(Congress Report) – The release of internal documents by Twitter CEO Elon Musk that come from the time before he purchased the company have revealed a number of scandals that former employees of the platform engaged in, mostly focused on the censorship of conservatives and the suppression of the Hunter Biden news story during the 2020 presidential election. There are even messages contained in these documents that show liberal employees also sought to censor scientists and doctors offering alternative information concerning the COVID virus and the vaccine that came along with it. And let’s not forget the banning of then-President Donald Trump’s government and personal accounts.
However, according to Margot Cleveland at The Federalist, there seems to be one particular scandal lying within the bulk of these documents that pundits and the general public seem to be missing. The FBI actually interfered in the 2020 presidential election by lying to social media companies like Facebook and Twitter about the Hunter Biden laptop story in order to get them to censor and suppress it from being shared.
This is blatant weaponization of a federal law enforcement agency against the people of the United States by progressives who are in positions of power and influence.
Cleveland wrote, “The Hunter Biden laptop story, of course, refers to the New York Post’s Oct. 14, 2020 article, ‘Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad,’ that details emails, text messages, and videos recovered from the hard drive of a laptop Hunter abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware. In the first dump of the Twitter Files, independent journalist Matt Taibbi focused on “How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story.'”
18. Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022
“Internal communications revealed that Twitter censored the New York Post’s story based on its ‘hacked materials’ policy, preventing users from sharing the story and even suspending the New York Post’s official account. Those same communications showed Twitter staffers questioning the propriety and/or veracity of the ‘hacked materials’ explanation, with both Yoel Roth and Jim Baker defending the decision,” she continued.
Roth, who was serving as Twitter’s head of trust and safety at the time, went on to acknowledge the situation as “emerging” as “the facts remain unclear,” however he justified the censorship of the story based on “the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016.”
26. By this point “everyone knew this was fucked,” said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of… continuing to err. pic.twitter.com/2wJMFAUBoe
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022
Jim Baker, then-Deputy General Counsel for the company agreed with the assessment, going on to say, “we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked,” but nonetheless concluded that “it is reasonable for us to assume they may have been and that caution is warranted.”
“[T]here are some facts that indicate that the materials may have been hacked, while there are others indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes. We simply need more information,” Baker commented.
None of the documents that have been put out by Taibbi contain any sort of evidence that any of the materials were hacked. So yeah, there goes that attempt to justify suppression of the story.
“There is no need for a paper trail confirming that the government expressly told Twitter the Hunter Biden laptop, which served as the basis for the New York Post article, had been hacked, however, because intelligence agencies gave Twitter (and Facebook) a warning detailed enough to prompt the tech giants to presume the story represented the anticipated threat. And that is precisely what they did. By this point, the federal government had likewise primed the companies to censor such supposed malign interference in our elections, which again is exactly what Twitter and Facebook did when the story broke,” Cleveland expounded.
“The proof of these realities comes first from a Dec. 21, 2020, letter from Twitter to the Federal Election Commission, accompanied by a declaration signed by Roth. In his statement to the FEC, Roth stated that ‘since 2018 he had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security,'” she added.
23. Some of Roth’s later Slacks indicate his weekly confabs with federal law enforcement involved separate meetings. Here, he ghosts the FBI and DHS, respectively, to go first to an “Aspen Institute thing,” then take a call with Apple. pic.twitter.com/i771hD8aCD
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022
“During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October,” Roth remarked. Significantly, Roth then noted that during those meetings he learned “that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
A letter sent to the FEC by Twitter also explains that it was “the prior warnings of a hack-and-leak operation and doubts about the provenance of the materials republished in the N.Y. Post articles,” that eventually led to the decision made by the Integrity Team to reach the conclusion that “the materials could have been obtained through hacking.”
Twitter is essentially confirming in the letter that various intelligence agencies warned the social media platform to prepare for some sort of October “hack-and-leak operation,” rumored to include Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and it was this warning that led to Twitter suppressing the NY Post story.
Cleveland’s report then revealed, “Warnings from the FBI likewise prompted Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden story, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg. During an August 2020 interview with Joe Rogan, in explaining how Facebook handles controversial news such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, Zuckerberg began by providing his host with a backdrop to Facebook’s decision to limit distribution of the New York Post’s story, explaining: ‘The FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, [saying,] ‘Hey just so you know, you should be on high alert.'”
Zuckerberg asserted that the bureau told his company, Facebook, “[W]e thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election” and that “we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that so just be vigilant.”
“Hey, look, if the FBI — which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement — they come to us and tell us we need to be on guard about something, I want to take that seriously,” Zuckerberg stated. “So, when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story on Oct. 14, 2020, Facebook treated the story as potentially misinformation, important misinformation for five to seven days while the tech giant’s team could determine whether it was false.”
When he was asked if the FBI told him to be on guard concerning the laptop story, he first said “no,” but then commented, “I don’t remember if it was that specifically, but it basically fit the pattern.”
In other words, the reason Facebook decided to censor the Post’s expose on Hunter Biden, just days before the 2020 presidential election, is because the FBI issued their warning. Thus, the agency flat out lied to Twitter and Facebook in order to ensure this story was not able to get spread to the masses.
“The FBI’s warning and the federal government’s efforts to prompt the private censorship of speech, however, are not the heart of the scandal. Worse still is that the New York Post story was true, the computer files were not hacked, and the October surprise was not Russian disinformation but a legitimate and important news report establishing Joe Biden lied to the American public about his knowledge of his son’s business dealings and was also implicated in a pay-to-play scandal. And the FBI knew those facts for nearly one year, having seized the Hunter Biden laptop from the computer repair shop owner in December of 2019,” Cleveland said in her piece on the topic.
Yes, that’s right. The FBI lied in order to ensure that Joe Biden’s presidential campaign would survive and provide him a significant opportunity to take home the victory against then-President Donald Trump.
Copyright 2022. CongressReport.com
