Trump Officials Used Secret Twitter Account To Attack Enemies

A trove of documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request have revealed that officials within the Trump Administration's Interior Department set up an anonymous Twitter account to attack their critics. The documents show that the officials believed this would be an effective way to fight back criticism that the agency was receiving, but they were careless enough to use their official emails to set up the account. Farron Cousins explains what happened.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

According to new documents obtained by Huffington post via a freedom of information act, request the interior department during the Trump administration actually created a fake Twitter account in order to attack their enemies. And this Twitter account by the way, was approved by some of the top individuals at the interior part department. Okay. This wasn't just a couple little rogue, you know, Monday through Friday employees, these were people in positions of power who created what was called the no bull bison account so that they could go out to their enemies. What happened was this 2018, early 2019, the agency was getting annoyed about the fact that their decisions that they were making were being criticized by liberal groups for, you know, putting the country in danger. And of course in dangerous natural wildlife here in the United States, the decisions to drill here, put a pipeline there really bad.

And of course, liberal organizations talked about that. They put out reports detailing the potential damage and folks at the interior department got angry, but rather than doing the mature thing and putting out official statements, trying to debunk what these groups like center for American progress were putting out there. No, no, no, no. They decided to be infantile about it and created the no bull bison Twitter account so that they could go after center for American progress. Here's what it is. Uh, Daniel, George, Johnny, the agency's top lawyer and Todd Willens, who was then the acting chief of staff for then interior secretary David Bernhardt were among those involved in crafting the initial rebuttal of cap's report. Willens forwarded cap's report without comment to two colleagues on April 18th, 2019, Casey, Stemmler a senior advisor at the U S fish and wildlife service responded later that morning, writing that he'd quote become sick and tired of various people in groups claiming the order does this or that, or it will lead to this or that it would be great if we had a communication effort so I can lay out the facts.

All right, you with me continues here. Then you have faith. Vandervort the interior department's top spokesperson who used her official government email account to set up the no bull bison Twitter account. Uh, she quickly chimed in quote, I think this would make a fantastic first, no bull from the bison tweet. And then of course, after some back and forth, because the people she was emailing with, the other people mentioned were confused about what the hell she was talking about. She explained to them, and again, this is according to the emails obtained by the Huffington post, explained to them, she'd created this Twitter account. We're going to use it to go after our enemies. And then they were like, oh, that's a great idea. Do it. And she did. Now the no bull buys and Twitter account never became popular. In fact, they only actually even tweeted five times and I think they had a grand total of seven followers.

So it's not like the account did any good at all, but the fact that they did it, the fact that they had ongoing communications about what to tweet from the bowl, rather than being grownups going out there, holding a press conference, putting out counter reports, you know, to prove their points. If they hadn't, they didn't do any of that. They didn't do any of the traditional things that you would expect the federal government to do. Uh, number one being ignore it. I love how they always forget that. That's the number one option like you sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all. Like, just let it go, let it go. But they couldn't do that. They would rather make fools of themselves again, using their official government email account. Like don't, you know, that we can get that information here, you idiots. And it is what it is.

Uh, no bull bison, um, no longer operating. So I guess that's a good thing, but here's a problem I'm willing to bet this is happening more often than we think. And not just with government agencies, by the way, we already know this is happening with people on the right. You know, influencers are people who like to be big on social media, it's happening on the left.