On April 1, during a Capitol Hill hearing held to investigate alleged government censorship during the Biden administration, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, called GOP witness, veteran journalist Matt Taibbi, a "serial sexual harasser. In support of the allegation, she entered two articles from the Chicago Reader into the Congressional record. Unsubstantiated media reports appearing in online publications don’t confirm anything, but Congressional hearings aren’t designed to ferret out the truth.
My immediate thoughts after hearing about this attack was that the Congresswoman was afraid to engage with the journalist on the facts, and that he should sue her. The California Democrat, later posting on Twitter, said that it was “telling” that when the Republicans gave Taibbi time to defend himself against her smears, he didn't. Then I wonder what the Congresswoman thinks about the $10 million libel lawsuit that Taibbi filed against her against her two days later. As a member of Congress, she does enjoy, under the Constitution's “Speech and Debate” clause, strong protection for words spoken during Congressional hearings, but the fact that Kamlager-Dove also posted her attack on Twitter may have put her in legal jeopardy. It will be an interesting case to follow.
Nina Jankowicz, the former director of the short-lived, Stasi-sounding Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board under Joe Biden, said during the same April 1 hearing that Taibbi didn't understand what he was looking at when he had access to the Twitter Files, adding, “Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works.” That's rich, coming from someone who once spread the conspiracy theory that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.
Taibbi’s used to tawdry treatment at the hands of Democrats by now. In 2023, Democratic Party delegate from the Virgin Islands to Congress, Stacey Plaskett, called him a “so-called journalist” at a Congressional hearing, to which Taibbi responded, in a mic drop moment, "I've won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written 10 books, including four New York Times bestsellers.” Plaskett, further embarrassing herself, also threatened Taibbi with prison time for lying to Congress, which of went nowhere. If Taibbi’s a so-called journalist, then Plaskett is a so-called Congresswoman, as she's not allowed to vote.
How did Taibbi go from being a journalist with serious progressive bona fides—he once wrote articles for Rolling Stone about Wall Street “gangsters” like “Why Isn't Wall St. In Jail”—to becoming the Democrats’ bête noir? Trace that back to his participation in the Twitter Files investigation, a series of releases of select internal Twitter documents published from December 2022 through March 2023 on Elon Musk’s Twitter that covered such topics as the FBI and U.S. intelligence community's requests (demands?), under the Biden administration, for Twitter to remove content or users, a censorious effort that also included pressuring Twitter’s moderation process regarding New York Post coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop that ended up with Twitter suspending the Post’s account, even though its reporting on the subject was later proven to be accurate.
At the same time, the “legitimate” New York Times was reporting misinformation on the topic, just as the MSM and the intel community were doing—it was all Russia, Russia, Russia.
What the Twitter Files uncovered was that the government’s communications with Twitter officials, carried out by misinformed operatives, focused on certain posts that were allegedly “misinformation” or “malinformation,” and that the rationale for removing them was that they were violations of Twitter’s terms of service rather than being illegal. Taibbi said in his Congressional testimony, “They weren't looking for misinformation and disinformation. They were looking for orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, obedience and disobedience."
On Saturday, Christmas Eve 2022, just three weeks after Taibbi released his first Twitter Files reporting, the IRS opened an investigation of his tax returns. Then, on March 9, 2023, the IRS made an unannounced visit to his New Jersey home. Since when does the IRS make house calls, especially at the income level of a journalist? What sense does it make for an administration to harass a journalist who’s accused it of authoritarianism with more authoritarianism?
The sexual harassment comment that Kamlager-Dove made about Taibbi refers to the 2017 (the year #MeToo started) backlash over a memoir he co-wrote in 2000—The Exile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia—which a few critics claimed recounts his sexual harassment of females when he was working as a journalist in Russia in the 1990s. The book, written with Mark Ames, an editor at the same Russian newspaper at the time, contains passages involving mistreatment, sexual harassment, and even assaults of their female staff and other young women. Two women portrayed in the book told Paste magazine that none of the sexual harassment portrayed in the book ever happened. Taibbi posted a lengthy apology on Facebook, saying that the book was fictional, intended as a "giant satire" of young American expatriates living in Russia, while also ascribing a particularly controversial passage in the book to Ames. Doubters, however, pointed out that the book contains a note making clear that it is non-fiction.
If Harvey Weinstein's a 10 on the #MeToo offender scale, all things considered—credibility and accumulation of evidence, severity of the behavior, etc.—Taibbi’s about a one. The Democrats, who require outlets for their rage, target him like they do Teslas parked on the street. The same writer who wrote a book about the death of Eric Garner, a black man, at the hands of NYC cops—a death the author said reveals “the great distances that were traveled to protect his killer, and America's pathological desire to avoid equal treatment under the law for its black population”—is now a pariah to progressives.
Maybe, as Taibbi put it, progressives have changed, while he's remained the same. They want cheerleaders instead of actual journalists—people like former Bill Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos (ABC), former Obama press secretary Jen Psaki (MSNBC), and Margaret Brennan (CBS), who said on air to Marco Rubio that the Nazis “weaponized free speech to commit a genocide.”
In fact, one of the first things the Nazis did when they took over was to ban free speech. Stephanopoulos’ false claim that Trump was found liable for “raping” E. Jean Carroll cost his network $15 million from a defamation lawsuit, and Psaki laughed on air while mocking GOP voters for being concerned with the border crisis, one of the two main reasons Trump won the last election. None of these faux journalists lost their jobs, because not following the approved narrative’s the only real firing offense now.
MSNBC and CNN, among other media outlets, are complicit in tarring Matt Taibbi’s reputation. Members of Congress, instead of engaging with him on his Twitter Files reporting during hearings—even with attacks on it—have told the journalist to take off his tin foil hat and called him names such as “Elon Musk lapdog,” thus creating neat soundbites for CNN and MSNBC—the real lapdogs—to offer up as “news” later on in the day.
Becoming a lapdog to the servile media by buying anti-Taibbi tidbits the Democrats have handed to them is a bad idea. At the very least, he's way more of a journalist than anyone you'll see on TV.
