The IRS opened an investigation into independent reporter Matt Taibbi the same day he published a “Twitter Files” report documenting efforts between the social media platform and federal intelligence agencies to censor dissenting voices online.
On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel demanding all documents and communications related to the agency’s decision to launch an investigation into Taibbi. According to the letter, the IRS’s inquiry was initiated on Dec. 24, 2022 — the same day Taibbi released a bombshell report detailing collusion between Twitter and the federal government to silence online voices disapproved of by the regime.
“The IRS’s production shows that the IRS opened its examination of Mr. Taibbi’s 2018 tax return on December 24, 2022,” wrote Committee Chair and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. “Not only was this date Christmas Eve and a Saturday, but it also happened to be three weeks after he published the first Twitter Files detailing government abuses and the same day that Mr. Taibbi published the ninth segment of the Twitter Files, detailing how federal government agencies ‘from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA’ coordinated to censor and coerce speech on various social media platforms.”
In his Dec. 24 report, based on “documents passed to Twitter by the FBI-led Foreign Influence Task Force,” Taibbi revealed Twitter “was receiving content recommendations in bulk from an array of federal agencies through the FBI, about a range of topics — from domestic extremist groups in the U.S. to
