Roy Moore’s "Jewish attorney" is a practicing Christian

Former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore’s wife named the “Jewish attorney” she mentioned in a speech in December, AL.com reported Thursday.

Kayla Moore emailed AL.com to identify the lawyer after some news sites, including CBS News, published stories which identified Richard Jaffe as a Jewish attorney who represented the Moores’ son in a case years ago. Jaffe supported Moore’s opponent in the race, Doug Jones, and was uncertain about whether Kayla Moore had him in mind when she mentioned the family’s Jewish lawyer.

She explained in her note to AL.com why she had made the reference.

“We read where we were against Jews – even calling us Nazis,” Kayla Moore wrote. “We have a Jewish lawyer working for us in our firm – Martin Wishnatsky.”

Wishnatsky, 73, has characterized his upbringing as secular — though he attended Hebrew school and went through a bar mitzvah — and he told AL.com that he obtained his law degree at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. He also holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard. Wishnatsky clerked for Roy Moore when Moore was Alabama’s state Supreme Court chief justice and then worked as a staff attorney for the court. According to AL.com, he went on to work as a staff attorney for the Foundation for Moral Law, which was founded by Roy Moore. Kayla Moore is the president of the foundation. There, he writes mostly friend-of-the-court briefs for cases related to abortion, religious freedom, LGBT and other social issues.

Wishnatsky told AL.com that he became a Christian when he was in his thirties. “I had an experience of the reality of God at 33,” Wishnatsky said. “I knew God was real but I wasn’t sure who he was.” He initially converted to Mormonism, but he found its rituals “bizarre,” and he concluded the religion was “a fraud.” So instead, he become an evangelical Protestant Christian. Wishnatsky also then wrote a book excoriating the Mormon faith, “Mormonism: a latter-day Deception,” which he self-published with Xulon Press, a Christian self-publishing company.

After a stint as a college instructor, Wishnatsky worked for about a decade for a consulting firm on Wall Street, a job he told AL.com that he lost when he was in jail for a conviction stemming from his participation in anti-abortion protests.

“I’m a Messianic Jew,” Wishnatsky told AL.com. “That’s the term they use for a Jewish person who has accepted Christ.”

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Twitter explains why it won’t ban Trump from its social network

Ever since Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in November 2016, there have been those who have called on Twitter to ban him from the social network. After a tweetstorm from Trump on Tuesday, which included a bizarre message about how big his “nuclear button” is, those calls reached a fever pitch. Although Twitter has spent the past year and change declining to comment, the company finally spoke out on Friday.

In a blog post titled “World Leaders on Twitter,” the company acknowledges that there has been a great deal of talk regarding politicians and world leaders on its network. But today, after shutting out users for the entirety of the Trump presidency, Twitter has decided that now is the time to explain its point of view on the matter.

“Twitter is here to serve and help advance the global, public conversation,” writes Twitter. “Elected world leaders play a critical role in that conversation because of their outsized impact on our society.

“Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets, would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” Twitter argues in its blog post. “It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”

There are arguments to be made from both sides (regardless of whether or not you agree with Trump’s policies or are a fan of his persona). On one hand, Twitter is absolutely right — removing President Trump’s Twitter account would not silence him (providing that’s what anyone is hoping to accomplish). In fact, it would eliminate arguably the only unfiltered access we have to the way the president is thinking at any given moment.

On the other hand, Trump is undeniably breaking Twitter’s rules on a regular basis. He targets individuals and groups, which inevitably leads to them being harassed by his supporters. He insinuates violence against reporters and news organizations that paint him in a bad light. And on more than one occasion, he has threatened to launch nuclear weapons, which, by the way, is not exactly an idle threat coming from the POTUS.

More than anything, Twitter seems to be offended by the idea that it only keeps Trump around for “ratings,” and says as much in the post: “We review Tweets by leaders within the political context that defines them, and enforce our rules accordingly. No one person’s account drives Twitter’s growth, or influences these decisions. We work hard to remain unbiased with the public interest in mind.”

In other words, for better or worse, Donald Trump’s Twitter account isn’t going anywhere any time soon. The good news is that those who love him and those who don’t will be able to keep a close eye on him at all times, because he is clearly incapable of tearing himself away from Twitter for more than a few days at a time.

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