According to Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat who is a ranking member of the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, Taibbi committed perjury by lying to Congress about the Twitter files. According to Mr. Taibbi, perjury is an allegation that carries a maximum prison sentence of five years. Taibbi replied to this ridiculous message by writing that the “House Democrats Have Lost Their Minds.”
Taibbi said that when you think this Democrats can’t “sink any lower, it does.” In his report to Congress, Taibbi allegedly confused the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) with the Center for Internet Security (C.I.S.). Representative Plaskett wrote this “error is significant” because, by adding an ‘A,’ you were not making a harmless typographical error. Plaskett said that instead, Taibbi claimed that CISA, a government agency, collaborated with the EIP, Election Integrity Partnership, to have social media posts removed.
She added when presented with this false information after Mehdi Hasan’s congressional testimony, Taibbi admitted he had intentionally made ‘an error’ by altering the acronym C.I.S., and he promptly deleted the erroneous tweet. Plaskett added that before Taibbi had appeared on March 9 to give his testimony before the Subcommittee, he had signed the Judiciary Committee’s Truth in Testimony form, attesting that you are aware of 18 U.S.C. 1001 that knowingly providing false information or concealing information from this committee/subcommittee is a crime.
In his article, Taibbi states it would be one thing if he had actually made the error. In such a scenario, Plaskett’s letter would be nothing more than an unbelievable attempt to intimidate a witness by threatening to file a charge of intentional lying over an oversight. However, this is not the situation. Taibbi stated that he did make an error, but what Plaskett was referring to and repeating was the error made by Hasan. Taibbi said he didn’t know what to do other than explain and demonstrate this as plainly as possible.
Matt Taibbi documented on Twitter why he was correct. Mr. Taibbi wrote: Here is the EIP website stating that it has partnered with CISA, the C.I.S. website stating the same, and the award indicating that C.I.S. is a D.H.S. contractor. Taibbi told Hasan that he was incorrect on this point, and as a consequence of his mistake, he persuaded a politician to threaten him with prison time. Taibbi went on to say this has “gone too far.”
Then, screenshots verifying Mr. Taibbi’s claim were provided. An independent journalist, Lee Fang, wrote that Plaskett and her menacing letter were the results of a group effort in the Democratic Caucus. Lee Fang’s article also documents and describes how Taibbi’s congressional testimony contained no factual inaccuracies. Fang said Taibbi “thoroughly debunked” Mehdi Hasan’s “false accusations,” as Hasan’s claims were unrelated to his congressional testimony.
According to Mr. Fang’s article, Taibbi’s congressional statement was as follows: What they saw in The Twitter Files is that Twitter executives did not differentiate between D.H.S. or CISA and this entity EIP. For example, we might see a message that reads, from CISA escalated by EIP. So they were essentially identical in the company’s views. Taibbi said yes, they realized that this imaginary line between, say, the F.B.I., the D.H.S., or the G.E.C. and these private corporations is illusory, and that what is more significant is this constellation of quasi-private organizations that do this work.