Matt Taibbi has contributed another installment of the Twitter Files. It can be accessed via the first tweet in the 17-part thread below.
TWITTER FILES #16
Comic Interlude: A Media Experiment pic.twitter.com/Knp0UjfaMp— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023
Taibbi noticed the studied silence of the bigfoot press about the revelations of the Twitter Files so far — until last week. Something happened.
4. Then House hearings were held last week, at which one witness told a story about Donald Trump asking to remove a mean tweet by Chrissy Teigen.
The press went bananas. Now THAT was big news! pic.twitter.com/8ynYaD0lBb
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023
Taibbi wonders if the press might bestir itself to note a United States Senator “finking” on a number of “suspicious accounts” for lunatic reasons including “mentions immigration” (Taibbi’s favorite). King’s office of course declined comment. Taibbi is not similarly inhibited.
7. Here’s Maine Senator Angus King writing to Twitter to call a slew of accounts “suspicious” for reasons like:
“Rand Paul visit excitement”
“Bot (averages 20 tweets a day)”
Being followed by rival Eric Brakey
Or, my personal favorite: “Mentions immigration.” pic.twitter.com/uoJRlfrlOp— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023
Taibbi then takes up the case of “Republican Mark Lenzi, a State Department official most famous for offering to donate his brain to science after a claimed brush with Havana syndrome.” Lenzi is a former McCain campaign staffer who sought the removal of 14 Twitter accounts “distinguished among other things by skepticism of” the Russia hoax.
I wondered about Taibbi’s description of Lenzi as a Republican. Lenzi went to work for the State Department in the Foreign Service as a FP-06 grade level employee in 2011. He has sued the State Department over its alleged mistreatment of him. His 2021 complaint against Antony Blinken and the department is posted online here. The Washington Post story on Lenzi’s lawsuit is here.
Taibbi fails to note that Lenzi was a supporter of the 2016 Clinton campaign. See this 2016 Concord Monitor story: “Although he’s never before voted for a Democrat, Lenzi said his decision ‘wasn’t that much of a stretch.’ He has always been focused on foreign policy, and considers Clinton an experienced and capable leader in that realm.”
Lenzi speaks: “Trump is such an outlier, I don’t really consider him a Republican.”
Hmmm. I’m not sure we should really consider Lenzi himself a Republican.
Let us not forget the shiftless Adam Schiff and the performance of the media.
12. I noted before there were many crazy requests in Twitter records from officials wanting foes taken off Twitter, with Californian Adam Schiff’s effort to ban a reporter and stop “any and all search results” about a staffer making Angus King’s spreadsheet gambit look tame. pic.twitter.com/VVp1lwVI1T
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023
This is Taibbi’s take on the what we have learned so far.
14. The real story emerging in the #TwitterFiles is about a ballooning federal censorship bureaucracy that's not aimed at either the left or the right per se, but at the whole population of outsiders, who are being systematically defined as threats.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023
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