dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

President Donald Trump’s new acting director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell, has for years been a vocal Trump loyalist, using his Twitter account to boost the president’s policies on everything from 5G and NATO to the Iran deal and the economy.

But Grenell wasn’t always a Trump supporter: In 2016, before the New York real estate mogul became the GOP presidential nominee, Grenell called Trump “dangerous” and spoke out regularly in favor of then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich, according to deleted tweets recovered via a joint inquiry by POLITICO and the cybersecurity firm Nisos.

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“He’s dangerous!” read one deleted Grenell tweet from March 24, 2016, the day Trump tweeted that “NATO is obsolete and must be changed to additionally focus on terrorism as well as some of the things it is currently focused on!”

The tweets underscore a key irony of the Trump era: Some of the president’s fiercest critics during the 2016 race have since transformed into his most passionate defenders, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who warned that Trump would be an “authoritarian president”; GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, who denounced Trump as “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who would destroy the Republican Party; and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who called Trump a “terrible human being” right before the 2016 election.

Grenell seems to have undergone a similar evolution.

“Trump is dangerous. Wake up. He’s reckless,” he replied on another occasion to a user who had written “vote Trump.” He urged his followers to read Trump’s interview with The Washington Post editorial board, in which Trump said, “I think NATO as a concept is good, but it is not as good as it was when it first evolved … I’m not even knocking it, I’m just saying I don’t think it’s fair, we’re not treated fair.”

“NATO needs reforming. But Trump is questioning its usefulness,” read another deleted Grenell tweet from March 24, 2016.

Five days later, in another since-deleted tweet, Grenell wrote, “If you think Trump knows foreign policy issues then absolutely yes, you are stupid.” Vox highlighted some of Grenell’s criticisms in March 2017, when Trump was considering nominating Grenell to be U.S. ambassador to NATO. POLITICO and Nisos were able to recover more than 1,000 deleted tweets belonging to Grenell’s account via analysis of open source information through a proprietary capability that extracted and screen-captured archived tweets via the Wayback Machine. ..