A federal judge in the District of Columbia has used Trump’s tweets to inform her decision on blocking his transgender military ban. She said that the tweets were evidence that Trump’s executive order was not indeed out of concern for military effectiveness.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the executive order, saying it is unconstitutional.
Kollar-Kotelly wrote that announcing the policy change on Twitter lacked “any of the formality or deliberative processes that generally accompany the development and announcement of major policy changes that will gravely affect the lives of many Americans.”
She wasn’t the first judge to use Trump’s tweets as evidence in court, either, and that could spell big trouble for the ‘140 character president.’
THE PRESIDENT IS SETTING A PRECEDENT
President Trump is setting a precedent for his excessive use of Twitter. When he was a reality show star and just a candidate to be president, his tweets were one thing. Now that he is sitting in the Oval, that changes the ramifications of his “tell it like it is” habit with his Twitter account. Now his tweets can be used against him in the court of law.
Someone should tell him that. On second thought, maybe not. Let him bury himself.
One would think that Trump would have learned his lesson the first time. Two weeks earlier U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Watson temporarily halted the latest version of the travel ban order as a result of a lawsuit claiming that the ban discriminated against Muslims.
The judge used Trump’s tweets as evidence in that case as well.
ADD WITNESS TAMPERING AND OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE TO THE LIST
Trump’s tweets could be implicating him in far grander schemes as well, including obstruction of justice and witness tampering. Daniel Hemel, a co-author of a University of California law review article on presidential obstruction of justice, says that he could indeed be implicating himself.
Hemel wrote, “There’s no reason why obstruction of justice couldn’t happen in a tweet.”
With Trump using his Twitter account daily, the evidence continues to mount. It can seem like there is no end to the insanity, but it starts to look every day like that may not be the case. One of these things is going to catch up to Trump; one doesn’t need to be good at math to know it is honestly just a statistical likelihood at this point.
“This might be the 140-character presidency. But I don’t think it’s the 140 character-ization of the presidency,” said Hemel. “This too shall pass.”
It’s anyone’s guess what the actual “smoking gun” is going to be that takes Trump down. Maybe someone should start one of those betting sheets like they have at Superbowl time.
Featured Image via Flickr. Feature Image via Twitter.
