Taibbi to Newsmax: Jail Time Threat Chilling, Crazy

"Twitter Files" journalist Matt Taibbi says it's "chilling and crazy" that Del. Stacey Plaskett, D-Virgin Islands, the ranking member of the House Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government threatened him with jail time over an error he made and later corrected.

"Well, basically this is all over me getting an acronym wrong by one letter in one tweet, but actually the error is on the part of the committee and MSNBC, which interviewed me about this," Taibbi said Friday during an appearance on Newsmax's "The Record with Greta Van Susteren."

"I did make an error in a tweet but they're erroneously claiming that the Stanford election integrity partnership does not have a relationship with a Department of Homeland Security agency. They think that that's what that tweet meant, and they're wrong about that. It demonstrably does have a relationship with them. So they're threatening me with jail over an error, which is chilling and crazy."

The error was a reference to CISA, the government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, when he meant to refer to CIS, the Center for Internet Security, a private organization.

In a letter sent to Taibbi, Plaskett said the erroneous statement was "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."

Taibbi says he's not surprised Americans are losing trust in the news media.

"The irony of this from my standpoint is I started to drift away from what you might call mainstream journalism precisely over an issue like this," he told Newsmax.

"I remembered watching Adam Schiff's hearing about Russian active measures in March of 2017 where he basically read into the congressional record his theories that were promoted by Christopher Steele, and I thought, 'Wow, it must be true if it's prepared remarks by a member of Congress.' But when I wrote to Schiff's office to ask if they confirmed it, they said, 'We look forward to speaking to Mr. Steele to corroborate the story.

"They hadn't checked it all. So after that standard, they want to put me in jail over something that's not even an error, which again, you know, it's unbelievable."