Journalist Paul Sperry is not going quietly into the night — as we reported, he’s been calling out the effort by Rep. Adam Schiff’s office to silence him, to get him suspended from Twitter as well as to shut down his reporting about things that Schiff didn’t want to be exposed.
In articles for RealClearInvestigations, I outed his anonymous “whistleblower” from the first impeachment of President Trump. It was Eric Ciaramella, a Democrat who had worked in the Trump White House as an Obama holdover. I also exposed Ciaramella’s prior relationship with one of Schiff’s top staffers on the impeachment committee, Sean Misko.
My reporting cast fresh doubts on Schiff’s claims that the 2019 impeachment process happened organically. The New York Times had already busted Schiff lying about prior contacts with the whistleblower. Initially, Schiff publicly stated his office never spoke with the whistleblower before he filed his complaint against President Trump, when in fact a Schiff staffer had huddled with him, something Schiff’s spokesman Patrick Boland was forced to admit after the Times broke the story. (The staffer was never identified.) The prior contacts led to suspicions Schiff’s office helped the whistleblower craft his complaint as part of a partisan operation.
In the censorship demands Schiff’s office sent Twitter, Misko and the “impeachment inquiry” are mentioned. It’s not clear if Ciaramella is, too, since some names are blacked out. Schiff demanded Twitter “remove any and all content”‘ related to them.
Schiff told Twitter it was about shutting down “QAnon conspiracies” but as Sperry pointed out that wasn’t it at all.
In his list of demands, Schiff tried to justify banning me by claiming I was promoting “false QAnon conspiracies,” which I have never done and I challenge Schiff to produce evidence to back up his defamatory remarks.
Schiff knew better. He knew “QAnon” was a trigger for Twitter censors, who were suppressing QAnon posts.
This, even though it was Schiff who was spreading things like false Russia collusion information, Sperry said.
Sperry pointed out how Schiff’s office also tried to get his stories shut down by his chief of staff Patrick Boland calling his employer, RealClear Investigations with the ridiculous claim that they would “result in actual violence,” trying to use Jan. 6., when the stories exposed Schiff.
Months after Schiff lobbied Twitter to ban me and remove all the impeachment-related content from its platform, his communications director and chief of staff — Patrick Boland — tried to intimidate my editors at RCI into retracting the impeachment stories I broke a year earlier.
In his emails, Boland invoked “the events of January 6,” warning our stories could “result in actual violence” if they remained online. Over time, Boland’s demands became more and more strident. But my editors refused to give in to the bullying.
Sperry laid out Schiff for violating his oath and he asked the liberal media where they were on this whole matter when they seem to be missing in action when it comes to busting a prominent Democrat like Schiff.
Then Sperry laid out the timeline of events that led to his suspension and you can see how even though they initially said “no,” he was banned shortly after the Schiff people demanded it, and after they upped the game using Jan. 6 and potential “violence” as some sort of justification.
This is every danger to freedom of speech right there and this is how they were misusing Jan. 6 to shut down speech that exposed them. That alone is shameful, but as we see from what Schiff has done in the past, he has no shame.
Sperry has indicated that he is looking into what legal options he has regarding what happened and against Schiff.
As we noted, if he does that, he could get all kinds of things in discovery that could open up what Schiff’s office had been doing.
But Congress also should be taking action against Schiff for what he did and now that the Republicans have taken over, they can.
Schiff is about to lose his position on the House Intel Committee if House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (D-CA) follows through on his promise. So at least there will be that accountability — removing the position from where he launched so many lies. But they need to take formal action. And it sounds like Rep. Adam Schiff is not at all happy and is getting nervous about what might happen now.
That says it all right there — the Democrats who claim that they’re fighting for “democracy” are upset when there is more of it, when the individual members can have more say — as they should — rather than everything being dictated by leadership. Because the real concern Schiff has is power.
