The Twitter files revealed the FBI’s regular contact with Twitter, with the FBI even flagging for “action” parody accounts and jokes about when election day was. The FBI responded as though this was a perfectly normal thing.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, a spokesperson for the FBI said “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”

No, sorry guys, it’s suppression of speech, pushed by a government entity.

But Matt Taibbi pointed out how not only were they flagging speech that had no criminal aspect, but they were also asking for the locations of the Americans behind the accounts including the locations for Right Side Broadcasting and actor Billy Baldwin. Why would they want the location to track down those people? Both Taibbi and Elon Musk questioned this, but Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Ca) tried to justify this and admitted that he was aware this was going on.

Now with the Twitter files that dropped Friday night, Taibbi revealed things went even deeper than that. The FBI acted like they were just providing information to Twitter with their response. But in fact, they demanded written answers from Twitter on par with Congressional questioning, according to Yoel Roth, the very liberal guy with issues in charge of Trust and Safety. This went too far, even for him, who was concerned that Twitter could be viewed as “state-controlled media.” The FBI tweeted Twitter as though the platform worked for them.

7.Roth, receiving the questions, circulated them with other company executives, and complained that he was “frankly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we’d get from a congressional committee than the Bureau.” pic.twitter.com/SrLrdZLREa

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 18, 2022

Moreover, the messages between Agent Elvis Chan and Yoel Roth revealed that it wasn’t just the FBI pushing questions and demanding answers from Twitter here, but the Intelligence Community, which seemed to be using the FBI as a conduit to Twitter. Taibbi reported that the FBI said, “there was quite a bit of discussion within the USIC to get clarifications from your company.”

Who was behind the screen pushing these questions? Is that the CIA? The CIA is supposed to be looking into foreign countries and foreign citizens, not looking into U.S. citizens. So yes, they might be asking questions about foreign actors, but not about U.S. citizens. So there need to be some answers here as to what the involvement of the intelligence community was, what their involvement entailed, and if they were involved in asking for information/investigating U.S. citizens.

Even beyond the IC, the purpose of the FBI group — the Foreign Influence Task Force — was supposed to be looking into foreign influence, not chasing down what Americans say on Twitter, including jokes about the election that aren’t even criminal.

13.That may be true, but we haven’t seen that in the documents to date. Instead, we’ve mostly seen requests for moderation involving low-follower accounts belonging to ordinary Americans – and Billy Baldwin.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 18, 2022

They’re trying to police speech that didn’t even begin to be criminal rather than going after the criminals who they are supposed to be pursuing.

The Twitter files scream for further Congressional oversight as to what was going on here.