Trump tweets on whistleblower’s ID
He shares post offering alleged name
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump retweeted a post that included the alleged name of the anonymous whistleblower whose complaint ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment by the House.
Just before midnight Friday, Trump retweeted a message from Twitter user Surfermom77, an account that claims to belong to a woman named Sophia who lives in California. The account shows some indications of automation, including an unusually high amount of activity and profile pictures featuring stock images from the internet.
By Saturday morning, the post seemed to have disappeared on many users’ feeds, suggesting Trump had deleted it, though it could still be found in other ways, including on a website that logs every presidential tweet.
The retweet then reappeared Saturday night. Twitter told The Associated Press that an outage with one of its systems caused tweets on some accounts, including Trump’s, to be visible to some but not others.
While Trump has repeatedly backed efforts to unmask the whistleblower, his retweet marks the first time he has directly sent an alleged name into the Twitter feeds of his 68 million followers.
Unmasking the whistleblower, who works in the intelligence field, could violate federal protection laws that have historically been supported by both parties.
The whistleblower filed a complaint in August about one of Trump’s telephone conversations with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other dealings with the Eastern European nation. The complaint prompted House Democrats to launch an investigation that ended with Trump’s impeachment earlier this month.
Central points from the whistleblower’s complaint were confirmed during the House impeachment hearings by a string of diplomats and other career officials, many of whom testified in public. The White House also released a transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelenskiy, in which he asks for help investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee.
Speculation about the whistleblower’s identity has been circulating in conservative media and on social media for months.
U.S. whistleblower laws exist to protect the identities and careers of people who bring forward accusations of wrongdoing by government officials. The AP typically does not reveal the identities of whistleblowers.
Trump insists he did nothing wrong in his dealings with Ukraine and has asserted that the whistleblower made up the complaint. Trump also argues that he has a right to face his accuser and has called on the whistleblower to step forward.
For months, an array of right-wing personalities, proTrump internet sleuths and some conservative news outlets have published what they claim to be details about the whistleblower, including the person’s name and career history. The president himself had also been inching closer to attempting to out the individual; last week, Trump shared a tweet linking to a Washington Examiner article that included the alleged name.
Surfermom77, the Twitter handle on the post Trump retweeted, describes herself as a “100%Trump Supporter” and California resident.
Surfermom77 has displayed some hallmarks of a Twitter bot, an automated account. A recent profile picture on the account, for instance, is a stock photo of a woman in business attire that is available for use online.
That photo was removed Saturday and replaced with an image of Trump.
A deeper look at the account shows the user previously used two other stock photos as profile pictures.
Surfermom77 has also tweeted far more than typical users, more than 170,000 times since the account was activated in 2013. The account has posted, on average, 72 tweets a day, according to Nir Hauser, chief technology officer at VineSight, a technology firm that tracks online misinformation.
“That’s not something most humans are doing,” Hauser said.
While many bots only repost benign information such as cat photos, others have been used to spread disinformation or polarizing claims, as Russian bots did before the 2016 election.
Facebook has a policy banning posts that name the alleged whistleblower. But Twitter, which doesn’t have such a rule, has not removed the tweet from Supermom77 or tweets from others who have attempted to name the whistleblower.
Some details about the whistleblower that have been published online by Trump’s supporters have been inaccurate or misrepresented.
For example, a photo shared widely on social media last month was circulated by Facebook, Reddit and Twitter users who wrongly said it showed the whistleblower with Obama’s staffers outside the White House as Trump moved in.
The individual in the photo actually was R. David Edelman, a former special assistant to Obama on economic and technology policy. Edelman denied it and said he received threats online as a result of the claims.
Michael German, an FBI whistleblower who left the agency after reporting allegations of mismanagement in counterterrorism cases, said outing government whistleblowers not only puts them at personal risk but also discourages other government officials from stepping forward to expose possible wrongdoing.