Trump's Tweets May Be His Undoing - Josh Marshall

By JOSH MARSHALL Published NOVEMBER 14, 2017 6:24 PM

Many Americans have feelings of shock, embarrassment or just serial cringing watching Donald Trump’s presidential tweets. But intelligence professionals have noted for months that it also provides a priceless channel of information for foreign intelligence services trying to understand the President’s state of mind. All countries diplomatic personnel and intelligence analysts devote immense time and resources to understanding the views, motivations, weaknesses and agendas of key foreign leaders. Trump’s often erratic and impulsive tweeting patterns reveals sleeping patterns, moods, what makes Trump angry, what he’s focused on, who he’s hating or cuddling up to at a given moment. In some cases, his tweets actually having geolocations turned on. So they know precisely where he was. But there’s yet another dimension to Trump’s tweeting and generally impulsive nature and it bears on the Russia investigation.

When I first started writing this post last night, this had only been caught by the Journal’s Byron Tau. Julia Ioffe later incorporated it into a revised version of her Don Jr/Wikileaks exclusive in The Atlantic. Others have noted it over the course of the day.

Here’s the gist.

On October 12, 2016, “Wikileaks” (apparently Julian Assange himself) Twitter DM’d Don Jr: “Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications. Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us. There’s many great stories the press are missing and we’re sure some of your follows [sic] will find it. Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.”

Two days later Don Jr tweeted the link Assange suggested. But only 15 minutes after Assange sent his message, Donald Trump himself tweeted this.

Link to tweet

Could this be a coincidence? Theoretically, yes. In practice, it is almost certain that Don Jr told his dad and his dad wrote up this tweet. This came after Don Jr had asked Assange earlier in the month for information on what turned out to be the Podesta emails. Assange was not only in on-going contact with Don Jr but able to get both father and son to do things with his DMs, specifically he got them to broadcast the documents Russian intelligence operatives had stolen and given to Assange.

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