XPost: alt.politics.media, alt.politics.trump, sac.politics   
   XPost: alt.politics.democrats, talk.politics.guns, alt.politics.homosexuality   
   From: democrat-criminals@mail.house.gov   
      
   https://nypost.com/2023/01/06/how-democrat-adam-schiff-abused-his-power-   
   to-demand-i-be-kicked-off-twitter/   
      
   Back from holiday vacation, I found an interesting email waiting for me in   
   my inbox from Matt Taibbi, the independent journo Elon Musk tasked with   
   reviewing and releasing internal Twitter documents about decisions to   
   censor content and ban users from the platform.   
      
   “Paul,” Taibbi wrote, “just found a crazy email on Twitter — did you know   
   Adam Schiff’s staff . . . asked Twitter to have you banned?”   
      
   I was gobsmacked. This would explain why Twitter could never give me a   
   reason for suspending my account, even though I had broken none of its   
   rules.   
      
   Schiff, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House Permanent Select   
   Committee on Intelligence, made his “request” to ban me through his staff   
   in a November 2020 memo to Twitter. Three months later, in early February   
   2021, I was kicked off the platform.   
      
   Why would a congressional leader sworn to protect the Constitution and   
   First Amendment want to muzzle a veteran journalist? Like authoritarians   
   everywhere, Schiff did not like critical reporting. The man who vowed to   
   “protect our Democracy” from Donald Trump wanted to censor a free press.   
      
   In articles for RealClearInvestigations, I outed his anonymous   
   “whistleblower” from the first impeachment of President Trump. It was Eric   
   Ciaramella, a Democrat who had worked in the Trump White House as an Obama   
   holdover. I also exposed Ciaramella’s prior relationship with one of   
   Schiff’s top staffers on the impeachment committee, Sean Misko.   
      
   My reporting cast fresh doubts on Schiff’s claims that the 2019   
   impeachment process happened organically. The New York Times had already   
   busted Schiff lying about prior contacts with the whistleblower.   
   Initially, Schiff publicly stated his office never spoke with the   
   whistleblower before he filed his complaint against President Trump, when   
   in fact a Schiff staffer had huddled with him, something Schiff’s   
   spokesman Patrick Boland was forced to admit after the Times broke the   
   story. (The staffer was never identified.) The prior contacts led to   
   suspicions Schiff’s office helped the whistleblower craft his complaint as   
   part of a partisan operation.   
      
   In the censorship demands Schiff’s office sent Twitter, Misko and the   
   “impeachment inquiry” are mentioned. It’s not clear if Ciaramella is, too,   
   since some names are blacked out. Schiff demanded Twitter “remove any and   
   all content”’ related to them.   
      
   Unlike in other cases where Twitter did censor accounts, officials there   
   originally argued that “this isn’t feasible.”   
      
   At the time, Twitter was about the only media outlet where the names of   
   Schiff’s impeachment operatives were circulating. The Washington press   
   corps had conspired to protect the so-called whistleblower and cover up   
   his identity. The Washington Post even scolded me for identifying him,   
   claiming I was putting his life in danger. But this was a bluff. I was   
   told by his family, as well as impeachment investigators, that he had   
   received no credible threats.   
      
   In his list of demands, Schiff tried to justify banning me by claiming I   
   was promoting “false QAnon conspiracies,” which I have never done and I   
   challenge Schiff to produce evidence to back up his defamatory remarks.   
      
   Schiff knew better. He knew “QAnon” was a trigger for Twitter censors, who   
   were suppressing QAnon posts. Yet even Twitter’s liberal gatekeepers   
   appeared skeptical of Schiff’s claims: “If it is related to QAnon it   
   should already be deamplified.” (Emphasis in original.)   
      
   Schiff knows something about promoting false conspiracies. In 2017, he   
   took to the microphone in a televised House Intelligence Committee hearing   
   and read into the congressional record a screed of wild conspiracy   
   theories about Trump and Russia from the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded   
   dossier.   
      
   He trumpeted them as if they were fact. But they were false — every one of   
   them — as Special Counsel John Durham has proven in court documents,   
   expanding on what Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz found in   
   his earlier report.   
      
   We now know most of the preposterous rumors Schiff dramatically read into   
   the public record came from a source who was invented by the dossier’s   
   authors. In his hyping of the dossier, Schiff smeared and defamed not only   
   Trump, but also Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign adviser, whom   
   Schiff falsely painted as a Russian agent.   
      
   The next year, Schiff would be caught lying about the so-called Nunes Memo   
   exposing FBI abuse of the FISA wiretap process to spy on Page. Schiff   
   claimed then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes misled the   
   public when he said the FBI heavily relied on the debunked dossier to   
   swear out the warrants. In his own memo, Schiff, as ranking member,   
   insisted the FBI’s warrants were based on other evidence and were above-   
   board.   
      
   In 2019, the scathing Horowitz Report proved it was Nunes who was telling   
   the truth. Schiff, who had access to the same classified FISA information   
   as Nunes, knew better.   
      
   This is the real spreader of falsehoods. Nonetheless, Twitter promised   
   Schiff they would “review” my account — “again,” which suggests this   
   wasn’t the first time Schiff had tried to silence me. Or the last. Were   
   there other communications? Phone calls? Texts?   
      
   Months after Schiff lobbied Twitter to ban me and remove all the   
   impeachment-related content from its platform, his communications director   
   and chief of staff — Patrick Boland — tried to intimidate my editors at   
   RCI into retracting the impeachment stories I broke a year earlier.   
      
   In his emails, Boland invoked “the events of January 6,” warning our   
   stories could “result in actual violence” if they remained online. Over   
   time, Boland’s demands became more and more strident. But my editors   
   refused to give in to the bullying.   
      
   It wasn’t about “safety.” It was about wanting to avoid any scrutiny for   
   their actions.   
      
   After joining Twitter in June 2016, I tweeted more than 20,100 tweets and   
   I amassed more than 340,000 followers — all without any problems, without   
   any suspensions. Until Schiff exercised his vendetta against me.   
      
   He appears to have secretly interfered with my ability to do my job for   
   almost two years. Calling Twitter “social media” is a misnomer. In many   
   ways, Twitter is simply the media now. As a working journalist, you need   
   Twitter to do your job. News is broken there. Corporations and government   
   post their press releases there. Key information and data are archived   
   there.   
      
   If a powerful government official prevented me from promoting my stories,   
   including my New York Post columns, on the nation’s digital town square,   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)