Donald Trump was reportedly in talks to acquire a 40 percent stake in Parler in exchange for the then president agreeing to post first on the social media app that has become the platform of choice for many of his supporters.
The negotiations, which allegedly took place while Trump was still president, were closed after White House lawyers objected, saying that such a deal would violate ethical rules and potentially expose him to bribery charges.
The news of the negotiations was first reported by BuzzFeed News, which obtained documents describing the proposed agreement.
According to BuzzFeed News, the Trump company would have immediately received a 20 percent stake, while the remaining 20 percent would have been delivered in installments over a two-year period.
Donald Trump (seen above in West Palm Beach, Florida, on January 20) received a 40 percent share offer on the Parler social media app, according to BuzzFeed News
Parler presents itself as a social media platform that allows ‘free speech’.
The then president would have to agree to make Parler his primary means of communication with his supporters.
This meant that Trump would have to post all of his social media content – including posts, videos and live streaming – to Parler for at least four hours before posting on any other platform, according to the proposal.
Parler also asked Trump to link to the site when posting on other social media platforms or whenever sending an email to his supporters.
Trump would also have to give Parler access to his email lists so that the site could promote his platform to his many supporters.
Brad Parscale, former Trump campaign manager, addressed the idea of Trump’s partnership with Parler in 2019
According to BuzzFeed News, Trump representatives were in discussions with two Parler stakeholders – Fox News commentator Dan Bongino (left) and investor Jeffrey Wernick (right)
Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, was negotiating with Parler executives on behalf of the then president when the idea was first raised last summer, according to the report.
Parler was represented in the negotiations by two of his prominent shareholders – Fox News commentator and Trump supporter Dan Bongino and Jeffrey Wernick, one of Parler’s early investors.
DailyMail.com solicited comments from Parler and Bongino.
“The president was never part of the discussions,” former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale told BuzzFeed News.
“The discussions have never been more substantive.
“And that was just one of the many things the campaign was looking at to deal with the culture of Silicon Valley cancellation.”
Wernick told BuzzFeed that Trump was never involved in any discussions about bringing him to Parler.
“We talked to a lot of people about the potential stakes in the company to produce certain things,” said Wernick.
He said the secrecy deals that were made between Parler and the Trump Organization prevented him from detailing the details of what was discussed.
Legal experts cited by BuzzFeed News said the reported deal could have been illegal, as Trump was essentially receiving a financial reward from a company that received exclusive content while he was an incumbent president.
After Trump lost his candidacy for re-election in November, the two sides revisited the idea, but negotiations were halted after Parler was deplored by major tech giants like Apple, Google and Amazon, who accused her of not moderating extremist content.
Parler hoped that Trump would help boost his traffic by getting him to post content on his platform before doing so on other social media apps.
Trump advisers felt that Parler offered an alternative to conventional apps like Facebook and Twitter, which have long been accused of anti-conservative prejudice.
While the outgoing president was negotiating with Parler, he used the other platforms to mount a public relations campaign aimed at discrediting President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
Earlier this week, Parler CEO John Matze said he was fired after a disagreement with one of the company’s main financial supporters about its content moderation policies.
In the weeks following the November 3 election, Trump posted hundreds of messages claiming he was the victim of widespread electoral fraud that stole his victory.
Twitter and Facebook placed disclaimers on their posts, fueling suspicions that companies were trying to censor the president who is stepping down.
On January 6, Trump held a rally near the White House on the same day that Congress met to ratify Biden’s electoral victory.
After Trump spoke, hundreds of rally participants invaded the Capitol, trampling the police and frantically sending lawmakers hiding in fear for their lives.
Five people, including a Capitol police officer, died in the riots.
Amid the chaos and tension resulting from the disturbances, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms banned Trump, saying there was a risk that he would use his accounts to foment further violence.
In an instant, Trump was deprived of his primary means of communication with his 88 million Twitter followers, as well as the more than 35 million people who followed him on Facebook.
After Trump was banned from the main apps, millions of users migrated to Parler, although he also faced problems.
Parler, who is home to far-right users who support Trump and in many cases applauded the disturbances, has been removed from Apple and Google’s app stores.
It has also been removed from a web hosting platform by Amazon, making it inaccessible to users.
The big tech companies have accused Parler of failing to crack down on extremist content and calls for violence.
Conversations between the Trump Organization were reportedly interrupted after Parler was removed from his cloud-based servers by Amazon Web Services
Parler disappeared from the web last month with an error message saying ‘we can’t connect to the server’ after Amazon shut down
Parler’s then CEO, John Matze, 27, accused the big tech giants of censoring his platform.
Parler sued Amazon last month for antitrust violations. He also tried to get back online with the help of a Russian Internet security company, DDos-Guard, but users have yet to post.
Earlier this week, Matze said he was fired from his position by the company’s board after a disagreement with Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, one of the main financiers of the majority-owned app.
Mercer reportedly set up a team to run the site in the absence of Matze – including British lawyer Matthew Richardson and former Tea Party activist Mark Meckler.
Matze said on Wednesday that he and Mercer disagree on whether Parler should do more to moderate the extremist content on his platform.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Matze wanted to reinforce the site’s content moderation mechanism so he could return to the app stores run by Google and Apple.
Matze said the company’s board did not agree with his suggestion to ban certain groups affiliated with domestic terrorists.
Matze’s claim was challenged by Amy Peikoff, Parler’s policy director, who called his statements “misleading”.
“The company’s owners and managers have worked tirelessly to build a resilient and non-partisan platform dedicated to freedom of expression, civil speech and user privacy,” she said in the statement.
The idea of Trump becoming a co-owner of Parler was first raised by the former Parscale.
Trump was removed from social media apps Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and others after the January 6 riot on the United States Capitol, in which five people died
Trump’s ban on Twitter meant he could no longer communicate with his 88 million followers on the platform
Trump was also banned by Facebook, where the former president had more than 35 million followers
Parscale discussed the idea with Trump during a meeting last year at the White House, according to BuzzFeed News.
A Trump-Parler partnership intrigued Parscale, who first raised the idea of the then president creating an account on the controversial platform.
In the days that followed, Trump was encouraged by some of his aides to open accounts at Parler and another social media platform with less restrictions on hate content, Gab.
But he finally decided against it after his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and another adviser, Dan Scavino, discouraged him, Bloomberg News reported.
Matze said that at the last count, Parler has about 15 million users on his website, including the two eldest sons of the former president, Eric and Don Jr, as well as many former White House officials who served in the Trump administration. .