A Democratic delegate to Congress appears to have threatened “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi with up to five years in prison for purportedly lying under oath when he testified before Congress last month.
Stacey Plaskett (D-USVI) made the threat in an April 13 letter to Taibbi, accusing the Racket News journalist of contradicting his congressional testimony about Twitter in a subsequent interview with MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Intercept reporter Lee Fang.
Hasan invited Taibbi onto his show after his March 9 testimony before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government — of which Plaskett is the ranking member — about his reporting on Twitter’s collusion with the federal government to silence dissent online.
In his testimony, Taibbi said executives at Twitter took orders from nonprofits such as the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and government agencies such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) about which tweets should be censored.