Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner did not just delete his tweets, says Wayback Machine

Yesterday’s post about the relative tweeting habits of President Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner has inadvertently gotten swept up in a widely reported yet apparently false allegation that Kushner has recently deleted all his tweets, allegedly out of concern over what they might reveal relative to Russian interference in November’s election.

And while I am loath to defend anyone on Team Trump, the alleged mass deletion of tweets did not happen, at least according to the indispensable Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which has screen captures of Kushner’s Twitter page dating back to 2014. Those screen captures show that Kushner only tweeted three times – in 2011 and about innocuous matters. And while those tweets are indeed no longer visible on Kushner’s verified Twitter account, they haven’t been documented there since March 5, 2014.

Nevertheless, a cavalcade of news stories, blog posts – and, yes, tweets – have been published over the past 24 hours accusing Kushner of just recently cleaning his Twitter house. (There’s even talk of his having a second Twitter account, which I cannot find, but we’re concentrating on his verified account here.)

You can see what Kushner’s Twitter account looks like today in the photo above: empty.

Here’s what it looked like on March 19, according to the Wayback Machine: empty.

Here’s what it looked like on Feb. 8: empty.

Here’s what it looked like on Jan. 28: empty.

Here’s what it looked like on Dec. 2, 2016 – weeks after the election: empty.

Same thing on a handful of other dates.

Which brings us to the screen capture on March 5, 2014.

Visible there are two tweets, one in which Kushner, then publisher of the New York Observer, solicits the services of a freelance writer, and the other which reads: “Very liberating to get your name back on Twitter.”

The latter would appear to indicate that Kushner’s Twitter handle — @JaredKushner – was controlled by someone else prior to 2011. Maybe that experience soured him on his father-in-law’s favorite social media platform.

In any event, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has nothing to corroborate the accusation that Jared Kushner just recently deleted a boatload of possibly incriminating tweets.

Let the conspiracy theories begin.

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