Joy Reid maintains she’s the victim of a shadowy conspiracy by online criminals. The FBI is even investigating her assertion that online criminals hacked either her long-defunct blog, the Wayback Machine Internet Archive, and/or the Library of Congress.
“We have received confirmation the FBI has opened an investigation into potential criminal activities surrounding several online accounts, including personal email and blog accounts, belonging to Joy-Ann Reid,” Reid’s attorney, John H. Reichman, told the Daily Beast.
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His statement added, “Our own investigation and monitoring of the situation will continue in parallel, and we are cooperating with law enforcement as their investigation proceeds.”
The full story is rather long, and very, very stupid, and you can read more about it here.
In the meantime, though, I hope this very good use of the FBI’s time and resources includes a thorough investigation of whether these supposedly nefarious hackers are also responsible for the time in 2010 when Reid tweeted blog posts she wrote referring to Sen. Lindsey Graham, S-N.C., as “Miss Lindsey.”
Maybe hackers are responsible for the time she referred to populist author Ann Coulter as a “shim” (it’s a play on an old, nasty joke that Coulter looks a bit too masculine. Neither a “she” nor a “him.” Get it? Har, har.)
Surely the FBI will investigate who is really responsible for when Reid tweeted in 2011, “Sorry @Lawrence. I’m not gonna watch Ann Coulter. I like my drag queens fierce. Not a way to build ratings, my man.”
To borrow some of Reid’s preferred language, these tweets are very “problematic.” Homophobic and transphobic, even. They are also definitely from her Twitter account.
Really though, this story becomes more and more unbelievable by the day. Reid and her independent security “expert” allege hackers manipulated the “Dark Web” somehow to make it appear as if the she posted anti-gay articles more than a decade ago on her long-defunct blog.
She hasn’t quite come out and said she believes cybercriminals hacked her blog 12 years ago, back before she had a television show, hoping someone would discover it 12 years later (talk about playing a long game).
Rather, Reid has left open the door to the possibility that someone hacked the Wayback Machine, which archives online content even if it has been deleted, and/or the Library of Congress. Both data repositories say they’ve found nothing that suggests they’ve been manipulated by online hackers.
When the FBI eventually gets to the bottom of this story, I suspect Reid is going to regret their involvement.
