The Trump Organization negotiated on behalf of then-president Donald Trump to make Parler his primary social network, but it had a condition: an ownership stake in return for joining, according to documents and four people familiar with the conversations. The deal was never finalized, but legal experts said the discussions alone, which occurred while Trump was still in office, raise legal concerns with regards to anti-bribery laws.
Talks between members of Trump’s campaign and Parler about Trump’s potential involvement began last summer, and were revisited in November by the Trump Organization after Trump lost the 2020 election to the Democratic nominee and current president, Joe Biden. Documents seen by BuzzFeed News show that Parler offered the Trump Organization a 40% stake in the company.
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Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale raised the idea to Trump of taking an ownership stake in Parler during a meeting last year at the White House, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. Parscale had taken an early interest in Parler, and reportedly considered creating an account for Trump on the site in 2019 as a bulwark against Twitter and Facebook.
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Four sources told BuzzFeed News that Parscale and Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon met with Parler CEO John Matze and shareholders Dan Bongino and Jeffrey Wernick at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago in June 2020 to discuss the idea. But the White House counsel’s office soon put a stop to the talks, one person with knowledge of the discussions said, ruling that such a deal while Trump was president would violate ethics rules.
“The president was never part of the discussions,” Parscale told BuzzFeed News.
Buzzfeed
I'm sure he knew absolutely nothing about it.
Discussions were revived in the weeks following the election, according to two people involved, but the deal fell apart after the Capitol invasion. Following that event, Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores, and Amazon kicked the company off its cloud hosting service, forcing the site offline.
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When reached by phone on Friday, Wernick, who called himself an adviser to the company, said that there had been discussions with the Trump Organization about bringing Trump onto the platform, but that the former president had not been involved in those conversations. He also said there were inaccuracies in what BuzzFeed News was reporting, but did not provide specifics on what, if anything, was inaccurate.
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On Wednesday, Matze told the Wall Street Journal that the site had 15 million users, including the former president’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., as well as various current and former members of Trump’s staff.
Donald Trump, however, never maintained a verified account on that platform. [...] Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, intervened to keep him off Parler during his last days in office, according to Bloomberg News.
Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner stopped an effort to sign up the president on fringe social media platforms such as Gab and Parler after Twitter suspended his account last week, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Trump’s social media director, Dan Scavino, also objected, two of the people said. The two men thought the alternative social media sites, which have catered to political conservatives by promising fewer restraints on speech, weren’t suitable for the U.S. president partly because they didn’t think they were well managed or could handle the traffic.
Bloomberg
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