Thread by @juliaioffe

Since everyone's talking about old tweets and Trump allies looking for oppo on journalists, let me tell you a story.

On Election Day 2018, I was invited to Steve Bannon's election night watch party. A very strange and frumpy young man approached me.

He told me his name, which I now don't remember. He looked surprised that I didn't know him.

"But I'm the one who tried to get you fired from the Atlantic," he said.

? I said

He told me had been paid by a Republican donor (all he'd say was that his Wikipedia entry...

...had a picture, which, to him indicated power) to hunt for old, compromising tweets of mine. He found an old tweet, from 2010 or 2011 in which I quoted a strange Russian teenager who asked me if there were any real Americans in America "or is everyone a N-word?"

Unfortunately, you couldn't thread tweets at the time and even more unfortunately, I spelled out the N-word.

This young man had been paid by said Republican donor to specifically look into my old tweets and find something compromising.

I stood there, rooted to the spot. I had dealt with this kind of thing in Russia, but not in the United States, except the Russians were more slick about it.

"Noting personal," the young man said as he walked away, but this time he refused to repeat his name.

(I should add that I have apologized for and suffered consequences of this and other bad tweets, and I’m not saying I shouldn’t. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. And there are people, like our President, who suffers zero consequences for his bad tweets.)