The first 100 days of the Trump presidency were a rollercoaster of fun and existential terror for many. That doesn’t appear likely to change anytime soon, especially after a new report that the President himself was “directly involved” in trying to suss out who embarrassed him by tweeting out photos comparing the crowd sizes at his inauguration and Obama’s in 2009.
After Sean Spicer famously insisted the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration was bigger during his first press briefing, Reince Priebus said it was the media’s fault, and Trump complained about media coverage of the crowd sizes in front of the memorial wall at CIA headquarters, in a matter of days, it seemed the story ran its course. However, thanks to a FOIA request, we now know that Trump himself put pressure on anyone he could to unmask the rogue tweeter behind the infamous National Parks Service tweet that showed the stark difference in crowd sizes. Per CBS:
“Obviously, this has become a very sensitive issue, especially since the President has gotten directly involved and contacted Acting Director Mike Reynolds concerned about one of the images that was retweeted,” wrote Tim Cash, Chief of Digital Strategy at the National Park Service in a Jan. 21 email to Shaun Cavanaugh, the agency’s Chief Information Security Officer.
Like some sort of C-grade spy thriller, the FOIA request also unearthed a memo describing the National Parks Services’ efforts to find the tweeter. After running down the ISP of the posts to northern California, the agency thought the post may have been an accidental posting of material meant for a personal account (which “has happened on multiple occasions in the past with other NPS social media accounts,” according to the memo), but the agency concluded the account might be compromised. Sounds like taxpayer-funded man hours well spent.
(Via CBS)