The Week on Politwoops: a campaign to official account conversion, an omnibus flip flop and a basketball mixup

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A conversation with Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., about hundreds of deleted tweets.
Image via Twitter.

In this week’s roundup of deleted tweets archived by Politwoops, we’ll look at a bulk of campaign deletions from a senator, a revoked opinion about the omnibus bill and a staffer weighs in on a basketball game from the wrong account.

We start with the campaign Twitter account of Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., which started systematically deleting hundreds of tweets over the course of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. It started with a deletion from a few weeks ago thanking supporters for his re-election, but continued to scrub the account of more than 300 old tweets. They ranged from “@MittRomney’s speech last night was excellent! On to victory in November!” to “On the 69th Anniversary of #DDay, we remember the men & women who served in WWII to protect the freedoms we exercise.”

Inhofe and his staff didn’t warn that these hundreds of messages were going to be removed and only acknowledged them after being directed to Politwoops. The staff responded that his campaign account was being transferred to an official account (which suggests Inhofe will not be running a campaign again!) and that “Senate rules require all tweets that are campaign related” to be deleted. Their interpretation seems to include any use of the campaign logo, which may explain why the deletions include a Happy Easter, Happy Mother’s Day and other greetings. Curiously, this tweet lacking any campaign related content was also deleted: “Happy St. Patrick’s Day! RETWEET if you are wearing green today!

Other notable deletions this week include Rep. Lou Barletta, R-Pa., who removed a message after an hour that said, “…Boehner’s omnibus spending deal will reportedly surrender every gain Rs made this summer on the border crisis” and linked to this article on Breitbart.com. Barletta did not respond for a request to comment and ultimately voted “Aye” for the omnibus bill, defending his position in a press release saying “There can be no one who questions my position on illegal immigration.”

Finally this week, the official account for Gov. Terry McAuliffe, D-Va., deleted a tweet during the U-Va. victory over VCU that said, “I think the refs really killed this games momentum w/ call against Jequan Lewis – could have cut the lead to 4 at that point. #LetsGoVCU.” The tweet was replaced with a message saying “I was glad to attend today’s UVA-VCU game and see two great VA teams square off,” and his communications director told WTVR “a member of the governor’s communication team accidentally wrote and posted the tweet from the governor’s account instead of their personal account.”

I hope you have a great week, and, if you’d like, please help improve Politwoops by letting us know if we’re missing any accounts or following folks we should not follow. Thanks so much!