Authored by Matt Taibbi via 'Racket News' Substack, (emphasis ours)
Representative Stacey Plaskett, who called Michael Shellenberger and me "direct threats to people who oppose them," is now threatening me with prison - over Mehdi Hasan's uncorrected error
Wow. When I think this iteration of the Democratic Party can’t sink any lower, it does.
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.
Just after I ran a piece called “The Press is Now Also the Police” about the New York Times and Washington Post boasting of roles in delivering a leak suspect to the FBI, MSNBC’s new attack-caster, Mehdi Hasan, got his wish, inspiring first Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and then Plaskett to trumpet his incredibly vicious and mistaken claim that I lied to Congress.
The threatened penalty is five years:
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. 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.
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Lee Fang wrote a detailed article rebutting Hasan that included links to other previously unpublished #TwitterFiles emails, showing how the system worked.
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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.
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I’m not going to lie, it frightens me a little that I even have to offer this defense.
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?
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Subscribers can read Matt's full note here, it's shocking...if not surprising.
