Missouri AG Sues Media Matters For Aggravated MEAN TO TWITTER

// Remember when being the attorney general of a state was a real job that involved actual law? Well, take your Metamucil, Grandpa, because those days are over. Now it’s all about ownin’ the libs.

Here’s Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey doing his “job” yesterday on air with plagiarist shitposter Benny Johnson.

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🚨 AG Bailey comments on his lawsuit against Media Matters:

“Elon Musk has done so much on 𝕏 to ensure fairness— what we can’t have is market manipulation in the form of a corporate pressure campaign based on lies to destroy one of the last platforms dedicated to free speech… pic.twitter.com/LEWw8m6a06

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 26, 2024

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AG Bailey was there to talk up his spiffy new lawsuit against Media Matters for America (MMFA), who violated that statute that bars hurting Elon Musk’s feelings. See, MMFA made new Twitter accounts, followed a bunch of Nazis, and blocked the low rent ads that populate most of our feeds. This had the entirely predictable effect of generating ads for major companies next to explicitly pro-Nazi content — something Elon Musk’s pain sponge Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino had assured advertisers they’d be “protected from” under her stewardship.

Musk lost his shit, promising to file a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against MMFA and all its donors. The result was more like a wet fart, as the Nevada company shambled into federal court in Fort Worth demanding redress against the DC media outlet for a bunch of gobbledygook torts which are definitely not defamation.

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After a little prodding from Trump’s racism czar Stephen Miller, Bailey and Texas AG Ken Paxton jumped forward to defend their favorite damsel in distress.

My team is looking into this matter.

— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) November 19, 2023

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Paxton was apparently quicker on the draw dropping a demand for data on MMFA, which was met with a motion for a temporary restraining order filed in federal court in DC.

But Andy Bailey isn’t going to wait for some coastal elite judge to tell him what to do, no sir! Instead, he filed his subpoena on MMFA simultaneously with the petition to enforce it in the Circuit Court of Cole County. So on Monday, March 25, he demanded the names, addresses, and banking information of every MMFA donor in Missouri. And at the very same time, he marched into court and asked a state judge to issue a compliance order before MMFA could seek a TRO from a federal court.

18. The return date to produce all requested documentation and
information and submit the Certification of Compliance to the Attorney
General’s Office is no later than 10:00 a.m. April 15, 2024.

19. Media Matters has expressed its intent not to comply with CIDs
like this one.

20. For example, the State of Texas served on Media Matters a
virtually identical civil investigative demand in December of 2023, which
Media Matters refused to comply with and instead filed a lawsuit to block
compliance and disclosure of information and materials. See Exhibit 3 (Texas
CID); Exhibit 4 (Media Matters complaint); see generally Media Matters for
America, et al. v. Paxton, 1:24-cv-00147-APM (United States District Court for
the District of Columbia).

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MMFA isn’t even out of compliance with the subpoena, which has a return date of April 15. Nevertheless, Bailey insists that “Media Matters has failed or will fail to comply … as it has expressed that it will not comply with similar investigative demands,” and thus he’s entitled to an immediate enforcement order.

The petition is otherwise barely passable as performance art:

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Media Matters, a self-styled not-for-profit “progressive research and information center,” envisions itself monitoring, analyzing, and correcting
“conservative misinformation” in the U.S. media. In fact, this description falls
far short of reality for this political activist organization. Instead, rather than
passively “monitoring,” Media Matters has used fraud to solicit donations from
Missourians in order to trick advertisers into removing their advertisements
from X, formerly Twitter, one of the last platforms dedicated to free speech in
America.

Media Matters has pursued an activist agenda in its attempt to destroy
X, because they cannot control it. And because they cannot control it, or the
free speech platform it provides to Missourians to express their own viewpoints
in the public square, the radical “progressives” at Media Matters have resorted
to fraud to, as Benjamin Franklin once said, mark X “for the odium of the
public, as an enemy to the liberty of the press.” Missourians will not be
manipulated by “progressive” activists masquerading as news outlets, and they
will not be defrauded in the process.

Well … those are all words. They don’t have anything to do with the law or due process, but they do demonstrate AG Bailey’s red meat bona fides and suck up to Elon Musk. So, job well done, sir. Nailed it!

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

Topics

Andrew Bailey, Government, Technology, Twitter