I'd be lying if I said I didn't spend last week wondering how to undo any damage to the #TwitterFiles caused by my interview with MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan. Short of jumping in a DeLorean and time-flying back to cancel, few ideas presented themselves. I knew from the start the Twitter project would be a high-wire act, and I don’t get to blame anyone else for slipping.
Sadly, the aftermath of the segment took on a life of its own. I’ll have to weigh in at some point for obvious reasons, but in the meantime: remind me never to upset Lee Fang:
Update: I reached Anna Mulrine Grobe, co-author of the “pro-spanking” article Hasan is accused of plagiarizing. “I haven’t had any chats or contact with Mr. Hasan, including request for permission," she said. She added, “I’d forgotten all about the article (I have young children now and definitely don’t spank them).”
Also, in response to requests for clarification, here goes...
Post-segment, Hasan took the incredibly serious step of accusing me of lying to congress. Talk about “press as police”: that’s a felony charge, and Hasan has been insisting to everyone who’ll listen that I’m guilty of it. Hasan's claim is based on the idea that I was “suggesting a nonprofit was an intel agency to try & prove government collusion/censorship.”
This was a reference to my conflating the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in a #TwitterFiles tweet. One letter in an acronym may not sound like much, but it would have been a serious mistake indeed, if I’d implied an “intel agency” like CISA was partnered with Twitter and Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, if it was not.
But CISA absolutely was a partner to the EIP, as was the CIS. Hasan appeared not to have been aware of this, which may be why (apart from my bumbling demeanor) he seemed to think this was such a gotcha moment on air.
CISA, CIS, and EIP openly partnered through the 2020 election process, as TwitterFiles emails documents as well as publicly available information repeatedly demonstrate. I even tweeted months ago, in TwitterFiles #6, that the two agencies were easily confused, as both were partners to Stanford’s election initiative. Neither CISA, the CIS, Twitter, nor the EIP has ever claimed CISA wasn’t a partner to the EIP project. It would be an impossible thing to assert: there are too many public announcements describing the CISA-EIP partnership. From the EIP’s own website:
Hasan said claiming CISA involvement with the EIP was “key to my thesis,” and since this “thesis” wasn’t true, House Judiciary chief and Weaponization of Government Subcommittee chair Jim Jordan needed to correct the record. (He doesn’t). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose MO these days seems to involve loudly planting a flag in every online wedge controversy with any chance of trending, chimed in to claim the “entire Oversight hearing and investigation” was “based on these errors,” and therefore the GOP had wasted “tons of public time and dollars” on the Files material.
To say that all of this has been infuriating is a massive understatement. I have three little kids and these people are accusing me of a serious crime for which I could go to jail, yet they themselves are the ones making the mistake. The sheer viciousness of the ploy is mind-blowing.
Oh, and when Lee Fang responded point-by-point to Mehdi’s accusation, the matter plunged straight to the sewer, as Lee describes:
Mehdi… accused me of lying, of attempting to win access to the Twitter Files by “sucking up to Musk” — apparently unaware that I already had access to Twitter’s internal files and had published investigations using the documents — of careerism, and most viciously and absurdly, of being an Islamophobic bigot.
I’ve been angry in media spats before, but the level of withering hatred and dishonesty that’s come out over the Twitter Files is something new in my experience. I’m not surprised by it anymore, but I’ll never quite understand it. Thank God for Lee.
