The Twitter account for President Trump’s new pick for the Federal Election Commission was reportedly made private Tuesday evening after other Twitter users began noticing some of the nominee’s past sharing of anti-Protestant posts.
The White House announced late Tuesday night that Trump was nominating Trey Trainor, a Texas lawyer who repeatedly clashed with the state’s campaign finance regulators, to serve on the Federal Election Commission. Trainor is being picked to serve the remainder of a six-year term that expires in 2021, according to the White House announcement Tuesday night, but it is not entirely clear which current commissioner he will be replacing.
While many election law experts were quick to point out Trainor’s reputation of fighting campaign finance regulation, others noticed the “interesting” tweets in his timeline.
By Wednesday morning, Trainor had made his Twitter feed private, but not before a few users took screen shots of some of his Tweets, including those that appeared to promote anti-Protestant podcasts.
No more than a day since President Donald Trump announced he would nominate Akerman partner James “Trey” Trainor III as a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, the former election lawyer for the Trump presidential campaign is already under fire on multiple fronts.
Perhaps to be expected, the nomination of Trainor was almost immediately opposed by advocacy groups such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)—a nonprofit headed by former ethics czars in the Bush and Obama administrations—who said that Trainor stood for “exactly the opposite” of what the FEC does: Police money in politics.
Perhaps less expected, Trainor’s Twitter feed came under the spotlight after users found that he had retweeted posts expressing what appeared to be anti-Protestant views. In one Tweet screenshot before Trainor’s Twitter feed was made private, he wrote “There is only one church,” while linking to a post from a Catholic site, Churchmilitant.com, that said “Protestantism is poison.”