Trump Retweets Spam Account Tweet Naming Whistleblower

President Donald Trump raged on Twitter Friday night against the whistleblower whose complaint against him nearly singlehandedly caused his impeachment.

Trump retweeted several anti-Democrat memes as well as a tweet that naming the whistleblower. The name has not been verified to be the whistleblower, and the claim is seemingly unsubstantiated.

Trump retweeted user @surfermom77 who named the alleged whistleblower. While Trump has consistently pushed for the person’s identity to be revealed, this is the first time he retweeted a tweet with an unsubstantiated name.

On Saturday night, that tweet along with several others he published on Dec. 27 disappeared, causing many to believe he or his staff had deleted them. However, Twitter blamed a software “outage” for hiding the tweets from some users.

“Due to an outage with one of our systems, tweets on account profiles were visible to some, but not others. We’re still working on fixing this and apologize for any confusion,” the statement reads. A Twitter spokesman confirmed that Trump’s account was among the millions of accounts affected by the glitch.

By Sunday morning, the tweets were visible to all 68 million of the president’s followers.

The account @surfermom77 appeared to be a bot, retweeting in high quantity and using a stock image as the profile photo.

Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio told CNN Saturday afternoon that the platform has suspended some of the accounts that Trump had retweeted Friday night. Twitter often suspends accounts that are seemingly inauthentic.

In addition to @surfermom77, an account called @trumpgirlonfire that Trump had quoted with “The Wall is funded & being built!” is no longer visible.

While Twitter has policies designed to protect whistleblowers, such as preventing sharing confidential information about his or her address and phone number, these protections do not include listing a name.