Most tweets are bad, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation recently posted tweets so bad it decided to investigate itself for tweeting them. ThinkProgress reported Thursday that the FBI’s rarely used @FBIRecordsVault account is under internal scrutiny after it sent a flattering tweet about Donald Trump’s father and then, days later, followed that with a tweet linking to documents connected to an investigation into one of Bill Clinton’s presidential pardons. While the FBI is on the tweet beat, here are a few more government tweets that deserve a closer look:
Senator Chuck Grassley’s Tweets About Deer
One tweet about hitting deer with a car is a coincidence. Two is a pattern. More than nine is chilling.
Jeff
I just want to know who Jeff is supposed to be.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Stoner Musings
I’m sure everything’s fine, totally fine, no cause for concern, over at the CDC’s emergency-preparedness Twitter account. But perhaps they should just double-check real quick that the person running the account is not vaping the good shit, because its tweets swerve into stoner-musings territory with alarming regularity. #ThursdayThoughts
Joe Walsh’s “Watch Out Obama” Tweet
Twitter disabled former representative Joe Walsh’s account after he tweeted, “This is now war. Watch out Obama,” following the July 2016 fatal shooting of five Dallas police officers. Although he deleted the tweet, Walsh has defended it on numerous occasions. The First Amendment protects all sorts of unpopular speech, but specifically threatening the president of the United States is a crime, and people have been convicted for threatening Obama on social media. Earlier this year, the FBI raided an Oregon man’s apartment and arrested him after he made threats against Obama as a Twitter egg; just like Walsh, he’s also gone on anti-Muslim rants. Walsh’s wording was vague enough that an arrest for the tweet is highly unlikely, but it seems like a decent use of the FBI’s time to at least investigate an obviously politically-savvy ex-politician who knowingly sent a highly publicized “warning” to the current president.