Mitt Romney Campaigns In Wisconsin And Ohio IN FLIGHT- NOVEMBER 02: Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney uses his iPhone to make a video of staff members who are sleeping aboard his campaign plane on November 2, 2012 en route to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. With less than one week to go before election day, Mitt Romney is campaigning in Wisconsin and Ohio. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“What do they call me, a lurker?”
It was a passing remark that Sen. Mitt Romney (R) during an interview with Atlantic Staff Writer McKay Coppins that he has a secret account on Twitter so that he can follow other politicians, pundits, comedians and athletes quietly.
“I won’t give you the name of it,” Romney told Coppins, but “I’m following 668 people.”
That nugget in Coppin’s Atlantic article was enough for Slate writer Ashley Feinberg to track down the Senator’s secret account: @qaws9876
The account in question joined Twitter in July of 2011 shortly before Romney announced his run for president.
It follows 702 other accounts, a few more than the Senator mentioned in the Atlantic, “but,” Feinberg says, “it’s certainly possible to follow 30 additional accounts over the course of a few weeks, especially for a user that appears to have recently upped its Twitter activity.”
She noted that the very first account that Pierre Delecto followed was Romney’s oldest son Tagg and the rest of the accounts that were followed were, “everyone you might expect someone like Mitt Romney to follow. People like the late Charles Krauthammer, the late John McCain, Larry Kudlow, his children as well a number of former Romney advisers and aides, reporters who’ve directly covered Romney, Tom Brady, Brett Favre as well as some late-night hosts.
One person he doesn’t follow though is President Trump. He said that the posts too much, like one of his nieces.
As far as tweets go, there aren’t many. Delecto has only tweeted 10 times but that’s “certainly the sort of behavior one might expect to see from a self-described “lurker.”
The account has since gone private but Feinstein was able to capture screenshots of the tweets most of which were in reply to things dealing with Romney.
The account also liked 257 tweets that Feinberg broke down as 68 coming from Romney’s official accounts or mentions of them, and the other 189 were about Romney generally.
After Slate broke the news that they thought they had found the fake account, Romeny confirmed to McKay Coppins that he was, in fact, Pierre Delecto saying, “C’est moi.”
