Trump Retweet of Alleged Whistle-Blower’s Name is Back on Twitter

(Bloomberg) -- A retweet by President Donald Trump, naming the alleged whistle-blower whose complaint triggered the investigation that resulted in his impeachment, was restored to Twitter late Saturday.The post, originally from the handle @Surfermom77, was retweeted by Trump to his 68 million followers about midnight Friday and by Saturday morning was no longer visible in the president’s Twitter feed. CNN first reported late Saturday that the temporary removal followed a Twitter glitch that affected certain accounts, not deliberate action to delete the tweet by Trump or someone with access to his account.“Due to an outage with one of our systems, tweets on account profiles were visible to some, but not others,” the social media site posted on its @TwitterSupport account.The tweet identifies an individual it says is the whistle-blower: the person who first raised the alarm about the president’s conduct in his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.A mystery also surrounded the @Surfermom77 Twitter handle, which by Sunday night appeared to have been wiped from the social media site. Trump’s retweet was being directed to a different account, @4Shereene4, or “Leona.” @Surfermom77 had described herself as living in California and a “100% Trump supporter” -- as did the @4Shereen4 handle. On Saturday afternoon the account, with its pro-Trump and anti-Democratic material, was shown as having been “temporarily restricted.” It was visible again on Sunday morning but by late Sunday afternoon appeared to have been erased, with followers down to five from 78,000 and no biographical information.Confirming the identify of the account holder is next to impossible, but the original @Surfermom77 handle shared some traits common to fake accounts. Since its inception in 2013, the user’s profession evolved from “historian-documentary writer” to “educator” to “image model,” according to older versions of the account archived by the Wayback Machine. The name of the account holder also changed, from “Sophia” to “Evonne” and back to “Sophia.”Surfermom77 also appeared more than 1,000 times in Twitter’s own data set detailing accounts the company has removed and attributed to state-backed operations. The handle appeared in conversations Twitter deemed to be run by Russia and its Internet Research Agency, along with Iran and Venezuela. In late 2016 the account was linked to Gab, another social media platform popular among the extreme right wing.The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment on Trump’s Twitter activity.Trump has posted about the whistle-blower dozens of times over the months and also suggested in comments to reporters that he would like to unmask or face the individual.“Like every American, I deserve to meet my accuser,” Trump tweeted in September.On Thursday Trump also retweeted a link to a Dec. 3 article from the conservative Washington Examiner newspaper that carried the name of the alleged whistle-blower.Attorney Andrew Bakaj, who represents the whistle-blower, lamented in a tweet on Saturday that U.S. lawmakers, who in the past have championed the privacy rights of whistle-blowers, including Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, have shown “deafening” silence recently.“This is a defining moment where legacies will either be solidified or destroyed,” Bakaj said on Twitter.(Updates with details of Twitter activity from eight paragraph.)To contact the reporters on this story: Ros Krasny in Washington at rkrasny1@bloomberg.net;Kartikay Mehrotra in San Francisco at kmehrotra2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: James Ludden at jludden@bloomberg.net, Ros Krasny, Steve GeimannFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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