The first thread set records for engagement, but we didn’t have a real story until later, and wouldn’t have, without Bari Weiss.

On Tuesday, December 6, 2022, in a conference room on the ninth floor of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, a young, nervous-looking employee tiptoed into a room full of journalists and scrawled the firm’s in-office password in pert red font—a red bird was the theme of the day—on a whiteboard. That was the eve of Pearl Harbor Day, as journalists had just begun appearing as an invading force at the firm. I’d been stuffed in a tiny office the size of a broom closet before TwitterFiles #1. Now we had cozy accommodations in a conference room for a sizable-if-motley group of writers and researchers.

“Holy shit,” I thought.

There were two “teams,” a small one linked to me, and a larger one linked to former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, whose addition to the project hit the news after the dust settled from the first “Files” story.

The scene was surreal. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, would periodically knock and only poke his head in after a pause, fussing like a nervous B&B owner, a parody of John Cleese’s character in Fawlty Towers.

“Need anything? Coffee?”

The room was a Who’s Who of canceled or almost-canceled media figures. On one end sat the lean, distinguished-looking California gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger, perhaps best known for railing against defund-the-police proposals and suggesting climate change rhetoric was overblown. Michael in conversation seemed receding and deferential, and I made the mistake of dismissing him as a hanger-on of Weiss, like someone who graded papers for a campus celebrity. He would turn out to be the canniest operator among the dozens of media types who cycled in and out of the Twitter circus.

On the other end of the table sat physically tiny, exceedingly nice-in-person, but controversial author and Wall Street Journal columnist Abigail Shrier. At the time, she was being denounced as a transphobe thanks to a book, Irreversible Damage, which wondered at a statistical explosion in decisions by very young girls to commit to gender transition. I’d recently appeared to lose one good friend when I interviewed Shrier about Amazon refusing ads from her publisher, Regnery, and GoFundMe closing off private efforts by ordinary people to raise money to rent billboards to promote her book. Abigail was so radioactive in conventional circles that it would surely be a headline somewhere if anyone knew she was in this room. Indeed, headlines like “Anti-Trans Propagandist Abigail Shrier among ‘Team’ Given Access to Twitter Data by Billionaire” appeared about a year ago this week.

In a middle commanding seat sat Weiss, a decisive, extroverted personality who in the days since my first story announced herself as chief of Cruise Ship Twitter Files. Weiss ended up being crucial in organizing the whole project and helping secure the single biggest prize of the entire period: open, instantly searchable access to a huge database of files. It would come that very day and it would be the game-changing moment for the whole affair. At the moment, however, we had nothing. It was clear a fierce fight was going on among Twitter executives over how (or whether) to comply with Elon’s public dictum about opening files or if that dictum was even real. This made even the geography of the moment a problem.

“Someone close the fucking blinds,” a voice in the room whispered.

I stood up and wiggled the tilt wand for the conference room’s lone window. A few executives looked up in half-amazement, half-disgust.

Twitter executives for that week only regarded journalists with fear. Subsequently, we’d be contained in various ways, but as of that moment, loose talk in the office around “us” had already led to the firing of one senior executive. The story circulating was that Weiss, in the office on the Saturday after the first “Twitter Files” came out, heard one of the lawyers mumble something about needing to check with “Jim” before handing over a new batch of files. Bari then beat the phone number for “Jim” out of that lawyer—however this happened in fact, this was a key moment, and Bari deserves a lot of credit—then called and discovered “Jim” was Jim Baker, former FBI general counsel turned deputy general counsel for Twitter.

Baker had testified to being a source for Mother Jones reporter David Corn, whom I had publicly criticized for referencing the work of British ex-spy Christopher Steele, the “veteran spy” who claimed just days before the 2016 election that Russians had ways to “blackmail” Donald Trump. Now he’d been a source in one of my stories, and I didn’t even know? I felt like throwing up.

A Signal exchange from that morning was more upsetting:

Elon Musk: I need to clean house on the Twitter front.

I only learned tonight that [lawyer Alex] Spiro was running all searches through Jim Baker, who was one of the people complicit in the crimes! That’s utterly insane.

MT: Oh, my God. Well, no wonder. That would explain a lot.

EM: It’s like asking Al Capone to check the liquor license ... !

The Twitter Files became the biggest story in the world from the moment I hit “send” on December 2, and would remain so for a while, making a seat in this office a prized spot for anyone in media, unless the whole thing was a career-wrecking setup of some kind. This was on everyone’s mind, and it was why, that morning of December 6, the conference room of misfits was in a rage over a packet of documents put together by the now “exited” Baker regime.

We’d asked for correspondence involving the FBI, the White House, and others, and arrived that morning to find caches of spam letters from, among others, a serial letter-writer calling himself “DC Consulting.” This figure mass-mailed seemingly every federal government agency in addition to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon, and countless others. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey was on the list, which is how we came to be given the material.

The subject lines of these documents looked like something out of the movie Seven: “DC Consulting” alleged indecipherable conspiracies, for example:

India is facing white fungus problem as they are facing black fungus ... regardless US itself have butter and milk as small newspapers from India origin may working as PR for Modi PM India in USA true or false?

In another example, we asked for the Slack chats of Yoel Roth. We got them—but only his sides of the exchanges:

Yoel Roth 13:59:49

Which god help us makes me think he wants to share it publicly.

There was no way to interpret material like this except as an insult. If it was coming from Musk, we had a real problem, like poorhouse litigants getting a truckload of fuckyou discovery from a deep-pocketed insurance company.

Tensions were increased by the fact that, for a while anyway, a poor junior lawyer was put in charge of answering questions. She was a good egg, so bashful she was physically incapable of saying the word shit—10 times a morning, seemingly, she would instead say, “Oh, sugar!” But she had no answers to any of our questions, and when non-answering, she would always ask if we were hungry and knew where the cafeteria was.

This routine was straight out of Animal House, when Delta pledges were hustled by Omegas, who continually reseated them next to “Mohamet, Jugdish, Sidney, and Clayton,” Clayton being blind and wheelchair-bound. Each time we were offered food, it was like hearing Doug Neidermeyer snap his fingers while reaching for the name “Jugdish.”

There are a lot of things I can’t say definitively about Elon Musk even now because I still don’t know. Still, during the Twitter Files period, he mostly kept interactions with the various journalists on the story compartmentalized. That may have been an accident, or maybe it was done for the same reason a handler to multiple spies tells each only what each needs to know. Either way, this dynamic for months would inject uncertainty in the group, encouraging each reporter to focus on maintaining individual lines of communication with the Billionaire Space Explorer, often at each other’s expense.

The one time this wasn’t true was that day, when we were physically in one place. Bari worked the phone to wrangle cooperation from a Tesla tech exec assigned to fulfill our needs.

With that person’s help, fortunes suddenly changed. The short version is we ended up with a pair of laptops through which we could enter–without intervention–our own searches and get instant displays of Twitter Slack discussions for a roughly eightmonth period, between the summer of 2020 through a month or so after January 6, 2021. For that day and the next, we also had access to high-ranking if reluctant executives like some of the Roth replacements and other newly promoted execs for the Trust and Safety department, who, unlike the Oh, Sugar associate, now had instructions to answer our questions.

Once the laptops arrived, we started randomly grabbing chunks of stuff and reading. My assistant Emily Bivens saw an early exchange involving executive Nick Pickles and a comms official, about how to characterize certain partners. “I’m not sure we’d describe the FBI/DHS as experts, or some NGOs that aren’t academic,” he wrote.

“Holy shit,” I thought.

In the next hours, everyone else in the group found similar communications, or worse, with entries about content being “flagged” by the FBI or “sent” by DHS. Over the next 48 hours or so, we downloaded an enormous quantity of material that would eventually prove crucial, much of it involving the 2020 election.

At the end of that first day my head was spinning. What had been a relatively minor story about Twitter’s private censorship of a New York Post report on Hunter Biden’s laptop now looked like it might be of major, even historic importance, and involve a range of government agencies. We could also just be looking at something mundane and not know any better. Some of the government acronyms we found involved state enforcement groups we’d never heard of. Preliminary phone calls to people in federal law enforcement turned up goose eggs—even longtime friends threw up their hands when I mentioned EIP or the CFITF. “You’re asking the wrong fucking person,” is one answer I remember.

What was this stuff? Was it important, or did it just sound important? We had no idea, yet.

Matt Taibbi is an investigative journalist and the author of numerous books including Hate Inc., Griftopia, and The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia.