(TotalConservative.com) – Independent journalist Matt Taibbi has been threatened with jail time by Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) for a minor mistake he made during an interview with MSNBC host Medhi Hasan. Taibbi is firing back, asking Fox & Friends viewers to imagine if the Trump administration had threatened Jim Acosta with jail time and then pointed out they all rallied around him when the Trump administration temporarily revoked Acosta’s White House press pass.
Taibbi was shocked there hasn’t been more coverage of the threat, considering his mistake was incredibly minor and was made during an airing of Hasan’s MSNBC show and not before Congress. He suggested that which journalist is under attack shouldn’t matter, as the potential for any of them to be targets of an unfriendly administration will exist if the profession isn’t insulated from political attacks.
Plasket sent Taibbi a letter earlier in April wherein she alleged he committed a grave error regarding the name of a federal agency involved in the Twitter Files. She referenced Taibbi’s appearance on Hasan’s show where he misspoke referencing CISA, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency while intending to reference CIS, the Center for Internet Security, a non-profit organization founded in 2000. He later addressed and corrected the error, and actually spoke about how easy it was to confuse the two given their acronyms’ similarities and similar missions. She alleged he “intentionally” altered the acronym.
She then unleashed a large paragraph threatening him with jail time for lying on oath, when the mistake wasn’t made while he was under oath, and in general, was relatively minor and immediately corrected.
Fellow Twitter Files journalist Lee Fang also wrote out a substack article where he explained the situation, including the fact that his testimony was correct despite the error made on Hasan’s show. Taibbi cited a “brain cramp” as the cause of his error and also pointed out that both groups work with federal agencies anyway.
Leftist media was quick to deploy the talking point that Taibbi was working for Musk over his reporting on the Twitter Files last year, while clever commentators asked who they were working for. Is this why the same corporate press has been silent on this recent fiasco?
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