According to reports, Donald Trump was in talks to acquire a 40% stake in Parler in exchange for the then president agreeing to post first on the social media app that has become the platform of choice for many of his followers.
Negotiations, which would have taken place while Trump was still president, ended after White House lawyers opposed it, saying the deal would violate ethical standards and potentially expose him to bribery charges.
BuzzFeed News, which first got the news of the talks, obtained documents describing the proposed deal.
According to BuzzFeed News, the Trump company would have immediately received a 20% stake, while the remaining 20% would have been delivered in installments over a two-year period.
Donald Trump (seen above in West Palm Beach, Florida on Jan. 20) was offered a 40% stake in the Social Media Talking app, according to BuzzFeed News
Parler presents itself as a social media platform that allows for “free expression”.
The then president should have accepted that Parler was his main means of communication with his supporters.
This meant that Trump would have had to post all of his content on social media (including posts, videos, and live broadcasts) to Parler for at least four hours before posting it on any other platform, according to the proposal.
Parler also asked Trump to reconnect with the site when he posted to the rest of the social media platforms or when he emailed his followers.
Trump would also have been forced to give Parler access to his email lists so the site could promote his platform to his many followers.
Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, addressed the idea of Trump partnering with Parler in 2019
According to BuzzFeed News, Trump representatives were in talks with two Parler interest groups: Fox News commentator Dan Bongino (left) and investor Jeffrey Wernick (right)
The Trump company, the Trump Organization, was negotiating with Parler executives on behalf of the then president when it was first raised last summer, according to the report.
Parler was represented in talks by two of his prominent shareholders: Fox News commentator and Trump supporter Dan Bongino, and Jeffrey Wernick, one of Parler’s first investors.
DailyMail.com has sought reviews from Parler and Bongino.
“The president was never part of the discussions,” former Trump campaign director Brad Parscale told BuzzFeed News.
The discussions were never so substantial.
“And that was just one of the many things the campaign was studying to address Silicon Valley’s culture of cancellation.”
Wernick told BuzzFeed that Trump never took part in any discussion about bringing him to Parler.
“We’ve talked to several people about possible stakes in the company to produce certain things,” Wernick said.
He said the non-disclosure agreements made between Parler and the Trump Organization prevented him from detailing details of what was discussed.
Legal experts quoted by BuzzFeed News said the reported deal could have been illegal, as Trump would basically get a financial reward from a company that received exclusive content while he was acting president.
After Trump lost his candidacy for re-election in November, the two sides reconsidered the idea, but talks broke down after Parler was distorted by big tech giants like Apple, Google and Amazon who accused him of not moderating extremist content.
Parler hoped Trump would help increase traffic by getting him to post content on his platform before he did so on other social media apps.
Trump advisers thought Parler offered an alternative to major apps like Facebook and Twitter, which has long been accused of anti-conservative bias.
As the outgoing president negotiated with Parler, he used the other platforms to mount a public relations campaign aimed at discrediting President Joe Biden’s election victory.
Earlier this week, Parler CEO John Matze said he was fired after a disagreement with one of the company’s top financial sponsors over its content moderation policies.
In the weeks following the Nov. 3 election, Trump posted hundreds of messages alleging he was the victim of widespread election fraud that robbed him of victory.
Both Twitter and Facebook resigned from their posts, prompting suspicions that companies were looking to censor the outgoing president.
On January 6, Trump held a rally near the White House on the same day Congress met to ratify Biden’s election victory.
After Trump spoke, hundreds of rally attendees stormed the Capitol, outrunning police and sending lawmakers frantically hidden for fear of their lives.
Five people, including a Capitol police officer, were killed in the riots.
Amid the chaos and tension that followed the riots, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms banned Trump, saying there was a risk that he would use his accounts to encourage more violence.
In an instant, Trump was deprived of his key mode of communication with his 88 million Twitter followers and the more than 35 million people who followed him on Facebook.
After Trump’s expulsion from major apps, millions of users flocked to Parler, though he also had issues.
Parler, who mostly welcomes far-right users who support Trump and in many cases encouraged the riots, was removed from Apple and Google app stores.
Amazon also removed it from a web hosting platform, making it inaccessible to users.
The big tech companies accused Parler of not cracking down on extremist content and called for violence.
Talks between the Trump Organization were reportedly broken after Amazon Web Services withdrew Talking about cloud-based servers
Parler disappeared from the network last month with an error message saying “we can’t connect to the server” after Amazon unplugged
Parler’s then-CEO John Matze, 27, accused the big tech giants of censoring his platform.
Parler sued Amazon last month for antitrust violations. It has also tried to get back online with the help of a Russian Internet security company, DDos-Guard, but users have not been able to post yet.
Earlier this week, Matze said he was fired from his position by the company’s board after a disagreement with Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, one of the app’s key financial sponsors who owns a stake. majority.
Mercer reportedly set up a team to run the site in Matze’s absence, including British lawyer Matthew Richardson and tea party activist Mark Meckler.
Matze said Wednesday that he and Mercer disagreed on whether Parler should do more to moderate extremist content on his platform.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Matze wanted to strengthen the site’s content moderation mechanism so that it could be returned to app stores managed by Google and Apple.
Matze said the works council did not agree with his suggestion to ban certain groups affiliated with domestic terrorists.
Matze’s claim was disputed by Amy Peikoff, Parler’s chief policy officer, who called his statements “misleading.”
“The owners and managers of the company worked tirelessly to build a resilient, partisan platform dedicated to freedom of expression, civil speech and user privacy,” it said in the statement.
The idea of Trump becoming a partial owner of Parler was first raised by Parscale.
Trump was removed from social media apps Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and others after the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in which five people died.
Trump’s banishment from Twitter meant he could no longer communicate with his 88 million followers on the platform
Trump was also banned by Facebook, where the former president had more than 35 million followers
Parscale addressed the idea with Trump during a meeting last year at the White House, according to BuzzFeed News.
A Trump-Parler partnership intrigued Parscale, who first raised the idea of the then president creating an account on the controversial platform.
In the days following some of his aides, Trump was being encouraged to settle accounts with Parler and another social media platform with fewer restrictions on hate content, Gab.
But he finally decided against it after his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and another adviser, Dan Scavino, discouraged him, Bloomberg News reported.
Matze said the Parler count finally has about 15 million users in its place, including the former president’s two eldest sons, Eric and Don Jr., as well as many former White House staff who served in the Trump administration.