Late last week, Rudy Giuliani kept up his public-relations offensive against Special Counsel Robert Mueller, complaining on Twitter about the timing of the plea agreement with Michael Cohen. Giuliani’s tweet read exactly as follows:
Mueller filed an indictment just as the President left for G-20.In July he indicted the Russians who will never come here just before he left for Helsinki.Either could have been done earlier or later. Out of control!Supervision please?
What Giuliani, a member of Donald Trump’s legal defense team, didn’t notice was that he’d inadvertently created a hyperlink in his tweet. There should’ve been a space after the period between “G-20” and “In.” The typo created a link to a non-existent website.
Except, it didn’t stay non-existent for long. Someone having a little fun at Giuliani’s expense registered the G-20.In domain and created a single page with a one-sentence message: “Donald J. Trump is a traitor to our country.”
Yesterday, the former New York City mayor discovered what had happened — and concocted a conspiracy theory involving Twitter. Giuliani wrote:
Twitter allowed someone to invade my text with a disgusting anti-President message. The same thing-period no space-occurred later and it didn’t happen. Don’t tell me they are not committed cardcarrying anti-Trumpers. Time Magazine also may fit that description. FAIRNESS PLEASE
For the record, practically every Twitter user has accidentally published typos; I’ve had plenty of my own. Most of us, however, don’t blame Twitter for our mistakes, and certainly don’t attribute our mistakes to some nefarious political plot cooked up by our perceived enemies.
Regardless, there are a couple of substantive angles to this. The first is an unfortunate pattern: every time Republicans think they’ve finally uncovered evidence that proves their conspiracy theories about tech giants and their political agenda, it’s the Republicans who end up looking foolish.
The second deals with Giuliani’s purported area of expertise. Let’s not forget that in January 2017, a week before his presidential inauguration, Donald Trump announced that Giuliani would advise the incoming White House on cybersecurity issues. This made sense, at least in Trump World, because Giuliani led a consulting firm that specialized in cybersecurity issues. I won’t pretend to be a cybersecurity expert, but if your go-to guy on the subject is hopelessly confused about how links work in Twitter, perhaps he doesn’t understand the internet as well as he should?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past." Recommended
