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Musicmystery -> RE: President Trump sued for blocking people on Twitter (7/12/2017 3:56:51 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery
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ORIGINAL: RottenJohnny
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ORIGINAL: Musicmystery
I honestly don't remember -- it was a few months back. But you could Google it, I'm sure.
I already gave it a quick look but didn't really see anything except the joke pages about his tweets. But it occurs to me that if the President can sit in a press conference and ignore some of the reporters he can easily justify blocking tweeters.
OK, I took a look ... it's along the lines of this one:
https://gcn.com/articles/2017/02/01/twitter-presidential-records.aspx
The issue at the time was deleting tweets, which are now presidential records.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-deleted-tweets-violate-presidential-records-act-article-1.2952416
Even beyond cybersecurity, [Trump's] ad-hoc approach suggests the Trump White House has not fully adjusted to the complexities of life in the federal government.
When Trump deleted a tweet, he likely violated the President Records Act, a 1978 law that requires all presidential writings be preserved. Congress recently amended it to include electronic records.
“If he uses his Twitter account for official presidential business, it should be subject to the Presidential Records Act,” Caroline Mala Corbin, a constitutional law professor at the University Miami, said.
Congress passed the law “after the Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s attempt to hide his records,” she said, to establish that all presidential records “must be preserved.”
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/twitter-presidency-experts-see-both-risks-rewards-trump-n712771
Deleting a tweet is commonplace -- Twitter does not allow users to edit their messages after they post. The question is whether Trump is violating the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which requires all the president's records be preserved for eventual release to the public on a delayed basis long after the commander in chief leaves office.
The National Archives and Records Administration is tasked with managing the records. Reached by CNN on Friday, NARA spokesman John Valceanu said the PRA should be followed but directed all questions about the current president to the White House.
Reached for comment, Kelly Love, a White House spokeswoman, said Saturday, "We have systems in place to capture all tweets and preserve them as presidential records; even if they have been deleted."
She did not immediately provide further details, including whether those "systems" would apply to Trump's personal account as stringently as they do the @POTUS account. The PRA specifically does not distinguish between personal and work efforts, and the last provision of the law prohibits personal communications unless there is government redundancy.
Guidance from NARA on the act said presidential records "can be in any media, including textual, audiovisual and electronic." This would almost certainly include tweets from the President's personal account as it does to the official @potus account handed down to Trump from former President Barack Obama.
Trump often deletes tweets from his personal account over spelling mistakes and then quickly tweets corrected versions. There are caveats in the law for personal records, like a private diary, but the act "requires the president and his staff to take all practical steps to file personal records separately from presidential records."
The responsibility for complying with the law lies with the President. Whether the President has violated the spirit of the law is a trickier question.
"The PRA gives ownership of all presidential records to the United States (we the people), and all of those records must be transferred to the Archivist of the United States after the president leaves office," Shontavia Johnson, a law professor at Drake University Law School, wrote in an email to CNN. "The only presidential records that can be disposed of are those that 'no longer have administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value.' To completely dispose of presidential records, including tweets, the president has to go through certain complex steps with the Archivist, who has years of training maintaining such information."
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/18/politics/presidential-records-act-donald-trump-twitter/index.html
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