WH: Trump's tweets are official statements as him being POTUS, except when they are not.

[DetlefK]

https://thinkprogress.org/white-house-twitter-personal-eaa2346371e2/

The White House has filed a legal brief arguing people blocked by President Donald Trump’s Twitter account cannot sue him for restricting their access to his tweets. Opponents say the brief is tantamount to claiming the Commander in Chief’s social media use is beyond the reach of the First Amendment, placing the president above the law.

...

White House lawyers flatly rejected this claim in a brief filed on Friday. They argued that not only are the Commander in Chief’s published statements on Twitter not a “state action,” but that individual citizens don’t have standing to sue the president because “it would flout the separation of powers for the Court to issue an order limiting the President’s discretion in managing his Twitter account.”

...

The brief’s insistence that the president’s account is “personal” was also backed by the Department of Justice, which argued in a letter on Friday that the president’s use of the account doesn’t constitute a state action but is just one of “many… personal decisions he makes as president.”

...

Although both the brief and the DoJ claim that the president’s account is personal, for instance, Trump’s own former press secretary Sean Spicer once argued the tweets were “official statements” of the president. What’s more, the White House argued in a June letter to Congress that Trump’s tweets are official state language when discussing Trump’s firing of former FBI director James Comey.

[Sunlei]

1. Trump is to chickenshit to use the official WH & POTUS twitter, cause HE KNOWS he's a bullshitter.

[Vinca]

2. I can't imagine a court siding with this argument.

He uses the same account to put out carefully scripted, normal-sounding, "presidentially" things that he does to issue vile screeds about who or what he's currently mad at.

[Kentonio]

3. They screwed themselves with that letter to congress.