The bill would expand
the Presidential Records Act to include the president's use of his personal account.
Quigley, the founder and current co-chair
of the Congressional Transparency Caucus, said in a statement:
In order to maintain public trust in
government, elected officials must answer for what they do and say; this
includes 140-character tweets. President Trump’s frequent, unfiltered use of
his personal Twitter account as a means of official communication is unprecedented.
If the President is going to take to social media to make sudden public policy
proclamations, we must ensure that these statements are documented and
preserved for future reference. Tweets are powerful, and the President must be
held accountable for every post.
Alex Howard, deputy director for the
transparency advocacy group the Sunlight Foundation, told us that his group is
supporting Quigley’s proposal. Howard echoed Quigley’s concerns over Trump’s
use of his personal Twitter account to make statements of policy, saying that
it has created “heightened attention to the issues of preservation and
constitutionality.”
Howard said of the president:
He has the power of the “bully pulpit” that
he could be leveraging to address the nation on television. He could be calling
weekly press conferences. He could be going to our national monuments or other
venues. He is choosing to go directly to the public using social media
personally in a way that a chief executive hasn’t before.
However, Howard also said that while
Trump’s public posts merit scrutiny, it would be useful for any legislation
requiring them to be archived to include private messages sent on the platform:
It is certainly true to say that the
President of the United States’ statements are always going to be read. And
even if they’re deleted quickly, the odds are quite good that they’ll be
instantly screen-shotted and otherwise kept. And the White House itself has
attested to the fact that they will be preserved under the PRA, including deletions.
But what’s missing, I think, is a recognition or attestment and transparent
mechanism regarding the preservation of deleted direct messages or direct
messages at all because those are also relevant under the PRA.
A spokesperson for Quigley’s office, Tara
Vales, told us that there has no discussion concerning expanding his bill to
include direct messages, saying that “we’d also have to look into whether
that’s public versus private communication.” Vales added that several of
Quigley’s Democratic colleagues have contacted his office about potentially
co-sponsoring the bill.
The title of the bill stems from the
non-word Trump posted (and
later deleted) on Twitter on 31 May 2017 (probably a mangling of the word
“coverage,” but no one would confirm or deny it). White House Press Secretary
Sean Spicer later said that “the president and a small group
of people knew exactly what he meant.” Spicer has also said that
Trump’s Twitter posts “are considered official statements by the president of
the United States.”
The National Archives and Records
Administration said in
a March 2017 letter to Democratic lawmakers in March 2017 that it had been
assured by White House officials that it was preserving Trump’s tweets,
including those he deleted.
Twitter did not have a comment on Quigley’s
proposal as of press time. We reached out to the White House for a comment, but
have not yet received a response.
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