Donald Trump May Have Broken the Law by Deleting His Tweet?!

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by Amna El Tawil
 
When it comes to Twitter, we rarely think of it as a website where one can, actually, break the law. It’s primarily a social media platform where you tweet about your day and many other things. For President Donald Trump, Twitter is a way of expressing his thoughts and informing the public about his plans, ideas, and facts that we don’t get to see on TV. That’s why the reports that a simple action such as deleting his tweet could be considered as breaking the law during Mr. Trump’s first day in the office.
 
The Independent writes: “President Trump could be in breach of an Act of Congress when he deletes tweets and edits typos without archiving them. On day one of his reign in the White House, President Trump deleted a tweet that misspelled the word “honored” from his personal account, which he has built up over eight years. The tweet was corrected with the right spelling and tweeted again from his new Presidential Twitter account.”
 


Although Trump has a fair share of misspelled tweets just like everyone else, this was his very first tweet in the role of the President of the United States.
 
The seemingly innocent action of deleting a tweet without archiving it violates the Presidential Records Act which dictates that all presidents and vice presidents must archive their correspondence and preserve records. Although in the 1978 Act of Congress nobody mentioned Twitter, duh, but President Obama’s administration archived every tweet he sent out.
 
Ezra Mechaber, a former President Obama staffer, tweeted Saturday: ““We eventually set up auto-archiving for official platforms, so errors could be corrected while preserving the original. If it’s not being archived they’re really starting to blur some records laws.”
 


The official White House website says that only tweets and DMs from the White House Twitter profiles are archived.