MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan, Matt Taibbi clash in tense interview
'Twitter Files' journalist Matt Taibbi and MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan clashed over Taibbi's reporting in a contentious interview.
Matt Taibbi fired back at a Democrat who sent him a letter suggesting he could face prison time after his contentious congressional testimony last month, saying the party as a whole had lost its mind.
"At the moment I still can’t quite wrap my head around this, and hope others will be able to make more sense of it. I’d laugh, but I have three kids, and these people might be serious. It’s like waking up in a H.U.A.C. hearing. Have they all gone mad?" he asked.
Taibbi, one of several journalists behind the "Twitter Files," received a letter from Democratic Rep. Stacey Plaskett, suggesting he could be sent to prison for perjury based on remarks he made last month before a House subcommittee about government weaponization.
"I learned yesterday Virgin Islands Delegate and Ranking Member of the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government Stacey Plaskett is threatening me with prison, over her own error," he wrote in a piece headlined, "House Democrats Have Lost Their Minds."
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.
Journalist Matt Taibbi refused to reveal a source during a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing on Twitter Files. (Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage)
"It would be one thing if I really made the mistake. In that case, Plaskett’s letter would merely be an outrageous attempt to intimidate a witness by threatening a charge of intentional lying over a miscue. But that’s not the case," Taibbi wrote. "I did of course make an error, but what Plaskett is referencing is actually a mistake by Hasan, one she’s now repeating. I’m not sure what to do but explain and show this as clearly as possible."
He added further detail about how two major institutions with similar acronyms could be so easily mixed up, due partly to how closely they work together.
"I did in a tweet conflate the Center for American Security (CIS) with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), saying that CISA was so close to Stanford’s Election Integrity Project (EIP) that Twitter staffers didn’t really distinguish between them," he wrote. "This happened precisely because the agencies were hand-in-glove partners, and I’d seen so many communications about their cooperation that I lost track of some acronyms. I even tweeted months before, in TwitterFiles #6, that the agencies CIS and CISA were easily confused, because both worked with the EIP and CIS was a DHS contractor."
Rep. Stacey Plaskett (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
After writing further details about ties between the CIS and CISA, Taibbi went on to lament how this latest controversy says more about the state of the American government than it does about his integrity as a journalist.
"This means that when Plaskett writes it was ‘misinformation’ for me to be ‘alleging that CISA — a government entity — was working with the EIP to have posts removed from social media,’ she herself is engaging in misinformation. It may be an unintentional mistake, as she certainly seems capable of not knowing or caring to know underlying reality, but it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding," he wrote. "Only a person totally unfamiliar with the issue could believe that CISA/DHS were not closely involved with content moderation at Twitter, to say nothing of other companies. Both she and Mehdi are wrong about this, and make their accusation in defiance of a lot of obvious documentary evidence."
Taibbi recounted that while he is merely human, there has been an erosion of good faith between journalists and readers or even among fellow journalists in recent years.
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"I’ve of course made mistakes," he wrote. "It’s not supposed to happen, but it does, inevitably, which is why the New York Times has a ‘Corrections’ section. What the Times still does is one of the last relics of the old honor system, under which journalists implicitly promise to try their hardest not to screw up, and readers agree to trust them, so long as they can see editors and their charges admitting their errors."
"Unfortunately there’s a new model, in which news organizations don’t address errors or audience complaints at all," he wrote. "It’s from just such a media institution that Plaskett — while herself making an easily checkable mistake — got the idea to threaten prison for the kind of blunder we once would have consigned to the corrections page without a thought."
Fox News' Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
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