RealClear Media Group has many readers inside the halls of Congress. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, is apparently one of them.
We have recently learned that Rep. Schiff waged a determined campaign to censor RealClearInvestigations senior reporter Paul Sperry. RCI is a nonprofit investigative unit working in partnership with RealClearPolitics.
Two years ago, a few weeks after the Jan. 6 siege at the U.S. Capitol, Schiff’s staff contacted editors at RCI directly, demanding that we retract a series of stories we published about the first impeachment of President Donald Trump. These were year-old stories that the Schiff camp tried to connect to the dangers posed by the Capitol Hill mayhem.
We resisted these demands, of course. The public had a right to know what Sperry reported about the whistleblower who initiated the first Trump impeachment—including his longstanding ties to one of Schiff’s top staffers, not to mention Joe Biden when he was vice president.
But Schiff’s attempts to stifle Sperry’s reporting didn’t start there.
Through the publication of the “Twitter Files,” we now know that Schiff’s congressional staff contacted Twitter months earlier, in late 2020, asking that Sperry’s account—which had 340,000 followers at the time—be suspended.
Staff at Twitter initially balked at the request, responding, “no, this isn’t feasible/we don’t do that.”
Nevertheless, with Democrats in high dudgeon over Jan. 6, Sperry was suspended from Twitter in February 2021, around the same time RCI was resisting Schiff’s retraction demands, and again last year—without any explanation. Click here to read Sperry’s account of this saga.
Thankfully, Sperry’s Twitter account was recently restored—but after he spent the better part of two years banned from what has effectively become America’s digital town square.
Adam Schiff may not respect the First Amendment and freedom of the press.
But at RealClearInvestigations, we most certainly do.
We understand that the First Amendment was meant to protect writers like Paul Sperry so that they can keep the public informed and hold the government accountable. That’s how democracy is supposed to work.
