement was struck at a time when the party’s finances were in a dire situation. Two sources said that it was in danger of not meeting its payroll.
“The Clinton campaign had effectively taken control of the Democratic National Committee in the year before the nominating process began,” said Tad Devine, the top strategist for the Sanders campaign. “They exercised their control through the use of the joint fundraising agreement.”
Read more at PowerPost
