Trump wipes tweets about Strange after Alabama loss

After enthusiastically endorsing an Alabama senator’s campaign for re-election, President Donald Trump distanced himself Tuesday night from the candidate’s loss in the most Trumpian way possible: He deleted his supportive tweets.

Hours after Sen. Luther Strange, R-Ala., lost in Tuesday’s primary runoff, Trump excised at least three favorable Twitter posts, including one sent Tuesday morning. In that tweet, posted as the polls in Alabama opened, the president boasted that Strange “has been shooting up in the Alabama polls since my endorsement.”

Strange, who was appointed to the Senate early this year after Jeff Sessions vacated his seat to become attorney general under Trump, conceded Tuesday night to Roy Moore, a former Alabama Supreme Court justice whose candidacy was opposed by leading establishment Republicans.

The deleted tweets were archived by ProPublica, a nonprofit journalism website, but are no longer public on Twitter, feeding into a legal debate about whether Trump is breaking the law when he expunges his tweets.

As president, Trump has maintained personal control of his Twitter account. He has used his posts to skewer opponents, respond to critics and, he says, to communicate directly to voters without the filter of the media.

At least two government watchdog groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive, argue that Trump may be breaking the law when he deletes tweets.

The groups in June filed a lawsuit against Trump and the Executive Office of the President, claiming that deleting social media posts violates the Presidential Records Act, a law that requires presidential communications to be archived. The groups are also suing to require White House staff to archive material sent through encrypted messaging apps, such as Whats-App and Signal.