Donald Trump isn’t known for deleting tweets for their content, but he’s grown notorious for doing so when a typo is involved. And all of this was fine before he became president, but now, he might be violating federal law when doing so. The House Oversight Committee (HOC) sent a letter to the White House as a warning that Trump’s deleting of tweets may violate the Presidential Records Act.
Trump’s typos would merely be embarrassing on a civilian level, but we’re also talking about a president who created an “unpresidented” snafu:
What better, more organic, Orwellian outcome than for an authoritarian ditz like @realDonaldTrump to coin it? "He was then #Unpresidented" pic.twitter.com/dEzVCYm9hP
— Keith Olbermann⌚️ (@KeithOlbermann) December 17, 2016
The correction arrived after screencaps preserved the evidence. Sad!
China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters – rips it out of water and takes it to China in unprecedented act.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 17, 2016
Trump also misspelled “hereby” twice earlier this month, and the internet noticed.
Tweeting and deleting may seem harmless, but Representatives Jason Chaffetz and Elijah Cumming are hereby hoping that Trump will cool it and explain why in their letter:
“Many of the messages sent from these accounts are likely to be presidential records and therefore must be preserved. It has been reported, however, that President Trump has deleted tweets, and if those tweets were not archived, it could pose a violation of the Presidential Records Act.”
The Huffington Post notes that Trump’s tweets are the property of the National Archives and Records Administration, as part of an initiative by President Obama to auto-archive tweets of top officials in the White House. Later in their letter, Chaffetz and Cummings asked the White House to look into whether their staff is using personal email accounts for work, and they suggest training for proper electronic archiving.
(Via House.Gov & The Huffington Post)