Self-owning Republican committee

Despite their own past behavior, Republicans are using their newfound control of the House to probe Democrats’ and federal law enforcement agencies’ interaction with Twitter.

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WHEN THE WHITE House called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.

That exchange — revealed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter by Rep. Gerry Connolly — and others like it are nowhere to be found in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” releases, which have focused almost exclusively on requests from Democrats and the feds to the social media company. The newly empowered Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now devoting significant resources and time to investigating this supposed “collusion” between liberal politicians and Twitter.

  Rolling Stone

Ooops.

The Trump administration and its allied Republicans in Congress routinely asked Twitter to take down posts they objected to — the exact behavior that they’re claiming makes President Biden, the Democrats, and Twitter complicit in an anti-free speech conspiracy to muzzle conservatives online.

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But during both the Trump and Biden presidencies, these types of moderation requests or demands were routinely sent to Twitter by the staff of influential GOP lawmakers — ones with names like Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik.

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The obvious irony here is, the sources note, that Republican leaders and elected officials have long been committing precisely the kind of “government interference” that they are now investigating, fundraising off of, and accusing Democrats and the so-called anti-Trump “Deep State” of perpetrating. Some of the loudest conservative and MAGA voices on Capitol Hill — who’ve been endlessly demanding taxpayer-funded, high-profile investigations into Big Tech “bias” and “collusion” — were themselves engaged in the behavior they now claim is colluding.

I wonder if Matt Taibbi and Jonathan Turley - or indeed, Elon Musk himself - will have anything to say.

Other posts on this insane flop of a committee can be found here and here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 09:24 am:

UPDATE 03:18 pm:  Well, we've heard from Turley now...

Maybe Taibbi will have something to say about that.

Katie, bar the door...

Too bad the yelling and screaming clips are what they're after - the fundraising value is priceless.

And wrapping it up...

The Age of Angry Torpor has descended on us all.

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The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability had its first chance to air out its chuckleheaded conspiracy tales about Twitter's "suppression" of the news about Hunter Biden's laptop. It took up most of the legislative day on Wednesday.

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When Rep. Lauren Boebert threatened a witnesses with arrest and prosecution for...something...and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Comer if he didn't think this violated committee protocols on witness intimidation, Comer fumbled and foozled around until an aide at his shoulder prompted him to reply, “We don't agree there was witness threatening.” (He couldn't come up with that on his own?)

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Comer put a blow-up of the NYP front page in question behind his chair. That story speculated that the laptop contained evidence that Joe Biden had gotten a Ukrainian prosecutor fired because the man was closing in on one of Hunter's business partners. This, you may recall, was the primary red herring Republicans tossed out as an alternate theory of the crime during Impeachment No. 1. One person who remembered that quite clearly was rookie Rep. Dan Goldman, whose previous gig was lead counsel for the House Judiciary Committee in that very matter. He took Comer out for a walk.

  Charlie Pierce

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