Fox News star Tucker Carlson on Friday had what was, from him, high praise for a Democratic member of Congress over messages that were revealed in the Matt Taibbi “Twitter Files” thread promoted by Elon Musk.
The controversial and not super well-received tweet thread by Taibbi covered documents leaked and provided to him by Musk’s Twitter related to the high-profile censoring of unflattering news about Hunter Biden in 2020 — most infamously resulting in a temporary ban of the New York Post‘s Twitter account entirely.
In the thread, Taibbi shared both internal communications between Twitter employees and communication between employees/execs and Democrats. One of those conversations was between Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna and then head of legal, policy, and trust at Twitter Vijaya Gadde.
Rep. Khanna raised an objection to Twitter censoring the story, the newspaper, and specifically the also temporarily banned account of then-Donald Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, on First Amendment grounds. He wrote that it represented a “violation of 1st Amendment principles,” and that “the story now has become more about censorship than relatively innocuous emails.”
Gadde was not moved by the argument, but the Fox News host was, when reading about it in Taibbi’s thread, saying “good for him,” and characterizing the liberal Democrat as “sort of a real one.”
But the whole country knew that something was being censored. A lot of people couldn’
t read it, but it was widely known that Twitter was censoring this. And so, by the way, were many other news organizations. And at that time, Twitter received a communication from a consultant in Washington who had taken an informal poll of members of Congress, Democrats. And the message this person sent to Twitter was, Democrats in Congress support the censorship, and we’re quoting, they ‘don’t think the First Amendment is absolute.’ Huh. In other words, sitting members of Congress were encouraging censorship to affect the outcome of a presidential election. That is illegal. It is effectively election-rigging, and it is a direct attack on our Bill of Rights by people who have sworn to uphold the Bill of Rights.You got to hope someone will be held accountable for this. So back to the documents: Within Twitter, others, presumably all voting Democrats, but some with some integrity, kept raising questions about this. Former vice president of global communications, Brandon Borman, asked, quote, ‘Can we truthfully claim this is part of the policy?’ In other words, is this consistent with the rules? Then the general counsel of Twitter, Jim Baker, that would be the former FBI general counsel who was directly involved in the FBI’s interview with Michael Flynn when his life was destroyed for political reasons, signed off on the continued censorship. The former FBI official signed off. Quote, ‘Caution is warranted,’ said Baker. Let’s hope we hear from Mr. Baker in a congressional hearing very soon. So throughout all of this, the record shows, at least as of right now, only one elected official in the entire Democratic Party – That would be Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley, a Democrat — voicing any concern at all. So Khanna reached out to Vijaya Gadde. And here’s what he wrote: ‘This seems to be a violation of the First Amendment principles. And I say this as a total Biden partisan.’ But he was completely blown off by Vijaya Gadde. By the way, good for him. He’s a liberal, too, but apparently sort of a real one.
Watch the clip above, via Fox News Channel.