Synopsis:  In the latest edition of Twitter Files, journalist Matt Taibbi has accused US politicians, including Democratic Senator from Maine, Angus King, and Republican Mark Lenzi, a State Department official, of trying to influence Twitter for political gains.

From Matt Taibbi tweets:

Yes, the Maine Senator demanded @ZeroHedge (and 100s more) Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts (and Facebook Groups) be instantly removed for being “suspicious.

The real story emerging in the #TwitterFiles is about 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.

From Taibbi interview with Joe Rogan:

Going into it, I thought that the relationship between these security agencies like the FBI and DHS, and companies like Twitter and Facebook was a little less formal. I thought maybe they had an advisory role. What we find is that it is very formalized.

They have a really intense structure that they’ve worked out over a period of years, where they have regular meetings, they have a system where the DHS handles censorship requests that come up from the states and the FBI handles the international ones, and they all flood all these companies. It is a big bureaucracy. I don’t think we expected to see that.

I think that shows you the mentality. They really, genuinely felt that they were impregnable and they don’t have anyone to answer to. A normal person doesn’t put incriminating things in emails because we all have the expectation that someday it might come out. These folks didn’t act that way.

I was especially shocked by an email from a staffer for Adam Schiff, the [Democratic] California Congressman, where they are just outright saying, “We would like you to suspend the accounts of this journalist and anybody who retweets information about this committee.” This is a member of Congress, right?

None of these people have legal backgrounds, but they’ve got lawyers in the office for sure. This is the House Intelligence Committee. You would think that they would have better operational security.

Another moment that was shocking to me was an email from an FBI agent named Elvis Chan in San Francisco to Twitter, and they’re setting up this Signal group which is going to include all the top, sort of, censorship executives at all the big companies, and it is a word document that has all the phone numbers of all these important executives. And the subject line reads, “Phone numbers” and the Word document is just called “secret phone numbers.” And I’m just thinking, this is how they taught you to do it at Quantico?

And they never said we were misinformed, there never was this crazy collusion between Russia and Donald Trump, and in fact, there was some information that points to Hillary Clinton having involvement with Russia too, and they’ve all had involvement with Russia. This wasn’t some grand conspiracy to elect a Russian puppet as the president of the United States, sorry.

It was a three-and-a-half mass hysteria experiment. This is one of the reasons I got quietly moved out of mainstream journalism. I didn’t have a problem at Rolling Stone, but early on in the Trump years I said, “There is something wrong with this story, I think there are elements that can’t be proven, I don’t think we should be running this stuff.” And then before I knew it, I was working independently.

But with the Twitter Files, we’re finding stuff that now tells you absolutely what actually the truth was during that time. For instance, one of the big early Russiagate stories was in early 2018 when Devin Nunes, the Republican Congressman who was head of the House Intelligence Committee at the time, wrote a memo basically saying, “We think they faked FISA applications, we think the FBI used the Steele dossier to try to get surveillance authority against some Trump people like Carter Page, and we think they lied and cheated to do that.

So he submitted this classified memo and not only was he denounced everywhere as a liar but there was this big story all over the place that this hashtag, #ReleaseTheMemo, had been amplified by Russian bots. You probably don’t remember this, but this story was everywhere in January and February of 2018, that #ReleaseTheMemo was basically a Russian operation and Nunes was benefiting from it.

Well, I’m reading the Twitter Files looking for something else entirely, and suddenly we come across a string of emails internally at Twitter, where the Twitter officials are saying, “You know, we’re not finding any Russians at all behind this hashtag, and we told the members of Congress who asked about this that there are no Russians involved in this,” because Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, they all came out with this accusation of it being linked to Russia, “we told them there was nothing there and they went with it anyway.”

There are lots of stories like that now that are kind of falling apart.

Beginning in March, we’ll start using the Twitter Files to tell this larger story about how Americans turned their counterterrorism machinery against themselves, to disastrous effect, through little-known federal agencies like the Global Engagement Center (GEC).