Brandon Borrman, Twitter’s vice president of global communications, talked to OneZero about the company’s decision. That conversation, coupled with information from other Twitter representatives and public statements from the company’s executives, shed light on just how the company arrived at that fateful fact-check, and the roles played by Roth and others, including CEO Jack Dorsey. It adds up to a picture of a company that knew full well what it was doing when it fact-checked the president — and what kind of reaction it would spark from the White House.

“The company needed to do what’s right, and we knew from a comms perspective that all hell would break loose,” Borrman told OneZero…

By mid-afternoon Tuesday, the recommendation was in front of Dorsey and his executive team. They gave the go-ahead, and only after that did they loop in Borrman and Monique Meche, Twitter’s VP of global public policy and its top liaison to government, Borrman told me. The system is set up that way to keep enforcement decisions independent from the teams responsible for PR and government relations, he noted. (In contrast, Facebook routes critical policy decisions through policy chief Joel Kaplan, who is also the company’s main man in Washington, an arrangement that its former chief security officer recently criticized.) Borrman and Meche did not push back.