Taibbi blasts media for keeping mum on Dem threat: ‘Can you imagine’ if GOP threatened to jail Jim Acosta?

Independent journalist and “Twitter Files” researcher Matt Taibbi made it clear to Fox News host Brian Kilmeade on Monday that he’s stunned and angered that none of his colleagues in the mainstream media came to his defense after Democrats threatened him with jail time over a minor error in his reporting.

(Video Credit: Fox News)

Taibbi spoke with “Fox & Friends” about Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, sending him a letter threatening him over his testimony concerning the “Twitter Files” on March 9. She accused him of basically lying over a mistake he made concerning the name of one of the federal agencies involved in the Twitter scandal. She cited MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan’s hostile interview with Taibbi on the issue.

Taibbi accidentally named the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) rather than the privately run Center for Internet Security (CIS). Because of that, Plaskett threatened him with five years of jail time. It also became obvious later after reviewing the letter that there was a strong possibility that other high-level Democrats such as Jerry Nadler and Hakeem Jeffries were involved in the letter.

“I know this is a cliche, but can you imagine if something like this had happened in the Trump years? If Republicans had threatened somebody like Jim Acosta with five years in prison over a minor error that he didn’t even make in testimony before Congress?” Taibbi asked Kilmeade.

“You would have had every human rights organization on Earth complaining about it,” the journalist noted, “but not a peep from my so-called colleagues in mainstream media over this outrageous abuse. It doesn’t matter what journalist it is, they should be upset about it because it could be them next.”

“It was a very minor mistake,” Taibbi asserted.

Plaskett accused Taibbi in her letter concerning his statement, writing it is “contradicted by your own admission.”

“This mistake is important because, by adding an ‘A,’ you weren’t making a harmless spelling error. Rather, you were alleging that CISA — a government entity — was working with the EIP [Election Integrity Partnership] to have posts removed from social media,” Plaskett said in the letter obtained by journalist and fellow Twitter Files reporter Lee Fang on Thursday. “When presented with this misinformation, you acknowledged you had made ‘an error’ by intentionally altering the acronym CIS and you subsequently deleted your erroneous tweet.”

“Prior to your appearance before the subcommittee on March 9, you signed the Judiciary Committee’s Truth in Testimony form, certifying that you understand that ‘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). In addition, at the beginning of the March 9 hearing, you swore ‘under penalty of perjury that the testimony you [were] about to give [was] true and correct to the best of your knowledge, information, and belief.’ Under the federal perjury statue, 18 U.S.C. 1621, proving false information is punishable by up to five years imprisonment,” she threatened.

Lee Fang pointed out that the comments Taibbi made to Congress “were correct” despite the original error in his “Twitter Files” reporting.

Taibbi called the mistake a “brain cramp” and noted that both groups partnered with state entities.

Fox News reported on what happened to Acosta during the Trump administration, “In 2018, Acosta was serving as CNN’s senior White House correspondent when the Trump-era White House had his press pass suspended.”

“While he wasn’t facing anything close to jail time, the media industry largely rallied around him. Acosta’s ‘hard pass,’ which provides expedited access to the White House grounds, was suspended after he engaged in a contentious back-and-forth with Trump during a press conference, at one point refusing to pass the microphone to a female White House aide. His pass was restored after CNN argued that it violated the network and Acosta’s First and Fifth Amendment rights,” the media outlet recounted.

CNN host Oliver Darcy failed to mention the threats against Taibbi in his “Reliable Sources” newsletter that covers the media industry and threats to it. No other mainstream media voice picked it up either, in essence, purportedly throwing Taibbi under the bus because of politics.

 

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