Under pressure from the head of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, Paul Sperry, the investigative journalist who exposed the name of the so-called impeachment “whistleblower,” had his Twitter account blocked (D-CA).
In September 2019, a “whistleblower” who had supposedly reported to the committee about President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July 2019 settled with Schiff’s committee. The former said the former would be testifying during the impeachment hearings. Schiff never revealed the whistleblower’s name and falsely claimed that the source had a “right” to anonymity.
And to rub salt in the wound, Schiff lied about his interactions with the “whistleblower,” insisting at first that his committee had never spoken to the whistleblower and then, after the New York Times revealed otherwise, admitting that they did.
As Sperry explained in a follow-up article for RealClearInvestigations, the “whistleblower” was former Trump administration CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella. Furthermore, Sperry published articles linking Schiff’s committee to “holdovers” from the Obama administration who had been in the Trump White House. As the media and the IT industry kept the whistleblower’s name secret, Schiff refused to answer Republican questions about it during the impeachment hearing. Chief Justice John Roberts came in to prevent a query from Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul about the whistleblower from being asked during the Senate’s impeachment hearings. In new “Twitter files” published on Tuesday, investigative journalist Matt Taibbi claimed that emails from Schiff’s office showed that they had asked Twitter to censor Sperry after the 2020 election in November based on unsubstantiated claims that Sperry had disseminated “QAnon conspiracies” on the platform.
In an article published Tuesday, Sperry strongly refuted Schiff’s claims, adding, “I have never endorsed QAnon.”
“I have never supported any ‘QAnon conspiracy,'” Sperry responded in an email to The Post on Tuesday. If you still need to, follow me on Twitter. Nowhere.
“In my frustration, I participated in Schiff’s impeachment and tried to have the whistleblower removed from the site,” he explained. So I challenge Schiff to provide evidence for his defamatory Twitter posts.
It’s typical of the dishonest Chairman Schiff, but it’s still a scurrilous smear, as Sperry put it.
Schiff has sought to use post-election difficulties as a pretext to punish Sperry for his proven reporting, which violates Sperry’s First Amendment rights.
After first rejecting Taibbi’s request, Twitter agreed to look into Sperry’s profile, as recounted in his book. Immediately following the August 2017 FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Twitter arbitrarily and inexplicably banned Sperry.