How the FBI used the force of the state to quash the Hunter Biden laptop story on social media platforms is coming into clearer focus thanks to Friday’s “Twitter Files” dump and the reporting of the New York Post’s Miranda Devine.
It was the Post that broke the story in mid-October 2020 that emails obtained from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop showed the Biden family — allegedly including even Hunter’s father, Joe Biden — involved with shady overseas business deals with companies linked to communist China, and Ukrainian oligarchs.
Devine told Fox News on Saturday that it’s “fantastic” that new Twitter CEO Elon Musk is making his company’s communications regarding censoring the story in 2020 public.
“Unfortunately he left out a crucial element, and that was the involvement of the FBI,” she said.
Devine noted that is a matter of public record that the FBI approached Twitter and Facebook in the days and weeks before the Post’s story came out warning them of a “hack and leak” operation likely involving Hunter Biden.
FBI Agent Elvis Chan “testified by Zoom Tuesday in a lawsuit against the Biden administration that he organized the meetings in San Francisco for as many as seven DC-based FBI agents in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Chan also organized weekly meetings with Facebook,” Devine wrote in a Post story published Sunday.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg alluded to such a meeting in an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan earlier this year, saying the FBI told members of his team they should be on “high alert” for Russian propaganda because “there’s about to be some kind of dump.”
Devine explained in her Fox News interview on Saturday, “The reason why that’s so important is because the FBI, at that point, was spying on Rudy Giuliani from about a month after he became then-President Donald Trump’s private attorney. They were spying on his cloud so they had access to all his emails and all his iMessages.”
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“And included in those emails, in August of 2020, was the initial email from John Paul Mac Isaac, the computer repair shop guy who had in his possession Hunter Biden’s laptop that he had abandoned there eight months earlier, and [Isaac] told Rudy Giuliani exactly what he found on it, particularly to do with [Ukrainian energy company] Burisma,” Devine continued.
“He was worried about national security. He included screenshots. The FBI would have had access to all of that back in August of 2020,” she said.
John Paul Mac Isaac DID give it to the police – the FBI in December 2019 – and they buried it. Cleverly he had a copy. When he realized the FBI was bent, he reached out to members of Congress, and finally to @RudyGiuliani – the only person to reply and understand what he had https://t.co/0m96dBqDbx
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) December 4, 2022
You’ll recall that the Democrat-controlled House voted to impeach Trump in December 2019 over his phone call in July of that year with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Trump had suggested the new Ukrainian president might want to look into Hunter and Joe Biden’s business dealings in his country.
Hunter was paid $1 million a year to be on the Burisma board of directors while his father was U.S. vice president and overseeing American relations with Ukraine, according to the Post.
In January 2018, Joe Biden bragged at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting about an official visit he took to Ukraine in March 2016 during which he demanded then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin or lose $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees.
Shokin was investigating potential Burisma corruption at the time.
Biden recalled telling Poroshenko, “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in,’ I think it was, ‘about six hours.’ I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’”
“Well, son of a b****, he got fired,” Biden recounted.
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Isaac turned the laptop detailing some of the Biden business dealings in Ukraine over to the FBI in December 2019. When the bureau appeared to be doing nothing with it, he reached out to Giuliani in August 2020.
Devine noted that in addition to all the information Isaac shared with Giuliani, the FBI also would have had access to her messages with the then-Trump attorney because they were monitoring his iCloud.
“And they also would have access to my text messages with Rudy Giuliani about exactly when the New York Post was going to publish,” she said.
Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy responded, “This is so disturbing. This is so big.”
“The FBI should be protecting us from Joe Biden and his son and the national security threat they are to our country, and yet they were involved in suppressing it and altering an election in the process,” she argued.
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Campos-Duffy further contended that because the bureau was doing the opposite of what it was supposed to do, “Joe Biden is the president, and he is probably compromised because of these dirty deals that he did with the Chinese and with Ukraine and with the Russians.”
On Saturday, Musk characterized what the FBI did during the 2020 election as “interference.”
“Clearly, 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. … Frankly, Twitter was acting like an arm of the Democratic National Committee. It was absurd,” he said.
BREAKING: Elon Musk Says the DNC & Twitter Definitely Committed Election Interference
“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.” pic.twitter.com/4OEXP9Dqmb
— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) December 4, 2022
And the FBI apparently teed up Twitter and Facebook to suppress the Hunter Biden story, knowing full well it was about to drop and it was authentic.
A Pew Research poll conducted a few months before the 2020 election found that 86 percent of Americans got at least some of their news from digital platforms.
Further, at that time, nearly 71 percent of American adults were active on Facebook, and of those, 52 percent said they drew at least some news from there.
YouTube (owned by Google) and Twitter were other important sources.
To summarize: The FBI — an arm of the federal government, paid for by taxpayers — in effect stymied First Amendment free speech to help Democrat Joe Biden become the 46th president.
Intolerable.