As usual, the graphics in Friday night’s “Twitter Files” story make the entire thread too large to sneak through Gmail’s size limit. But a readable online version of the thread lives on the TK site. You can find it by clicking here.

Toward the end of work on this story a controversy blew up around the Twitter Files. I learned a little on Thursday night, and then apparently missed a whole drama that took place online Friday while I was trying to put the FBI story together.

Once that story was out, I saw just a few critics weigh in before falling asleep. This morning highlights were passed on to me by friends. The gist was expressed by MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan, who’s taken over the role of Ardent Establishment Moralist from Rachel Maddow, who had a firm grip on it until she spent three years bollocking the Trump-Russia story. Mehdi’s had a raging cable-on for all things Elon Musk for a while, apparently. Here’s a tweet from yesterday:

Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan

Is this a joke? Taibbi is doing a new Twitter Files thread while continuing to ignore what Musk has done to journalists on this platform for the past 24 hours? Even Weiss has called him out, but Taibbi seems to want to tweet through it. Wow.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

1. THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

9:03 PM ∙ Dec 16, 2022

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I actually wasn’t silent about it (see last night’s Substack piece), but even if I had been, so what? These Twitter Files stories that are coming out are getting at issues that have nothing to do with Elon Musk, Keith Olbermann, Aaron Rupar, Barney the Dinosaur, or anyone else.