US Sen. Angus King compiled an “enemies list” of Twitter users that resembles something the late President Richard Nixon would have dreamed up if he “sniffed glue,” according to the latest installment of the “Twitter Files.”
In a series of Saturday tweets, independent journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that King’s campaign director spoke to a Twitter exec on Oct. 1, 2018, to complain about the activities of hundreds of users.
An internal company email — titled “Suspicious Accounts from Senator Angus King” — said the campaign official also “provided a very large list (attached) of 354 suspicious Twitter accounts they have identified.”
The reasons for citing the accounts included “Rand Paul visit excitement,” “Bot (averages 20 tweets a day” and “Being followed by rival Eric Brakey,” Taibbi said.
“Or, my personal favorite: ‘Mentions immigration,’” he wrote.
Taibbi also tweeted: “If Dick Nixon sniffed glue, this is what his enemies list might have looked like.”
Taibbi — who titled Saturday’s installment “TWITTER FILES #16 — Comic Interlude: A Media Experiment” — complained that previous “newsworthy revelations produced exactly zilch in mainstream news coverage in the last two months.”
The former Rolling Stone writer also compared that to last week’s House Oversight Committee hearing at which a former member of Twitter’s content moderation team testified that the White House asked the company to delete a 2019 tweet in which model Chrissy Teigen called then-President Donald Trump a “p—y ass b—h.”
“The press went bananas. Now THAT was big news!” Taibbi wrote. “If a president freaking out about one tweeter is news, surely a U.S. Senator finking on three hundred-plus of his constituents also must be?”
Taibbi also highlighted an April 14, 2020, email sent to Twitter by US State Department official Mark Lenzi, who flagged what he said were 14 “Russian government controlled accounts that I think you will want to look into and delete.”
Taibbi said the fact that a “government official” made the request “from a State department email” raised a “clear First Amendment issue.”
The state Department didn’t immediately return a request for comment Sunday.
King’s office declined to comment, Taibbi said, and a spokesperson for King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Senate’s Democrats, didn’t immediately return an email from The Post on Sunday.
Republican Maine state Sen. Eric Brakey, who lost to King in the November 2018 election, tweeted Sunday, “If we still lived in a just society that valued the Bill of Rights, Senator Angus King would be too ashamed to file for re-election.”
Billionaire Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in October for $44 billion, has a team of independent journalists scouring its files to expose the company’s “free speech suppression” under previous management.
The first installment examined Twitter’s crackdown on The Post’s Oct. 14, 2020 scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop, including how the move was made behind the back of company founder and then-CEO Jack Dorsey.
Lenzi was one of two American diplomats stationed in Guangzhou, China, who were evacuated in 2018 after faling ill with symptoms of a mysterious ailment that’s been compared to the “Havana Syndrome” first experienced in late 2016 by State Department personnel stationed in Cuba.
The following year, Lenzi pledged to donate his brain for research and he filed suit against the State Department and Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2021.
The suit, which seeks unspecified damages, alleges violations of the federal Rehabilitation Act and official retaliation, with the case set for trial in federal court in Virginia in April.
Lenzi’s lead lawyer, Thomas Barba, declined to comment Sunday.
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