The presidency of Donald Trump seems to have newly energized the man from whose mind it seems to have sprung, fully formed, as a nice broad target to take on in his august years, with Michael Moore already producing the films Michael Moore In TrumpLand and the upcoming Fahrenheit 11/9, directing the Trump-filled “Unf—- The World” clip for hip-hop supergroup Prophets Of Rage, and announcing the Broadway play The Terms Of My Surrender. But just in case documentaries, rap videos, and one-man shows aren’t enough to dissuade Trump’s supporters, Moore has another plan: He’s launched TrumpiLeaks, a website that encourages government officials to send Moore damaging information from within Trump’s administration, which Moore can then disseminate to a public who will surely act on it, now that they know.
In a letter published at HuffPost, Moore acknowledges that Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that, no matter what act of dishonesty, malfeasance, incompetence, or outright treason he may commit, “just like all the times he’s done so in the past, he will get away with it.” He laments the many times Trump’s critics have crowed that this will surely be the thing that ends in impeachment, only to see him wriggle out of it with ease. Yes, it seems no revelation of Trump’s wrongdoing is so devastating that it could change the mind of his ardent base, who remain too blinkered by their partisan allegiance, their own selfish agendas, and their distaste for the arrogance of the liberal media.
But, uh, what this website presupposes is, what if that revelation came from Michael Moore?
Today, I’m launching TrumpiLeaks, a site that will enable courageous whistleblowers to privately communicate with me and my team. Patriotic Americans in government, law enforcement or the private sector with knowledge of crimes, breaches of public trust and misconduct committed by Donald J. Trump and his associates are needed to blow the whistle in the name of protecting the United States of America from tyranny.
We’ve put together several tools you can use to securely send information and documents as well as photographs, video and/or audio recordings. While no form of digital communication is 100 percent secure, the tools we’re using at TrumpiLeaks provide the most secure technology possible to protect your anonymity (and if you don’t require anonymity, you can just email me here).
The question of security isn’t an idle one—“I know this is risky. I knew we may get in trouble,” Moore says—especially in light of the charges filed yesterday by the Department of Justice against Reality Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old contractor who allegedly sent a copy of a top-secret NSA report on Russia’s attempted hacking of voting machines to The Intercept. As such, the site offers various methods of ”communicating directly with Michael Moore,” allowing anyone to send encrypted texts, images, and videos to Moore, composed of whatever useful information and definitely not threats or dick pics they might want to share.
But despite Winner’s arrest and Trump’s repeated Twitter-railing against “leakers,” and notwithstanding the terrible idea of allowing people to contact you from the internet, Moore believes “too much is at stake to play it safe.” In his letter, he cites a proud American history of whistleblowers, as well as an old video he recently discovered of Vice President Mike Pence when he was a congressman, where Pence lauded the whistleblower’s importance to our democracy and argued for the blanket protection of journalists. And surely those things—American tradition, Mike Pence’s integrity—will protect Moore now, as he risks imprisonment to uncover the damaging information that cannot already be gleaned from Trump’s own words and actions, all for the benefit of a nation that’s repeatedly greeted it with derision and frog memes, before declaring that it’s merely evidence that Trump is “shaking up the establishment.”
Nevertheless, Moore adds that TrumpiLeaks is just part of the first step in what he’s previously laid out as his “four-front strategy to end this carnage: 1. Mass Citizen Action 2. Take Him To Court Nonstop 3. YOU Run for Office 4. An Army of Satire”—a master plan of protests, endless lawsuits, local political engagement, and people writing funny things that will surely end Trump this time.