Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post’s scoop about the Biden family influence-peddling business weeks before the 2020 election came after the FBI warned the social media giant during weekly meetings to expect “hack-and-leak operations” by “state actors” involving Hunter Biden.
That’s according to a sworn declaration by Twitter’s former head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, the New York Post’s Miranda Devine reported.
On Friday evening, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, began releasing internal communications documenting the company’s suppression of the Post’s blockbuster stories before the 2020 election presenting evidence from a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden that the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate was covering up his family’s sale of access to the White House to the likes of Chinese Communist Party companies, and Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.
Internal communications between Twitter officials show the Biden White House had a direct line to the social media giant to remove information it didn’t like.
In her report late Sunday night, Devine pointed to the testimony last Tuesday of FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan in a lawsuit against the Biden administration brought by Republican attorneys. Chan said he organized weekly meetings with Twitter and Facebook in San Francisco for as many as seven Washington-based FBI agents in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
Twitter’s Roth was testifying in a separate lawsuit in which the Tea Party Patriots Foundation claimed the censorship of the Post was an “in kind” campaign contribution to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign.
“I 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 those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter,” said Roth in a Dec. 21, 2020, declaration to the Federal Election Commission.
“I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
It was Twitter’s policy of banning “hacked materials” that was cited Oct. 14, 2020, when it locked the Post’s account for two weeks and censored the reports of evidence that Joe Biden was lying about his knowledge of the family influence-peddling business.
Facebook also was warned by the FBI to be prepared for a “dump” of “Russian propaganda,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan in August. Facebook joined Twitter in censoring the Post’s stories.
Devine reported the FBI was aware of the upcoming Post stories because the bureau was spying on Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s online cloud. The FBI’s pretext was that it was investigating alleged foreign agent registration violations. But the probe was disbanded this year.
The FBI, through the warrant to spy on Giuliani, had access to emails in August 2020 from the owner of the computer repair shop where Hunter Biden abandoned his laptop in April 2019, John Paul Mac Isaac.
Mac Isaac had come to the FBI in the fall of 2019, expressing concern that the laptop contained matters of national security. He pointed to evidence of payments to the Biden family from Ukraine and China.
Two FBI agents came to Mac Isaac’s door with a subpoena on Dec. 9, 2019, and took the laptop and a copy of the hard drive. Since then, bureau whistleblowers have told congressional Republicans that officials in the FBI’s Washington Field Office buried derogatory information prior to the 2020 election that had been discovered in the investigation.
Musk weighed in on the findings Saturday in a Q&A on Twitter.
“If Twitter is doing one team’s bidding before an election, shutting down dissenting voices on a pivotal election, that is the very definition of election interference,” he said.
“Frankly Twitter was acting like an arm of the Democratic National Committee. It was absurd.”
Here are other significant revelations from the release of internal communications that began Friday:
- Twitter’s CEO at the time, Jack Dorsey, was left out of the loop in the decision to suppress the New York Post’s stories.
- The move to censor the stories was led by Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust, who previously was responsible for decisions to ban the accounts of conservative figures and who fiercely opposed Musk’s takeover.
- Many Twitter insiders questioned the stated rationale that the New York Post’s stories violated the company’s “hacked materials” policy.
- A former Twitter employee told Taibbi: “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it. They just freelanced it.”
- Members of Twitter’s communications and policy teams were concerned about the decision and the implications for the company’s relationship with Capitol Hill.
- Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California warned the decision had been met with a “huge backlash” on Capitol Hill.
- Accusing of violating Twitter’s “hacked materials” policy for sharing the story, the company locked then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany out of her account three weeks before the 2020 election. Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn fired off a message to Twitter demanding her account be unlocked. “At least pretend to care for the next 20 days,” he wrote.
At the White House on Monday, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked, in light of the “Twitter files,” if the decision by Twitter to censor the Post’s revelations about Joe Biden and his family business before the 2020 election was appropriate.
She accused Musk of “haphazardly” pushing a “distraction that is full of old news.”
See Jean-Pierre’s remarks:
Karine Jean-Pierre calls Twitter's censorship of the @nypost story on the Biden family's corrupt foreign business dealings "old news" and "a distraction" pic.twitter.com/YP8zQn1ubx
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 5, 2022
In a recent in-depth video interview with WND, Seamus Bruner, who along with Peter Schweizer uncovered evidence of the Biden family’s business long before the New York Post stories, breaks down the evidence as House Republicans prepare to investigate.
“This is not about Hunter Biden. This is not about a laptop,” Bruner told WND. “This is totally about Joe Biden.”
On Friday night, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. – who has said the committee’s focus in the “laptop” probe is Joe Biden – told Fox News guest host Jason Chaffetz that every Twitter staff member who suppressed the story will be brought before Congress to testify.
See the interview with Comer:
See a montage created by “War Room” showing the claim by media, Joe Biden and others that the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian disinformation ploy:
BANNON MONTAGE: Remember the lies pic.twitter.com/e6GHSwFojM
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) December 3, 2022
See how the media’s narrative evolved from “Russian disinformation” to authenticating the messages on the laptop, long after the 2020 election:
What happened: pic.twitter.com/O66PJZvVXd
— Matt Orfalea (@0rf) December 2, 2022
Actor James Woods discussed with Fox News host Tucker Carlson the fresh revelation Friday night that Twitter removed his tweets at the direction of the Democratic National Committee.
Woods, informing Carlson he plans to sue the DNC, had a message for “Joe Biden, and all those rats who worked with you and the DNC.”
“I am not afraid of you, and I am coming for you.”
See the interview with Wood:
‘Battle for the future of civilization’
Earlier this week, amid Musk’s measures to protect free speech on Twitter, including the elimination of its COVID “misinformation policy,” the White House promised to keep “a close eye” on the social media platform.
via wnd
