Parler “gave Donald Trump a 40% stake in the company while he was president”

Donald Trump was reportedly in talks to buy a 40% stake in Parler in exchange for the then president agreeing to post first on the social media app that has become the platform of choice for many of his supporters.

The negotiations, which allegedly took place while Trump was still president, were concluded after White House lawyers objected, saying such an arrangement would violate rules of ethics and could expose him to allegations of bribery.

The news of the talks was first reported by BuzzFeed News, which obtained documents describing the proposed agreement.

According to BuzzFeed News, the Trump company would have immediately received a 20% stake, while the remaining 20% ​​would have been handed over in installments for a period of two years.

The then president should have agreed to make Parler his main means of communication with his supporters.

This meant that Trump should have posted all of his content on social media – including posts, videos and live streaming – on Parler for at least four hours before posting on any other platform, according to the proposal.

Parler also asked Trump to connect back to the site when he posts on other social media platforms or whenever he sent an e-mail to his supporters.

Trump would also have been asked to give Parler access to his email lists so that the site could promote its platform to its many supporters.

Trump’s company, the Trump organization, has been negotiating with Parler executives on behalf of the president since the idea was first raised last summer, according to the report.

Parler was represented in talks by two of his major shareholders – Fox News commentator and Trump supporter Dan Bongino and Jeffrey Wernick, one of Parler’s first investors.

DailyMail.com searched for comments from Parler and Bongino.

“The president has never been in talks,” former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale told BuzzFeed News.

“The talks have never been so substantial.

“And that was just one of the many things the campaign looked at in dealing with Silicon Valley’s cancellation culture.”

Wernick told BuzzFeed that Trump has never been involved in any discussions about bringing him to Parler.

“I’ve talked to a lot of people about potential stakes in the company for producing certain things,” Wernick said.

He said the non-disclosure agreements between Parler and the Trump organization prevented him from detailing what was being discussed.

Legal experts quoted by BuzzFeed News said the reported arrangement could have been illegal, as Trump would essentially receive a financial reward from a company that received content exclusively while he was president.

After Trump lost his re-election bid in November, the two sides reconsidered the idea, but talks stalled after Parler was distorted by big tech giants like Apple, Google and Amazon, who accused him of not moderated extremist content.

Parler hopes Trump will help increase his traffic by getting him to post content on his platform before doing so on other social media applications.

Trump advisers believed that Parler offered an alternative to mass applications such as Facebook and Twitter, which had long been accused of anti-conservative prejudices.

As the president negotiated with Parler, he used the other platforms to launch a public relations campaign aimed at discrediting President Joe Biden’s election victory.

In the weeks leading up to the November 3 election, Trump posted hundreds of messages claiming that he had been victimized by widespread electoral fraud, which robbed him of victory.

Twitter and Facebook have placed both rejection statements in his posts, prompting suspicions that companies are trying to censor the outgoing president.

On January 6, Trump held a rally near the White House on the same day that Congress met to ratify Biden’s election victory.

After Trump spoke, hundreds of rally participants stormed the Chapter, overtaking the police and sending lawmakers frantically hidden from fear for their lives.

Five people, including a Capitol police officer, died during the riots.

Amid the chaos and tension that followed the riots, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms banned Trump, saying there was a risk that he would use his accounts to stimulate more violence.

In an instant, Trump was deprived of his main way of communicating with his 88 million Twitter followers, as well as with the more than 35 million people who followed him on Facebook.

After Trump was ousted from mass applications, millions of users gathered at Parler, although he also faced problems.

Parler, who mostly hosts far-right users who support Trump and in many cases have stirred up riots, has been removed from Apple and Google app stores.

Amazon has also been removed from a web hosting platform, making it inaccessible to users.

Major technology companies have accused Parler of failing to crack down on extremist content and calling for violence.

John Matze, 27, Parler’s CEO, accused the big tech giants of censoring his platform.

Parler sued Amazon last month for antitrust violations. He also tried to get back online with the help of a Russian internet security company, DDos-Guard, but users have not yet been able to post.

Earlier this week, Matze said he was fired by the company’s board of directors after a disagreement with Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, one of the main financial backers of the majority-owned app.

It appears that Mercer has created a team to run the site in Matze’s absence – including British lawyer Matthew Richardson and former Tea Party activist Mark Meckler.

Matze said Wednesday that he and Mercer did not agree on whether Parler should do more to moderate extremist content on his platform.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Matze wanted to strengthen the site’s content moderation mechanism so that he could be allowed to return to app stores run by Google and Apple.

Matze said the company’s board disagreed with its suggestion to ban certain groups that were affiliated with internal terrorists.

Matze’s claim was challenged by Amler Peikoff, Parler’s political director, who called his statements “misleading.”

“The owners and managers of the company have worked tirelessly to build a resilient and non-partisan platform dedicated to freedom of expression, civil discourse and user privacy,” she said in a statement.

The idea of ​​Trump becoming a partial owner of Parler was first raised by the former Parscale.

Parscale addressed the idea with Trump at a meeting at the White House last year, according to BuzzFeed News.

A Trump-Parler partnership intrigued Parscale, who first raised the idea of ​​the then president creating an account on the controversial platform.

In the days that followed, Trump was encouraged by some of his aides to create accounts on Parler and another social networking platform, with fewer restrictions on hate content, Gab.

But he eventually decided to oppose it after his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and another adviser, Dan Scavino, discouraged him, Bloomberg News reported.

Matze said Count Parler finally has about 15 million users on his site, including the former president’s two eldest sons, Eric and Don Jr., as well as many former White House employees who served in the Trump administration.