Journalist Matt Taibbi fired back at a House Democrat threatening him with prosecution and said he would be receiving far more support from his colleagues in the media if he were being targeted under the Trump administration.
Taibbi spoke with Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade on Monday about his dispute with Elon Musk and his testimony before Congress. The interview touched on Rep. Stacey Plaskett threatening Taibbi with prison time over an error he made in his reporting.
In an error that Taibbi has since corrected, he mistook the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) with the privately run Center for Internet Security (CIS). Plaskett called upon the journalist to correct his testimony before Congress, warning that perjury carries a five-year prison sentence.
As Taibbi spoke about how he’s been coping with the pressure surrounding his work, he told Kilmeade “I know this is a cliche, but can you imagine if something like this has happened in the Trump years? If Republicans had threatened somebody like Jim Acosta with five years in prison over a minor error that he didn’t even make in testimony before Congress?”
“You would have had every human rights organization on Earth complaining about it,” Taibbi said, “but not a peep from my so-called colleagues in mainstream media over this outrageous abuse. It doesn’t matter what journalist it is, they should be upset about it because it could be them next.”
Taibbi has complained before that Democrats treat him differently than other reporters. We should note that journalists did rebuke Plaskett’s threat toward him.
Since Taibbi brought up Acosta, Kilmeade seized the chance to bash CNN.
“The other thing is CNN would have gone 36 hours without a commercial, with different various headshots of Jim Acosta being persecuted,” Kilmeade snarked, to Taibbi’s amusement. “It would’ve been unbelievable, but I think it’s an apt comparison.”
Watch above via Fox News.
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