Q&A Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi is the author of four New York Times bestsellers. As Rolling Stone’s campaign reporter in 2016—and an early critic of how the mainstream media covered allegations of Russian interference in the presidential election— he concluded that political journalism was hyper-focused on the “pursuit of getting rid of Donald Trump.”

- Nick Gillespie

When Taibbi started publishing his work on Substack in 2020, he quickly became one of the platform’s most popular writers. He also was the first journalist to write about the Twitter Files, a collection of behind-the-scenes discussions revealed after Elon Musk bought the social media platform. Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Taibbi at FreedomFest in Memphis, Tennessee, in July to talk about the Twitter Files, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Donald Trump, and more.

Q: What were you expecting to find when you started the Twitter Files?

A: I went into the Twitter Files with a very oldschool, antiquated kind of First Amendment conception of what we might find or what questions we might answer. We discussed with Twitter’s management the idea of focusing on the suppression of the Hunter Biden story, mainly because Mark Zuckerberg had given an interview and had testified before Congress in which he suggested that the FBI had tipped him off about that story.