Twitterâs suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story may or may not have swung the 2020 election in Joe Bidenâs favor, but the new âTwitter Filesâ are shining a glaring light on the FBIâs influence on Twitter and other Big Tech companies, which put its attempt to discredit the Hunter Biden Laptop story in perspective.
Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis. had previously accused the FBI of acting to discredit their investigation into Hunter Bidenâs financial connections to foreign governments.
On Aug. 6, 2020, Grassley and Johnson agreed to meet with the FBIâs Foreign Influence Task Force. During the meeting, the FBI brought up âinformation that we already knew and information unconnected to our Biden investigation.â Elements of the meeting were leaked to the press, leading to âinaccurate media articles during the course of our investigation which falsely labeled our investigation as advancing Russian disinformation.â
The FBI got its hands on the Hunter Biden laptop all the way back in December 2019, butâaccording to whistleblowers who spoke to Grassley and Johnsonâthe FBI failed to investigate the smoking gun claims that Joe Biden himself was involved in Hunter Bidenâs lucrative foreign business deals. Worse, the FBI or other intelligence agencies seem to have âpre-debunkedâ the story, pressuring Twitter and other social media platforms to suppress it as foreign âmisinformationâ even though the laptop has turned out to be accurate.
In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, FBI officials and others in the intelligence community had weekly meetings with Twitter, according to a sworn declaration from Twitterâs former head of site integrity, Yoel Roth.
âI was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through these hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter, Roth said, The New York Post reported. âI also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.â
It remains unclear whether the FBI or a separate intelligence agency had brought up Hunter Biden, but the FBIâs possession of the laptop may have influenced this rumor.
The latest installment of the Twitter Files, published by journalist Michael Shellenberger, shined an important light on this apparent influence campaign.
Both the FBI and Twitter repeatedly stated that there was no Russian attempt to influence the 2020 presidential election in the same way as Russian actors did in 2016. âWe did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016,â FBI agent Elvis Chan testified in November 2022. He added that âin an abundance of caution, we warned the companies in case they saw something that we did not.â
14. Were the FBI warnings of a Russian hack-and-leak operation relating to Hunter Biden based on *any* new intel?
No, they werenât
âThrough our investigations, we did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016,â admitted FBI agent Elvis Chan in Nov. pic.twitter.com/tFPMqbydbA
â Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022
Yet Twitter repeatedly reported very little Russian activity. On Sept. 24, 2020, Twitter told the FBI it had removed 345 âlargely inactiveâ accounts âlinked to previous coordinated Russian hacking attempts.â These accounts âhad little reach & low follower counts.â Twitter actually went so far as to debunk journalistsâ claims of foreign influence on the platform. âWe havenât seen any evidence to support that claim,â Roth told Chan. âOur review thus far shows a small-scale domestic troll effort⌠not a significant bot or foreign angle.â
Internal emails showed Twitter executives complaining about âa sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our API policies.â
The FBI appears to have had a very close relationship with Twitter. When James Baker, the former FBI general counsel who played a central role in the Russiagate investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump, joined Twitter, another former FBI employee welcomed him as the newest âBu alumn.â
29. As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees â âBu alumniâ â working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals. pic.twitter.com/prVhPGohOC
â Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022
The FBIâs Elvis Chan arranged for temporary Top Secret clearances for Twitter executives to access FBI information. Twitter also collected $3,415,323 between October 2019 and February 2021, according to an email to Jim Baker. The email mentions âLE-related projects,â likely a reference to âlaw enforcement-related projects.â
46. The FBIâs influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time.
âI am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!â reports an associate of Jim Baker in early 2021. pic.twitter.com/SmNse97QxK
â Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022
It remains unclear when officials at the FBI or another agency first mentioned Hunter Biden to Roth and other Twitter executives, but the FBI had access to the Hunter Biden laptop when Delaware computer repair store owner John Paul Mac Isaac first reached out to the bureau in the fall of 2019. On Dec. 9, 2019, two FBI agents arrived at his store with a subpoena and took the laptop and a hard-drive copy.
After not hearing from the FBI for months, Mac Isaac would later send the laptop to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who then forwarded it to The New York Post in early October 2020. The FBI had been monitoring Giuliani at the time.
On Oct. 13, Hunter Bidenâs lawyer, George Mesires, emailed Mac Isaac, noting that The New York Post had reached out to him for comment. That evening, the FBIâs Elvis Chan sent Twitterâs Roth 10 documents. The next day, the story went up, and Twitter censored itâeven blocking transmission via direct message, which Twitter only did for extreme cases such as child pornography.
The first installment of the Twitter Files revealed that Twitter executives did not have a good explanation for censoring the laptop story, but the FBIâs pressure helps explain why Twitter decided to double down âin an abundance of caution.â
By September 2020, Roth and other social media executives met at an Aspen Institute âtabletop exerciseâ based on a scenario eerily similar to The New York Post story.
âAnonymous website, BIDENCRIMES.info, and a Twitter account, @HUNTERLOLZ, begin posting documents that purport to be from Burisma, tied to Hunter Biden,â the scenario begins. Next, The Drudge Report and Fox News pick up the story, as does then-President Donald Trump. The team debates on how to respond to, and ostensibly suppress, the story.
![Burisma leak exercise](https://theconservativetake.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Burisma-Leak-Exercise.jpeg)
![Burisma leak exercise](https://theconservativetake.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Burisma-Leak-Exercise-2.jpeg)
![Burisma leak exercise](https://theconservativetake.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Burisma-Leak-Exercise-3.jpeg)
![Burisma leak exercise](https://theconservativetake.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Burisma-Leak-Exercise-4.png)
Perhaps most concerning, the FBIâs influence over social media and other companies seems to extend far beyond Twitter. As Twitter executives prepared for a meeting with the FBI, one executive shared âkey takeawaysâ from a call with the FBI.
âThey repeatedly emphasized Twitterâs low level of compliance in comparison with other platformsâ when it comes to sending information in response to an FBI âemergency disclosure request,â a request that does not require a warrant.
From this exchange, it appears that the FBI not only works with other companies similar to Twitter, such as Facebook and Google, but that other tech companies are even more compliant with the FBIâs requests.
Although it is impossible to know what would have happened had Twitter not suppressed the Postâs reporting on the contents of Hunter Bidenâs laptop, a Media Research Center poll conducted in the days after the 2020 election found that 36% of self-described Biden voters said they were not aware of the evidence behind claims that Joe Biden was personally involved in his son Hunterâs business deals with China, a claim bolstered by emails found on Hunterâs laptop. Thirteen percent of those voters (4.6% of all Biden voters in the sample) said that if they had known the facts, they would not have voted for Biden.
The FBI did not respond to The Daily Signalâs request for comment about its apparent campaign to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, but the bureau responded to Matt Taibbiâs Twitter Files installment with this statement: âThe FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actorsâ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independent make decisions.â
Taibbi replied, âThat may be true, but we havenât seen that in the documents today. Instead, weâve mostly seen requests for moderation involving low-follower accounts belonging to ordinary Americans.â
The Twitter Files suggest a horrifying level of political interference and downright gaslighting on the part of the FBI, in an apparent attempt to help Joe Biden defeat then-President Donald Trump. Some on the Left have suggested that this could not be the case, since Trump appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray, but many Trump appointees and former FBI staff spoke out against the Trump administrationâs policies and even fought to restrain Trump from within. The legacy media and many cultural influencers demonized Trump so thoroughly that members of his own administration turned on him, and the Trump White House leaked like a sieve.
The American people deserve to know just how far the FBI went to protect Joe Biden from a negative news story, and they need reassurances that law enforcement will not put its thumb on the scale like this ever again.
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