Taibbi: State Dept Interns Reportedly Came Up With Controversial 'Election Integrity Partnership'

2 days ago

At Tuesday's House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI) spoke to witnesses Matt Taibbi and Benjamin Weingarten.

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Transcript

00:00Thank you with that. We will return to questioning. I'm going to give myself

00:04three minutes and eating up some of that time in a very unfortunately on my part

00:11so again my apologies to the to the panel for any confusion there. I was

00:17enthusiastic yes the ranking member reminds me so I think it was your

00:21spirited opening that may have brought me along that path. Well with that I'm

00:28going to take three minutes and Mr. Taibbi you had started to explain and

00:33did in your opening statement about the election integrity partnership and I

00:37appreciate that. Mr. Weingarten you were talking about an advertising blacklist

00:43and the GDI News Guard used these blacklists to censor American speech and

00:50I am curious you know those blacklists how did they treat the right-leaning

00:55outlets versus the left-leaning outlets and were outlets punished for even

00:59attempting to provide ideological balance. I mean you wrote Real Clear

01:02Politics was one of those that was on the list. I think the Real Clear Politics

01:08case study is instructive in that if you go to our website you see sources left

01:12and right and the whole purpose is let's provide a balanced diet of opinion and

01:17analysis and let the American people decide because we have faith in the

01:20American people that they have agency and they can decide for themselves and

01:23the fact of the matter is that RCP and then some on the right libertarian

01:28conservative and even anti-establishment leftist publications have found

01:31themselves dinged by these so-called risk raters and that risk by the way is

01:36that they may be brands who advertise on these sites may be targeted for

01:41boycotts and attacks generally by progressive groups so this whole sort of

01:45apparatus exists out of coercion essentially from the left and as a

01:49consequence ad revenue streams have died for many of these companies and it

01:53threatens their their viability. Yeah and and how would these blacklists treat

01:57a publication that had the audacity of suggesting that COVID-19 virus may have

02:02originated from a lab leak which actually turned out to to be a

02:06legitimate and true theory. I don't know about the rest of my colleagues or the

02:12panelists but I know people who were canceled over putting out such theories

02:17and even threatened with their job and their livelihood on that so how talk to

02:24me a little bit about very quickly about COVID-19. In Real Clear's reporting we

02:27saw that at least one source that put forth questions about all manner of

02:32issues from the origins of COVID to mitigation measures and beyond they get

02:37attacked because or they got attacked because they dissented from what was

02:41public health orthodoxy at the time and as we know that public health works

02:44orthodoxy that consensus has shifted but if you differed from consensus you

02:49were dinged and you had essentially no recourse or real due process to get off

02:53a blacklist for just presenting an opinion or a substantiated analysis. I'm

02:58gonna move quickly here and I know Mr. Taibbi you're not the only controversial

03:02person here. Ms. Jankowicz as we talked about some of her posts some of this

03:08saying that the fairy tale about Hunter Biden's laptop is out there and the

03:16Chris Steele provides some great historical context about the evolution

03:20of disinformation so without objection I'm going to put those into the record

03:24as well. I find it ironic that something called the American Sunlight Project is

03:29actually a dark money group that won't that won't release its its donors the

03:35certainly that that doesn't bode well. I'm gonna Mr. Taibbi I'm gonna give you

03:40a last moment here can you explain exactly how GECC colluded with social

03:45media companies specifically through the election integrity partnership?

03:53Mr. Chairman GECC's actual relationship to the election integrity partnership

03:59was not clear. It was made plain in the EIP's own website. Secretary of State

04:08Blinken mentioned that it was cooperating with the EIP when he visited

04:14Stanford. Also there was a story that that it was actually interns from the

04:20State Department who came up with the idea for the EIP so but they they were

04:25one of the two major government organizations that was working with the

04:30EIP. My time has expired with that I give yield to the

Taibbi: State Dept Interns Reportedly Came Up With Controversial 'Election Integrity Partnership'

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