Official White House Twitter account has bizarre meltdown about Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris
We’ve seen Donald Trump use his personal @RealDonaldTrump account on Twitter to conduct a significant amount of official government business. We’ve also seen him use it to launch partisan and personal attacks on his political adversaries. That’s led to a good amount of legal debate about whether Trump’s personal account is a de facto government account. But there’s no debate about the nature of the official @WhiteHouse account, which is why it was so jarring to see that account posting such a vicious meltdown in the direction of two U.S. Senators.
Senator Elizabeth Warren recently stated that, due to the role that ICE has played in Donald Trump’s illegal kidnapping and caging of thousands of immigrant children, the agency should be abolished. Senator Kamala Harris has stated that ICE should be reevaluated. Other Democratic lawmakers have also spoken out against ICE’s abuses in recent days, but the White House focused in on these two today.
This afternoon the @WhiteHouse Twitter account posted this tweet: “Senator Warren, why are you supporting criminals moving weapons, drugs, and victims across our nation’s borders? You must not know what ICE really does.” It included a link to a propaganda article on the ice.gov website. Then roughly an hour later, the @WhiteHouse account posted this: “Senator Kamala Harris, why are you supporting the animals of MS-13? You must not know what ICE really does.”
Andrea Mitchell of NBC News dug up this statute which suggests that Donald Trump’s White House broke the law by using the @WhiteHouse account in this manner: “Re: White House tweets attacking Senators: Section 1352(a) of Title 31: No part of the money appropriated by any enactment of Congress shall..be used directly or indirectly to pay for any .. written matter… intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress.” Although Twitter is free of charge and there is no taxpayer cost involved in the @WhiteHouse Twitter account itself, it can be argued that money appropriated by Congress is paying the salary of the White House personnel who took the time to post these tweets aimed at influencing two Senators.
The bottom line is that we’ve never seen anything quite like this, even by Donald Trump’s nonexistent ethical standards. It’s also notable that, of the various members of Congress who have criticized ICE’s abuses, the Trump regime used the official @WhiteHouse Twitter account to go after the two who have been widely mentioned as potential presidential candidates in 2020.
