The Twitter Files are the gift that keeps on giving. The government’s illegal involvement in efforts to censor the voices of citizens has already been demonstrated beyond question. Up until now, however, it seemed like most of the censorship directives were coming from DHS, the Justice Department or the intelligence agencies. Twitter also worked with the Biden campaign during the 2020 election. But even I was a bit surprised when we found out that Adam Schiff, the head of the House Intelligence Committee was getting in on the action. And he wasn’t just going after random accounts that put up memes making fun of him and other prominent Democrats and their families. Schiff went after at least one journalist, Paul Sperry, who writes for RealClearInvestigations, among other places. This week, he penned a column for the New York Post explaining how and why this all happened. And it started with an email he received from Matt Taibbi when he returned from his holiday vacation.

“Paul,” Taibbi wrote, “just found a crazy email on Twitter — did you know Adam Schiff’s staff . . . asked Twitter to have you banned?”

I was gobsmacked. This would explain why Twitter could never give me a reason for suspending my account, even though I had broken none of its rules.

Schiff, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, made his “request” to ban me through his staff in a November 2020 memo to Twitter. Three months later, in early February 2021, I was kicked off the platform.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that a congressman should never have been directing a social media platform to censor a journalist. (Or anyone for that matter.) The real reason for Schiff’s vendetta against Paul Sperry is the true meat on the bones of this story.

It turns out that Sperry had written an article for RCI identifying a previously anonymous “whistleblower” from the first impeachment of Donald Trump (Eric Ciaramella). He also published the history that Ciaramella had with one of Schiff’s staffers, Sean Misko. Sperry’s reporting angered Schiff because it cast doubts on his claims about the impeachment proceedings arising “organically.”

In response, Schiff’s staff began firing off demands to Twitter, listing various tweets that they wanted to be removed and accounts that should be suspended. Initially, the staff at Twitter declined most of the requests since the users weren’t violating any rules. You can see this in the redacted email below.

Even the “safety” people at Twitter found Schiff’s demand unreasonable and not in keeping with their policies. Keep in mind that this was happening in November of 2020 after the election was over. But within a few months, something changed. Tweets were being repressed at a frantic rate and by February, Paul Sperry had received notification that his Twitter account had been permanently suspended.

Sperry is back on Twitter now that Elon Musk is in charge. But he was never able to get the old management to explain why his account was suspended or identify any sort of rule that he’d supposedly broken. His real crime (obviously) was having investigated what had been going on inside Schiff’s office and reporting on it.

It’s bad enough when the government enlists social media platforms to silence the voices of random citizens. But when they start shutting down journalists, that’s a massive escalation in the war on free speech. Where are the rest of the elite journalists from the corporate media culture on this report? Shouldn’t they be expressing their outrage over a journalist being treated in this fashion? Apparently, it’s okay as long as it’s a journalist that reports on Democrats. This remains an outrageous and simultaneously sad state of affairs.