Independent journalist Matt Taibbi released another batch of “Twitter Files” Saturday night using a series of tweets to reveal the internal communications between Twitter executives and government officials looking to target constituents and a political rival, as well as label various users’ accounts as “Russian-controlled.”
In the latest Taibbi tweets, he reported on the two examples of what appears to be Sen. Angus King (I-ME) and, separately, State Department official Mark Lenzi, trying to influence Twitter in a series of emails.
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A 2018 email allegedly from Twitter Public Policy manager Kevin Kane revealed that King’s “campaign director” requested Twitter to censor 354 “suspicious” Twitter accounts, including supporters of his campaign rival at the time, Republican Maine State Sen. Eric Brakey.
King’s campaign team allegedly identified several reasons that the accounts should be considered “suspicious,” citing things such as “Rand Paul visit excitement,” “Bot (averages 20 tweets a day),” “mentions immigration,” or being followed by his campaign rival and U.S. Senate Republican nominee Eric Brakey.
King’s office did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
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
“If Dick Nixon sniffed glue, this is what his enemies list would look like,” Taibbi wrote of King’s spreadsheet of “suspicious” Twitter users.
Former Capitol Hill Chief of Staff Jim Pfaff called the pressure by King on Twitter to target users and even his political rival a “clear ethics violation.”
“In the case of Angus King and others, this should be something going before Ethics Committees in the House or the Senate. They are literally using their power, influence and knowledge to shut down speech that they might find problematic,” said Pfaff on a “Twitter Spaces” discussion on Saturday night. “No member of Congress – unless they got someone who does research on this — would know that something was a bot.”
Pfaff went on to discuss how concerning it was that King was sitting on the U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence in 2018 when he allegedly pressured Twitter.
Brakey, King’s former Republican opponent in 2018, responded on Saturday night to Taibbi’s reporting about King allegedly attempting to silence his supporters.
“Matt Taibbi’s report shows that Angus King’s staffers tried to silence his political opponent and hundreds of constituents,” Brakey said.
Brakey added, “What King’s staff appears to have done on his behalf is repugnant to American values … Senator King needs to come clean with the people of Maine about his attempts to censor voters and limit freedoms of speech.”
Taibbi wrote on Twitter that “King’s spreadsheet gambit” looked “tame” in its attempt to influence Twitter in comparison to his own previous reporting on the “crazy requests” allegedly from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) who wanted to “ban a reporter and stop ‘any and all search results’ about a staffer.”
In another Twitter communication, the journalist showed an email purportedly from State Department official Mark Lenzi who wrote to Twitter to ask for the removal of, as Taibbi described, “14 accounts distinguished among other things by skepticism of Russiagate.”
“In my work I have been able to identify a lot of Russian controlled Twitter accounts that have made it through some of your purges,” Lenzi allegedly wrote in his email to Twitter. “The below are some Russian government controlled accounts that I think you will want to look into and delete.”
11.A government official, writing from a State department email, asks to “delete” 14 accounts that are engaged in legit speech and for which no evidence is shown they’re Russian controlled or bots (in fact, we at Racket know some of these people). A clear First Amendment issue.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023
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Taibbi remarked in his reporting of Lenzi’s alleged email that there was “no evidence” that the users were “Russian controlled or bots” and called the situation “a clear First Amendment issue.”
Taibbi summarized his latest #TwitterFiles dispatches as exposing “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.”
