Independent journalist Matt Taibbi has been threatened with up to five years of prison for an alleged perjury charge by Virgin Islands Democrat Rep. Stacey Plaskett.
The charge is in connection with an error in a tweet related to Taibbi’s “Twitter Files” testimony in front of Congress last month.
Plaskett cited the tweet’s inaccuracies as potentially leading Congress to rely on incorrect testimony when considering and passing new legislation impacting all Americans.
On March 9, Taibbi testified in a hearing held by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), whose subcommittee on the weaponization of government is investigating the Federal Trade Commission’s treatment of Twitter.
Plaskett, a non-voting member of the House and the panel’s ranking member, questioned Taibbi and author Michael Schellenberger about their vetting of internal Twitter emails and instant messages.
These messages revealed how the social media platform allegedly collaborated with government agencies, including the FBI, to suppress conservatives on the platform.
During the hearing, Taibbi told Congressman Chris Stewart (R-UT) that he and Schellenberger saw in the Twitter Files that Twitter executives did not differentiate between specific government agencies, such as the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP).
Plaskett accused Taibbi of misleading the public and members of Congress with a specific tweet he posted on the morning of the hearing.
The tweet alleged that the EIP worked with the CISA to ask social media companies to remove millions of tweets deemed to be disinformation on their platforms.
Plaskett pointed out an error in Taibbi’s tweet, in which he mistakenly used the incorrect acronym for two groups accused of relaying information to Twitter about content moderation.
Instead of writing “CISA,” Taibbi used “CIS,” which refers to the non-profit group Center for Internet Security.
In an April 6 televised interview with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan, Taibbi acknowledged the mistake, stating he had “gotten one thing wrong or a few things wrong.” He subsequently deleted the erroneous tweet.
Plaskett further criticized Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files as being “rife with numerous other false and misleading claims.”
These included an inaccurate total of tweets labeled as disinformation by the EIP, omission of pertinent dates regarding taxpayer-funded organizations flagging tweets as disinformation, and the assertion that the EIP was founded in response to the government pausing the operations of the Disinformation Governance Board.
In her letter to Taibbi, Plaskett emphasized that knowingly providing false information to the committee or concealing material information is a crime punishable by up to five years imprisonment.
Although Taibbi appeared to have unintentionally made a mistake without trying to deceive the committee, Plaskett used the issue to threaten jail time for misspeaking about the subject.
Plaskett has offered Taibbi the chance to correct the hearing record by answering a series of questions by April 21 to ensure accuracy in a congressional hearing.
Taibbi stated in a tweet on Tuesday that he would “have to weigh in on this eventually, since the controversy revolves around a serious (but grossly incorrect) accusation leveled at me.”