Top House Democrat Stacey Plaskett, V.I., is facing intense backlash for threatening jail time towards independent journalist Matt Taibbi over his testimony about the Twitter Files at last month's Congressional hearing.
"Sure is getting fashy around here," reacted fellow Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger, who testified alongside Taibbi at the hearing.
Shellenberger later added, "It is an honor to be invited to be an expert witness. Not only are we unpaid, we pay our own travel. What @StaceyPlaskett has done is a disgrace. Why would anyone choose to testify if they’re going to threatened with prison? Talk about a grotesque attack on norms. For shame."
Del. Stacey Plaskett, D-V.I., the ranking member of the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, sent a letter to Taibbi regarding a comment he told lawmakers, which she alleged included an error that was previously propped up by MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan in a tense interview exchange regarding the name of one of the federal agencies swept up in the Twitter Files.
The error was a specific reference to CISA, the government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, when he meant to refer to CIS, the Center for Internet Security, which is a private organization. Taibbi later addressed and corrected the error in his reporting.
Others piled on the House Democrat for the overt threat..
"Now Rep. @StaceyPlaskett is trying to get @mtaibbi, a journalist, jailed for five years for exposing Clint Watts' US govt-funded Hamilton 68 as a fraudulent lie machine that was promoted by corporate media outlets and congressional Dems like herself," The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal tweeted.
"Extraordinarily unbefitting a member of Congress, if this letter is real, and worthy of public rebuke by her colleagues as soon as possible," Washington Examiner executive editor Seth Mandel wrote.
MSNBC HOST FEUDS WITH MATT TAIBBI OVER TWITTER FILES, DODGES RUSSIAGATE CRITICISM: ‘I WASN’T THERE'
"Can someone who is not blocked by Mehdi ask him how he feels about his monologue being used to threaten a journalist with prison? A typo in a Tweet thread is not lying before Congress," NewsNation reporter Zaid Jilani knocked the MSNBC host.
"Democrat House Reps are now threatening journalists with prison. Are the norms restored to everyone's satisfaction now?" The Spectator contributing editor Stephen L. Miller wondered.
"The party of Norms threatens to imprison a journalist for confusing nearly identical acronyms," Washington Free Beacon Aaron Sibarium similarly expressed.
"Reckless behavior by @StaceyPlaskett . Disagree with Taibbi all you want, but there’s no better way to confirm the point of his reporting than to threaten him with imprisonment for telling Congress about his reporting," Substack writer Matt Stoller tweeted.
"Stacey Plaskett trying to disprove the notion that the federal government is being weaponized against dissenters by threatening Matt Taibbi with 5 years jail time," Reason Magazine senior editor Robby Soave pointed out.
"Behold @mehdirhasan 's most notable journalistic accomplishment: via his own mistake, getting a member of Congress to threaten an actual journalist with imprisonment," Useful Idiots podcast co-host Aaron Maté wrote.
"Send an IRS agent to Taibbi's home the day he's testifying about the weaponization of the federal government. Have a non-voting delegate to the U.S. House threaten him with perjury for truthful statements made in sworn testimony over an error in a tweet raised by an MSNBC host. Yep, there's no weaponization and hyper-politicization of the ruling regime against its political foes -- particularly those claiming it is weaponized and hyper-politicized," The Federalist senior contributor Benjamin Weingarten summarized.
Rep. Plaskett's office did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment.
In the letter sent to Taibbi, Plaskett cited his alleged erroneous statement, saying 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 wrote to Taibbi, according to a 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."
Plaskett continued, "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."
But as Fang noted in his reporting, the specific comments Taibbi told Congress that Plaskett cited "were correct" despite the original error in his Twitter Files reporting.
Plaskett, a non-voting Democratic delegate from the Virgin Islands, had a contentious exchange with Taibbi at last month's hearing, referring to him as a "so-called journalist" and grilled him to reveal his source for his Twitter Files reporting, who she suspected was Twitter owner Elon Musk. Taibbi refused to answer.
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Taibbi, who was granted access by Musk to Twitter's archives last year, has been under a microscope by government officials since he began his reporting in December. Last month, the Federal Trade Commission ordered Musk to "identify all journalists" who had access to the Twitter Files.
It was also revealed that the IRS visited Taibbi's home as he was giving his March 9 testimony to Congress about the Twitter Files. According to a letter sent by House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, Taibbi was allegedly told that both his 2018 and 2021 tax returns were rejected due to "concerns over identity theft."
