Bid to block Twitter Trump

Former undercover CIA agent launches crowdfunding campaign.

WASHINGTON: Valerie Plame Wilson, a media-savvy former undercover CIA agent, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to buy Twitter in order to take away Donald Trump’s favourite communications tool.

“It’s time to shut him down,” Plame said in her pitch for donations on gofundme.com.

“From emboldening white supremacists to promoting violence against journalists, his tweets damage the country and put people in harm’s way. But threatening actual nuclear war with North Korea takes it to a dangerous new level.”

Plame’s plan is simple, if unlikely to succeed: raise US$1bil (RM4.2bil) to buy a controlling interest in Twitter and use that to pressure the social network to ban Trump.

“That’s a small price to pay to take away Trump’s most powerful megaphone and prevent a horrific nuclear war,” she wrote.

Launched last week, Plame’s campaign had raised US$6,000 (RM25,670) as of Wednesday.

Trump’s use of Twitter has been a near daily source of controversy. His intemperate tweets have threatened war, scalded allies and opponents alike, and at times abruptly changed the course of US policy.

The billionaire prefers to express himself on his personal account, @realDonaldTrump, over his formal presidential account @Potus.

He has sometimes removed tweets from his own account, usually because they contain typos. Exasperated critics note that under US law, all the president’s public utterances must be preserved for the record.

Plame’s career as an undercover CIA officer was upended in 2003 after her husband, diplomat Joe Wilson, accused the administration of George W. Bush of lying about the threat posed by Iraq.

Administration officials retaliated by leaking Plame’s secret work for the CIA, in violation of laws that make it a crime to release classified information to the press.

A White House aide was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the case, but Bush later commuted his prison sentence. — AFP