Thread by @JoshMeyerDC

Wow, @SethAbramson. No surprise you hate this @CJR/@lyzl profile of you but it’s bizarre that you’re dragging me (and my former employer Politico) into your Twitter beef over it when we have literally nothing to do with anything in it. But I’ll correct your many falsehoods here.1

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1359903961667543041

2/As that four-year-old email you tweeted today indicates, I did appreciate your discussing with me some information you’d gathered – mostly from other peoples’ reporting, as you volunteered at the time – on various threads of the Trump-Russia investigation.

3/As our emails show, I shared even more info w/ you based on my own often exclusive actual reporting. But neither I nor Politico ever asked you to “exclusively” provide your research to us so we could use it “secretly” and w/out your name on the articles “even as a researcher.”

4/Even more absurd and, again, untrue is your recollection that I told you – way back in 2017 – that “POLITICO takes things from the internet all the time without credit, why not [your] work too?” That's just laughable.

5/ To refresh your memory, here’s your Nov. 17, 2017 email to me in which YOU said you’d “like to offer” an arrangement in which you'd get an “assisting reporter” or other credit on my stories anytime I wanted to hear you “elaborate” on stuff you’d already tweeted:

6/ which, again, you said wasn’t any kind of conventional reporting but rather some form of “curatorial journalism,” or connecting the dots of other peoples’ work. Even so, in the interest of trying to HELP you, I said I’d run your offer by my editors.

7/ As you recall, and as we discussed, I did, and they said Politico didn’t enter into such freelancer arrangements -- and that was that. I never asked you to discuss anything substantive again and even stopped following you on Twitter.

8/ So for you to suggest that any of this constituted some kind of job offer or, worse, some craven effort by me or Politico to take advantage of you, is ridiculous and insulting. And seriously, what does any of this have to do with the CJR profile of you?

If anything, your accusations would seem to support the last line of the story, that when someone pulls on one of your interpretive and conspiratorial threads, “the whole tapestry unravels.”