Donald Trump blocks at least 40 followers on Twitter.

Trump has blocked me from reading his tweets. I may have to kill myself.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) June 13, 2017

Courtesy of HuffPo:

At 8:10 a.m. Tuesday, the progressive veterans advocacy group VoteVets alerted its Twitter followers that it had been blocked by President Donald Trump. 

Hours later, the novelist Stephen King let it be known that he too had been stymied from viewing Trump’s 140-character missives. Jordan Uhl, an organizer known for quickly responding to Trump’s tweets with what can best be described as trollish behavior, said he also was blocked on Tuesday. As did Brandon Neely, a former Guantanamo Bay guard who’s been a Trump critic. 

The seemingly thought-through effort by Trump, or whoever is running his account, to keep people from viewing his tweets is not the most outrageous example of government secrecy exhibited by this administration.

However it is bad enough that it has inspired those who were blocked to fight back.  

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University is representing the legion of the Trump-blocked. Their argument has been that there is something fundamentally unconstitutional about a president restricting access to what are definitionally public proclamations. 

“Twitter is many things at once,” the Institute’s executive director, Jameel Jaffer, told HuffPost. “It is a broadcast mechanism and being blocked from the president’s Twitter account means it is harder to get access to his statements on Twitter and sometimes those statements are important.... If you’re a critic you don’t have access on the same terms as everyone else.”

The group has reached out to Trump's social media guru but have not heard back as of this post.

Kind of ironic that the guy who has used Twitter for years to attack everybody from the Pope to Rosie O'Donnel is such a little snowflake that he himself cannot take a little criticism.

Maybe if everybody who was blocked gathered around a table to tell Trump what an awesome tweeter he was, reminiscent of that bizarre cabinet meeting, he would agree to unblock them.

Yeah fat chance of that happening.

So why is the Trump administration so afraid of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates?

Courtesy of the Washington Post:  

The Trump administration sought to block former acting attorney general Sally Yates from testifying to Congress in the House investigation of links between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, The Washington Post has learned, a position that is likely to further anger Democrats who have accused Republicans of trying to damage the inquiry. 

According to letters The Post reviewed, the Justice Department notified Yates earlier this month that the administration considers a great deal of her possible testimony to be barred from discussion in a congressional hearing because the topics are covered by the presidential communication privilege.Yates and other former intelligence officials had been asked to testify before the House Intelligence Committee this week, a hearing that was abruptly canceled by the panel’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). 

Yates was the deputy attorney general in the final years of the Obama administration, and served as the acting attorney general in the first days of the Trump administration.

Well gee that seems suspicious.

Why would the Trump administration not want the American people to hear what Sally Yates had to say?  

Yates and another witness at the planned hearing, former CIA director John Brennan, had made clear to government officials by Thursday that their testimony to the committee probably would contradict some statements that White House officials had made, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The following day, when Yates’s lawyer sent a letter to the White House indicating that she still wanted to testify, the hearing was canceled.

Ooooh.

For their part the White House is denying all of this.

Courtesy of TPM: 

White House press secretary Sean Spicer, in an emailed statement to TPM, called the Post’s story “entirely false.” 

“The White House has taken no action to prevent Sally Yates from testifying and the Department of Justice specifically told her that it would not stop her and to suggest otherwise is completely irresponsible,” he continued.

And boy we know how dedicated to the truth old Spicey is, don't we? 

Okay well now I want to hear what Yates has to say more than ever.

Time to start applying the pressure.

Adult site blocks North Carolina's access in response to anti-gay legislation. Okay now things just got real.

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