BREAKING NEWS: Despite Media Claims Trump Erased His Efforts to Out a CIA Whistleblower, a 12/26 Tweet Linking to an Article with the Alleged Name of the Whistleblower in its Headline Is Still Up—Raising Doubts Over Whether Trump Thinks Such Tweets Are Witness Intimidation or Not 
1/ Legally speaking, it's far *more* interesting that Trump illegally deleted a 12/27 tweet seeking to out the whistleblower while leaving *up* a 12/26 attempt to do the same thing, as it means two things: (1) Trump knows it's wrong to do what he's doing; (2) he's still doing it.
2/ It also means: (3) Major media is *still* missing the fact that Trump sought to ought the whistleblower on 12/26, as discussed on this feed in a tweet with 26,000+ retweets and 66,000+ likes; (4) neither major media *nor* Trump saw the tweet on this feed on that subject; or...
3/ (5) Trump saw he was being chewed out for his 12/26 *and* 12/27 tweets, but only deleted the latter because he presumed—apparently correctly—major media would ignore the former, and figures he's in the clear so long as only Twitter, and not major media, catches him in a crime.
4/ I'm obviously "sad" that 26,000+ retweets and 66,000+ likes on Twitter about a crime committed by the president that major media isn't otherwise reporting on *still* gets missed by major media and (possibly) Trump, but that indicts major media, not Twitter feeds like this one.
5/ Much more importantly, I'm *mystified* that @washingtonpost and others consider it newsworthy that Trump tried to intimidate a federal witness and then illegally deleted that intimidation on 12/27, but *not* newsworthy that he did the same on 12/26 and *didn't* delete it. Why?
@washingtonpost 6/ Legally speaking, we'd say the 12/27 post and deletion creates sufficient "mens rea"—"guilty mind," or the state of mind necessary to commit a given crime—to establish a federal offense only *because* Trump did the same thing on 12/26 and *didn't* delete it. I'll explain why.
@washingtonpost 7/ Trump is responsible for knowing what he's tweeted. If he deletes something that he tweeted on 12/27, he's acknowledging his tweet was "wrong"—and indeed *so* wrong it's worth committing a federal offense to remove it. So what does it then say that he leaves the 12/26 post up?
@washingtonpost 8/ We can now say—of the *12/26* tweet seeking to intimidate a federal witness contrary to law—that Trump *knowingly* is keeping it up *and* that he *knows* it is *wrong* to leave it up. If only the 12/27 tweet existed, he could say that he made a mistake and tried to retract it.
@washingtonpost 9/ So while I was wrong—clearly—to say the Post botched the timeline of the story *it* was reporting, it's 100% correct to say that it botched the timeline of the newsworthy events within its remit. There's no excuse for professional media catching the 12/27 but not 12/26 tweet.
@washingtonpost 10/ If you or I were paid to be full-time journalists, we'd be on the phone *right now* to the White House asking not just, "Why did you delete the 12/27 tweet?" but *also*, "Why did you *not* delete the 12/26 tweet?" And you'd credit social media for catching the latter offense.
@washingtonpost 11/ The result of not doing this—of only reporting the 12/27 tweet—is it's made to look like Trump made an error and (sort of) quickly tried to fix it. But that's not what happened. He made an error 2 days in a row and deliberately only fixed one of them. Now we need to know—why?
@washingtonpost 12/ As critically, the 12/26 tweet is an ongoing harm accounts like mine can *try* to ameliorate by calling attention to them, but clearly only major media can *really* police. So where's the media on this? I know from my Twitter data that thousands of reporters follow this feed.
@washingtonpost 13/ So why does this matter? Because it's an *impeachable offense*. Tweeting content to intimidate a federal witness is a crime—not under the whistleblower statute, but under 18 U.S. Code § 1512. That's exactly why major media reported on the 12/27 tweet. law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18…
@washingtonpost 14/ So if media believes the 12/27 tweet was newsworthy because it was criminal—and far less so, because it was deleted in a manner that runs contrary to the presidential records act—why would a tweet with identical content (legally speaking) that's still up *not* be newsworthy?
@washingtonpost 15/ One of the few jobs an attorney who's gone into teaching still has even when they're not practicing is to try to speak accurately in public about the law and promote the values of the legal profession—which include *equal justice* under the law. I hope I've done so here. /end
@washingtonpost BREAKING NEWS: Trump has now, as of 11:34PM EST, retweeted the alleged name of the whistleblower directly in his feed (I won't retweet/screenshot it). We need to hear from media now about this; it's his *third* attempted outing (an act of felony witness intimidation) in 72 hours.
