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.
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.
“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.
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 Time
The lawmaker also noted that prior to his appearance before the subcommittee on March 9, Taibbi signed the Judiciary Committee’s Truth in Testimony form, certifying that he understood that “[k]knowingly providing material false information to this committee/subcommittee, or knowingly concealing material information from this committee/subcommittee, is a crime (18 U.S.C. § 1001).”Additionally, at the start of his hearing, the veteran journalist swore under penalty of perjury that the testimony he was set to provide would be “true and correct to the best of your knowledge, information, and belief,” the letter noted.
“Under the federal perjury statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1621, providing false information is punishable by up to five years imprisonment,” Plaskett continued. “In light of the potential for such serious consequences, I would like to offer you the opportunity to correct your statements before the panel.”
Plaskett gave Taibbi until April 21 to respond to a list of questions regarding the accuracy of his Twitter Files as the testimony he gave to Congress. She also asked the journalist to reveal when Twitter CEO Elon Musk first got in touch with him and whether the businessman placed “any conditions on your discussions of him and Twitter” and if so, what they were.
“The CIS site saying the same thing, and the award showing CIS is a DHS contractor. You’re wrong on this and you convinced a politician to threaten me with jail as a result. This has gone too far,” he wrote to Plaskett.
