Former staffers for Democrats Barack Obama and Pete Buttigieg are creating a list of people who staffed for, donated to, or even endorsed President Donald Trump and his administration.
“The world should never forget those who, when faced with a decision, chose to put their money, their time, and their reputations behind separating children from their families, encouraging racism and anti-Semitism, and negligently causing the unnecessary loss of life and economic devastation from our country’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the site for the “Trump Accountability Project” reads.
The list of names was initally published on the project’s website asking people to “remember what they did,” and is now privatized, but captured by internet archives. It shows an extensive Google Sheets document listing off people who the project deems necessary to curb from “profiting from their experience” working with the Trump Administration.
Tabs on the document separate those listed into categories such as “Campaign Staff,” “Administration,” “Appointees,” “Donors,” “Law Firms,” “Endorsers,” and “Denouncers.” The “Administration” tab contained names of senior advisors in the White House all the way down to the “Chief Calligrapher.” Under “Denouncers,” the project listed Miles Taylor, the low-level bureaucrat anonymous source published and promoted by the New York Times as a “senior administration official.”
The Trump Accountability Project’s list surfaced after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Friday asking if anyone was keeping track of “these Trump sycophants.”
“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future?” she wrote. “I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.”
The New York representative’s tweet received backlash from conservatives, with some comparing her suggestion to the actions of previous authoritarian socialist and communist regimes, and others suggesting that it would be great advertising for Republican campaigns in the future.
Tacked onto AOC’s inflammatory tweet was a now-deleted reply from a former Obama campaign staffer dealing in analytics, Michael Simon, advertising the “Trump Accountability Project.”
“Yes we are,” he wrote, replying to AOC’s request for a roundup of Trump “sycophants” and linking to the project’s website. “Every Administration staffer, campaign staffer, bundler, lawyer who represented them- everyone.”
Following Simon’s tweet, others such as former national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee and former senior spokesman for the Obama presidential campaign Hari Sevugan as well as a former staffer for the Buttigieg Campaign Emily Abrams posted about the project, encouraging people to join their movement.
We’ve got one too at the Trump Accountability Project.
Let’s combine lists and make sure we don’t miss holding anyone who took a paycheck to help Trump undermine America responsible for what they did. https://t.co/clRu6WSfvL https://t.co/VE5rstgkLE
— Hari Sevugan (@HariSevugan) November 6, 2020
The project’s own Twitter account advertised the list, asking for help from software engineers to “archive a larger number of Trump campaign/administration staffer Tweets.”
Shortly after the project began to receive traffic and criticism on Twitter, the project’s advertisers began deleting their tweets and making changes to their website.
In the site’s main blurb explaining the project’s purpose, the organizers added a line clarifying that the list was intended for people who “took a paycheck from the Trump Administration.” They also removed “those who served him,” “those who represented him,” and “those who supported him,” from the list of those on the permanent record.
At this time, it is unclear what exactly will happen to the people listed on the project’s website.