【2014 Archives】

UPDATEDAug. 24014 Archives 2017 3:45 pm ET: Updated to include comments by Plame and new fundraiser totals.

Every day brings us a new wrinkle that continues to push the Donald Trump presidency further and further into Twilight Zone territory, and Wednesday is no different.

With tear gas still lifting from the streets of Phoenix after Trump's blustery Tuesday night rally, word comes that former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson is crowdfunding an effort to buy Twitter for the sole purpose of banning Trump.

Yes, thatValerie Plame, the former undercover CIA agent who was outed in 2003 by the White House via columnist Robert Novak after her husband, diplomat Joseph Wilson, dared to call bull on the Bush administration's assertion that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for building weapons.

The campaign launched late last week but is just now starting to garner attention and momentum. The account, as of Thursday afternoon, had accrued a little over $43,000 of its $1 billion goal.

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Speaking to Mashable, Plame spoke about how she was inspired to start the campaign.

Referencing a joke John Oliver recently made about Twitter possibly being the tool that could trigger armageddon, Plame said, "The people who understand how crises proliferate -- I worked on counter-proliferation at the CIA, my colleagues that are there now -- this is really scary. He's inciting violence using Twitter."

So about that effort to stop him by buying Twitter (or at least part of it): In 2016, when there was a lot of chatter about someone — Google? Disney? — buying Twitter, the numbers being thrown around ranged from $16 to $30 billion (LOL), and its current market cap is $12.3 billion.

Plame's plan, though, isn't to buy the whole shebang but, rather, buying up shares. According to the campaign's page:

Twitter is a publicly traded company. Shares = power. This GoFundMe will fund the purchase of a controlling interest in Twitter. At the current market rate that would require over a billion dollars — but that's a small price to pay to take away Trump's most powerful megaphone and prevent a horrific nuclear war.

She elaborates a bit more further down the page.

Proceeds from this campaign will be used to buy a controlling share of Twitter. If we can't get a majority interest, we'll explore options for buying a significant stake in the company and champion this proposal at the annual shareholder meeting. If that's impossible for any reason or if there is a surplus from this campaign, 100% of the balance of proceeds will be donated to Global Zero, a nonprofit organization leading the resistance to nuclear war. 

Okay, so that's a tall task. As the Associated Press notes, while $1 billion would still be well short of giving her a controlling interest, it'd be enough to make her the largest shareholder.

Plame admitted the goal was "ambitious" and noted that, just as she does on the fundraiser page, if the campaign falls short of the goal, every cent will be donated to Global Zero, a group Plame said is "leading the resistance to prevent nuclear war and eliminate nuclear weapons."

"My real hope in launching the campaign was to shine a spotlight on just how dangerous Trump's use of Twitter really is," she told me. "I want to show people they don't have to sit by while Trump uses this huge global platform to undermine our national security."

And Plame seems to be 100% into the idea, echoing other critics in claiming Trump's tweets threatening war violate Twitter's terms of service.

Plame was critical of Twitter's leadership, noting, "Their executives are turning a blind eye to their own rules."

This effort, she said, aims to "hold their feet to the fire and enforce their own rules."

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It's true that Trump's account has become a weapon for what's been a volatile presidency, being used to announce military policy without the military's approval, retweet bots, cost companies billions of dollars, and even potentially reveal CIA secrets (which, admittedly, probably hits pretty close to home for Plame.)

"It is deadly serious," Plame said of Trump's Twitter use. "Whether you like Trump or not, I think most people would be agree that he is impulsive and, using the global platform of Twitter in the casual way that he has, particularly regarding the nuclear issue and North Korea, I'm deeply concerned that we'll stumble into a nuclear war." 

For their part, Twitter has no comment on the matter and probably isn't sweating the effort too much, as they've had very little (nothing, really) to say about Trump's potential violations. The last time we asked, we got the usual response: "We do not comment on individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons."

"The fact is," Plame worries, "if you don't get this nuclear issue right, none of the other ones matter."

And Trump isn't slowing down, either, as he continues to rally against the mainstream media, attack opponents even if they're within his own party, and say other generally unpleasant things.

Regardless of how the effort turns out, Plame is upbeat about her role in leading the fundraiser and trying to highlight the reason behind it: "I think we all have to contribute where we can on things we care about so this is my little value added."