The Atlantic

What Happens When the President Is a Publisher, Too?

With platforms like Twitter, Donald Trump is able to disrupt congressional hearings in real time.
Source: Screenshot from C-SPAN

It had to be Twitter. What other platform could a member of Congress use during a high-profile congressional hearing to keep tabs on the president’s reaction to that very hearing?

Not TV. Not radio. Certainly not a crinkly newspaper full of yesterday’s news.

But on Twitter, it’s possible to be sitting in a room full of your colleagues, surreptitiously scrolling on your mobile phone, and notice that, hey, whaddya know, President Donald Trump is tweeting again.

At a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Monday, Jim Himes decided with the men who were there being questioned—the FBI director James Comey and the NSA director Mike Rogers—along with the rest of the room, and the public. Here’s how it went down:

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