The media’s shock that lawyer John Dowd wrote a controversial tweet for President Trump about the Russia affair is getting a shrug from those inside the White House and Team Trump. The reason: staff regularly write some of his tweets.
What’s more, staffers even label their tweets as “mild, medium, and hot,” said the president’s former communications director.
At a recent event hosted by the Institute of Politics and Public Service at Georgetown’s McCourt School, Mike Dubke said, “The president writes a good number of his tweets, but some of them are also suggested tweets.”
Dubke told students that the staff typically writes the tweets for the official @WhiteHouse and @POTUS accounts, but that Trump does many of his @realDonaldTrump account tweets, especially those before 8 a.m.
“@realDonaldTrump, which are the ones that generally [get] most of the attention, those are also sometimes written from, there are suggestions,” Dubke said. “As an example, our team would send three sample tweets for consideration at one of the handles, kind of a mild, medium, and hot tweet. I won’t tell you which ones usually made it through, but that was the way we handled it. We’d offer three tweets and a lot of times that’s what you see more so during the kind of working hours,” he added.
I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2017
Secrets wrote about Dubke’s comments in this story.
Trump’s weekend tweet about the firing of former national security advisor Michael Flynn, written by Dowd, has led to suggestions he might face obstruction of justice claims, dismissed by Dowd and other legal scholars.
Dowd said he fumbled the writing of the tweet.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
