The FBI Building. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The FBI Building. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

You would think that the Federal Bureau of Investigations has more pressing matters at hand, but in the article “The FBI Is Investigating Me Because I Tweeted A Joke About Fake News,” Huffington Post Senior Enterprise Editor Nick Baumann details how one joke on Twitter—which he clarifies is a joke in a reply tweet—resulted in an investigation into him, one that remains ongoing. And it wasn’t even a bad joke!

“This episode has not inspired confidence,” Baumann writes.

To understand his joke (and, of course, explaining jokes often zaps them of their humor, but bear with me), you’ve got to know about another Tweet sent weeks before Baumann’s.

This tweet, easily fact-checked and revealed as satire, was nonetheless seriously picked up by a series of conservative outlets as true, prompting investigations from the U.S. Postal Service and the state of Ohio.

Weeks later, Baumann referenced the joke in a tweet.

He clarified the next day that he was joking, but as one user responded to him, “too late. You’ve been reported.” Other users also said they’d reported him, both to the FBI and to huckster James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas.

Baumann explains what happened next:

On Nov. 4, I received a call from someone who said he was an FBI agent and wanted to speak to me. I figured it was a prank. I get a lot of hate emails and angry voicemails, and I dismissed the insane possibility that the FBI would investigate an obvious joke on Twitter. I would’ve called back anyway, just to be sure. But it was right before the election, and I forgot about it.

Then, on Monday, a month later, I received a followup message. It was the same person. It turns out he really is a special agent in the Washington Field Office of the FBI.

The agent told Baumann that the investigation was prompted “not because of what you were posting actually, because that’s free speech and everything, but because of the nature of what you were saying―that’s what we’re following up on.”

Baumann does not hold a job with the D.C. Board of Elections or volunteer with them. He says a quick call to DCBOE was enough to get an official to send a letter stating as much. So why is the FBI using its resources to investigate further, particularly to question a journalist who has written stories about the agency?

He reports that the FBI calling him mere days after the tweet may constitute a violation of the Justice Department’s rules about questioning journalists. Instead of meeting with the FBI agent, Baumann called his boss.

The FBI Washington Field Office has declined to comment.

The specter of an FBI investigation adds yet another consideration for journalists, who already face censure, or even job termination from employers for their tweets.

We’ve reached out to HuffPo to inquire about their employee Twitter policy, and will update if we hear back. Baumann seems secure that HuffPo has his back. He celebrated the appointment of new Huffington Post editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen, announced shortly before his story was published, with this:

Filed Under: fbi, federal bureau of investigations, huffington post,