A former CIA agent is crowdfunding an attempt to buy Twitter just to ban Trump

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, that Valerie 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. Maybe that's why its account is, at post time of this story, sitting at only around $9,500 of its $1 billion goal.


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.

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.

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.
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.)

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."

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.