Government

Missouri AG Sues Media Matters For Aggravated MEAN TO TWITTER

He's also a wee smidge confused on civil procedure.

By  
on

954792Remember 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.

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.

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.

Sponsored

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).

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:

Sponsored

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

, , ,