Ex-CIA agent seeks to buy Twitter, ban Trump

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) - Former covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson is seeking $1 billion to buy Twitter and ban President Donald Trump from the microblogging site.

Wilson started a gofundme page last week to little fanfare. But it gained traction Wednesday as various media outlets reported on the campaign -- growing from $8,000 early Wednesday to more than $20,000 by late afternoon.

"If @Twitter executives won’t shut down Trump’s violence and hate, then it's up to us. #BuyTwitter #BanTrump," she wrote on the site when she announced the gofundme.com page last Friday.

The White House said the low response rate was an indication of Trump’s popularity on Twitter.

"The fact so few people have donated to her cause shows the American people like the President using twitter to directly communicate with them," spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement emailed to Anadolu Agency.

Wilson's campaign is now trending on the site.

Citing Twitter's refusal to shutter Trump's account, Wilson's gofundme page says she is seeking to buy enough shares of the company to establish a controlling interest.

The more than $1 billion is “a small price to pay to take away Trump's most powerful megaphone and prevent a horrific nuclear war", the campaign says above one of Trump's tweets that threatens North Korea.

But while having that value in Twitter stock would likely make Wilson Twitter's largest share holder, it would not give her a controlling interest.

The company is valued at more than $12.5 billion, so a controlling interest would necessitate at least $6.25 billion in stock.

Wilson left the CIA in 2005 after her identity was leaked by an official in the George W. Bush administration while she was undercover two years prior.

The purposeful disclosure was likely an act of retribution after Wilson's husband, a former diplomat, penned an op-ed doubting one of Bush’s rationales for going to war with Iraq.