An account in exchange for a stake in the company. This is the deal Parler offered to then-President Donald Trump to turn the online refuge for uninformed extremists into his main social network.
The Trump Organization, which negotiated on behalf of the president, was offered a 40% stake in Parler if Trump made an account on the platform, even though nothing had ever been completed, according to the revised documents. per Buzzfeed News and four sources familiar with the deliberations who spoke with the dam. Talks began sometime last summer and were rekindled in November after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, apparently because he had another online soapbox to blow up (and reap the benefits of) his conspiracy theories about election fraud. According to Buzzfeed News, it is unclear to what extent Trump personally participated in these negotiations.
But while nothing finally came out of the deal, just entertaining those discussions, the Trump Organization could suffer serious legal headaches. It is almost certain that all the nonsense runs into the laws against bribery. It’s also triggering flashbacks from when Trump He tried to arm Microsoft hard to give the U.S. Treasury a cut from any TikTok deal he made.
It turns out that when you put a corrupt businessman at the head of a country, he abuses his power to try to make money. Who would you fool?
According to the media, Trump representatives conspired with Parler to help the platform compete with major social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. The logic is that if Trump posted his nonsense to Parler before sharing it on other platforms, Parler served to take advantage of this exclusivity while giving a direct line to some of his strongest supporters who had already been released everywhere online.
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Parler is considered the “first platform for freedom of expression in the world” free of so-called policies of oppressive moderation and censorship of other platforms. Or at least, that’s what he claimed to be back to when the platform was still running. It has been down since early January, when Parler was launched from Amazon web services, as well as from Google and Apple app stores, for not adopting significant moderation policies that prevent users from posting content type violent which reportedly helped fuel the attack on the Capitol. Hill last month. While Parler has done so ever since we found a new web host—Epik, the domain name registrar behind other extremist repositories like Gab and the Daily Stormer — the site was nothing more than a bulletin board for a handful of challenging messages from Talk about it and its few experts on the right.
During a meeting at the White House last year, former Trump campaign director Brad Parscale was the first to suggest Trump get a stake in the ownership of the deal with Parler, according to a source familiar with the negotiations that spoke to Buzzfeed News. Four sources reported at the outset that Parscale and Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon met the then CEO of Parler, John Matze and shareholders Dan Bongino and Jeffrey Wernick at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida to discuss a possible deal. According to Parscale, Trump never came out in the picture.
“The president was never part of the discussions,” he told BuzzFeed News. “It simply came to our notice then. And that was just one of the many things the campaign was studying to address the Silicon Valley cancellation culture. ”
After the election, the Trump team revisited the idea, according to two people familiar with the matter, but negotiations with Parler worsened after pro-Trump insurgents launched a deadly raid on the building. of the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the election results. Before the deal collapsed, Parler offered the Trump Organization a 40 percent stake in the company, according to a December paper reviewed by Buzzfeed News and two sources with direct knowledge of the talks. Half of this participation would be addressed immediately after sealing the agreement, while the other half would be “spread over sections over the 24-month period of the agreement.” In return, Trump would agree to post all of his content online to Parler at least four hours before posting it anywhere else. Parler also asked Trump to call Parler whenever he posted on other social media platforms or emailed his followers, give access to his email lists for promotional purposes, and introduce the company to potential investors or advertisers.
Wernick confirmed to the media that Parler had been in talks with the Trump Organization about Trump’s installation on the platform, but said the former president was not involved in those discussions. He also discussed Buzzfeed News reports, although he did not go into details about the information he claimed was inaccurate.
“We’ve talked to several people about possible stakes in the company to produce certain things,” Wernick said.
Scott Amey, attorney general for the non-partisan government’s Government Oversight Project, told the media that the news warrant greater control and “immediate criminal investigation.”
“While then-President Trump boasted that the ethical rules did not apply to him, bribery laws do apply and the courts have held that Trump’s posts on social media constituted official business while he held office.” , he said. “His publications were a preferred method for the White House to communicate with the public. If the offer included something of value, and Trump planned to post on a social media platform while he was still in office, that would almost certainly be illegal and he would have to be held accountable. ”
Parler did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Surely you didn’t really expect Trump’s drama to end now that he left the White House, did you? They probably won’t be the last business under the table coming out of his tenure and all we can do is wait for everyone to see their day in court.
[Buzzfeed News]