White House adviser and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner called the top executives at AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to complain after the companies’ anti-spam programs blocked the Trump campaign’s mass text messaging voter outreach program as spam, Business Insider reports.
The problem began earlier this month during the July 4 holiday weekend when the Trump campaign attempted to send out more than one million text messages to voters in an effort to broaden small donor fundraising efforts.
Citing people familiar with the corporations’ decisions to block Trump’s messages, Politico reported that the problem stemmed from the campaign’s use of peer-to-peer messaging, which the companies feared may run afoul of federal communication regulations prohibiting robocalls.
While peer-to-peer systems are capable of delivering massive amounts of messages, each of the texts are sent individually. This differs from robo-messages, which are sent in a single mass blast to all recipients.
Trump last December signed an anti-robocall law intended to curb the torrent of unwanted calls and messages to Americans. The new law imposed steeper fines for allowing unwanted calls and texts while also giving phone companies the power to block such contacts without prior approval from customers.
The FCC on June 25 ruled that phone companies may block unwanted robocalls by default, based on reasonable analytics, and offer consumers more advanced tools that can block calls not on their contact lists or allow calls only from so-called “white lists” of approved contacts.
Kushner will reportedly continue acting as the designated mediator in a stand-off that could last through the November election, a prospect that the former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub did not take kindly to.
“What’s a nepotistic position in the White House even for if not to abuse your power to seek an electoral advantage for daddy-in-law and to turn the White House into a political boiler room with the explicit blessing of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel? (Hatch Act agency),” Shaub wrote Thursday.
