Investigative journalist Paul Sperry does his job well. People who have something to hide don’t like that. People like California Democrat Congressman Adam Schiff. As a recent Twitter Files exposé reveals, Schiff took that dislike to the level of censorship. Sperry explains:

Back from holiday vacation, I found an interesting email waiting for me in my inbox from Matt Taibbi, the independent journo Elon Musk tasked with reviewing and releasing internal Twitter documents about decisions to censor content and ban users from the platform.

“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.

Why would a congressional leader sworn to protect the Constitution and First Amendment want to muzzle a veteran journalist? Like authoritarians everywhere, Schiff did not like critical reporting. The man who vowed to “protect our Democracy” from Donald Trump wanted to censor a free press.

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 even falsely alleged that Sperry was promoting “false QAnon conspiracies” in an obvious bid to trigger Twitter’s censors. As Sperry notes, someone should ask Schiff about false conspiracies given his dogmatic dedication to spreading the one about Trump and Russia colluding to steal the 2016 election.

He trumpeted them as if they were fact. But they were false — every one of them — as Special Counsel John Durham has proven in court documents, expanding on what Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz found in his earlier report.

Schiff has been caught lying about plenty of other things, yet Twitter never silenced him. By contrast, Schiff participated in what amounts to a clear violation of the First Amendment:

If a powerful government official prevented me from promoting my stories, including my New York Post columns, on the nation’s digital town square, how is that not state censorship?

Read the whole thing here.