Feel sick seeing this. Al Schmidt is an honest person. Philly election officials have already gotten death threats. Trump’s lies here are putting him in physical danger. https://twitter.com/MaxMMarin/status/1326536652215316481

Some context: Al Schmidt is a Republican. I interviewed him in 2009, for this @phillymag piece, when he was running for city controller against the Democratic candidate. https://www.phillymag.com/news/2009/09/23/philadelphia-republic-party-this-party-sucks/

At that point, Schmidt had spent YEARS trying to get the city’s GOP to run more competitive races against Democrats. It was a lonely fight, because the Philly GOP was controlled for generations by a single family that was content with scraps from the Democrats.

Schmidt was frustrated with the GOP’s perpetual losing record. So were many GOP activists in Philly. And so Schmidt decided to run for office himself, against a machine Democrat. But though he was a strong candidate, the city GOP didn't back him. They tried to talk him out of it!

Schmidt had worked as an auditor for the GAO. He had worked on the president's Holocaust commission, returning assets stolen by Nazis to their victims. He had even been exec director of the GOP city committee.

When his party didn’t back him, he ran for controller anyway. He said he thought it was important for the GOP to at least try to run more competitive races in Philly. He ended up losing, but two years later he ran for the elections board and won, becoming a City Commissioner.

He does not deserve to be a target of the president of the United States. I mean, no one does. But anyone who goes along with this harassment attempt is an idiot who knows nothing of Philly politics or history.

I also don’t understand why @TwitterSafety is allowing Trump’s tweet about Schmidt to stay up. It’s obviously personal harassment and it comes in the wake of death threats. Like, why?

Twitter has already flagged the tweet as misinfo, with their little exclamation point. And it personally incites harrassment against an election official. Under what Twitter policy is this an OK use of the platform?