Trump's Twitter rants are Officially Presidential Statements
The Department of Justice on Monday told a federal district court judge In Washington, D.C. that Donald Trump’s tweets are “official statements of the President of the United States.”
As the National Law Journal reports, the assertion that the tweets are official government statements was made in James Madison Project v. Department of Justice, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that seeks the release of documents related a dossier of allegations regarding Trump’s ties to Russia and written by former British spy Christopher Steele.
The president’s tweets are relevant to the case because the plaintiffs—the James Madison Project, an intelligence watchdog organization, and Politico—had argued that certain tweets waived the DOJ’s responses to their FOIA request.
Judge Amit Mehta asked DOJ attorneys to explain “how official [the tweets] are, are they statements of the White House and the President.” In a response filed Monday (PDF), DOJ attorneys said “the government is treating the statements upon which Plaintiffs rely as official statements of the President of the United States.”