House Democrat Claims ‘Twitter Files’ Journalist Matt Taibbi Gave ‘False’ Testimony’ to Congress, Threatens Jail Time

Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands) has threatened “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi with up to five years in prison for allegedly providing “false and misleading” testimony before Congress last month.

In an April 13 letter (pdf) to Taibbi, the lawmaker accused him of lying under oath, stating that he contradicted his congressional testimony in March about Twitter in a subsequent interview with MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan.

Taibbi is one of the multiple reporters to be granted exclusive access by Elon Musk to internal Twitter documents, including conversations among employees at the social media platform, that showed the social media giant colluding with the federal government and left-leaning organizations to censor tweets from conservative commentators and suppress a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election.

The long-time journalist testified to the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government—of which Plaskett is the ranking member, in March.

During that hearing, Taibbi said executives at Twitter took moderation “requests” from nonprofits such as the Stanford Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and government agencies such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) regarding which posts should be censored on the platform.

“Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system,” Taibbi told lawmakers in his opening statement. “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at [the] State [Department], even the CIA.”

“For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded,” he added.

Taibbi Admits Mistake

He continued, “What we see in The Twitter Files is that Twitter executives did not distinguish between DHS or CISA and this group, EIP. For instance, we would see a communication that said, ‘From CISA escalated by EIP.’

“We have come to the realization that this bright line that we imagine that exists between, say, the FBI or the DHS or the GEC and these private companies is illusory and that what’s more important is this constellation of kind of quasi-private organizations that do this work,” he testified.

However, during an April 6 interview with MSNBC, host Mehdi Hasan pointed out that Taibbi had cited CISA, the Cybersecurity, and Infrastructure Security Agency, as having been one of the government agencies to direct Twitter to take down or censor certain tweets, as opposed to CIS, the Center for Internet Security.

Taibbi admitted during that interview that he had made a mistake and subsequently updated the error in his own reporting of his testimony and the Twitter Files.

Despite acknowledging the mistake and correcting it, Plaskett, in her letter to Taibbi, accused the journalist of “alleging that CISA—a government entity—was working with the EIP to have posts removed from social media,” as opposed to making a “harmless spelling error.”

She added that Taibbi has not yet corrected the mistake during the hearing in the record in Congress.

“When presented with this misinformation, you acknowledged that you had made ‘an error’ by intentionally altering the acronym CIS and you subsequently deleted your erroneous tweet,” she wrote.

“While these inaccuracies may seem minor to you, they could lead Congress to rely on inaccurate testimony in considering and/or passing new legislation which would impact all Americans,” she said.

Plaskett Threatens Jail