After the “Twitter Files” dropped on Friday evening, it’s become clear that someone is fibbing when it comes to the Hunter Biden laptop story — because the details are not adding up.
Let’s go back to the beginning.
When the New York Post first dropped its bombshell about Hunter Biden back in October 2020, the story obviously wielded the power to do some real harm to Joe Biden’s chances in the general election.
Of course, controversy ensued when Twitter took action to prevent the story from being disseminated on its platform.
As Matt Taibbi, the journalist who brought the “Twitter Files” to light, noted, Twitter essentially threw the laptop story into the same category as child pornography:
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
The non-profit group Tea Party Patriots, seeing a blatant attempt to influence the election, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Committee shortly after the story was all but squelched.
That complaint was unanimously dismissed by the FEC in September 2021 when it found “no reason to believe” that Twitter had done anything wrong.
Twitter’s defense, which was sent to the FEC in a December 2020 letter, highlighted claims from Twitter’s former head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, that he had 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.”
Should Congress investigate Twitter’s censorship?
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“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 said.
“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. … I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
But here’s where it gets interesting. Taibbi’s damning exposé makes specific mention that “there’s no evidence” — at least that Taibbi has seen — that the government actually played any role in this.
22. Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem…
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022
In fact, here’s how one former employee described Twitter’s approach to censoring the Hunter Biden story: “They just freelanced it.” Also, interestingly enough, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wasn’t even in the loop on this.
24. “They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “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.”
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022
So which was it? Was this a coordinated response based on warnings from the intel community? Or was Twitter just “freelancing” it?
There is mounting evidence that the latter is true.
But there’s one more significant problem: Twitter couldn’t even point to an official finding that the Hunter Biden material was hacked.
The problem with the “hacked materials” ruling, several sources said, was that this normally required an official/law enforcement finding of a hack. But such a finding never appears throughout what one executive describes as a “whirlwind” 24-hour, company-wide mess. pic.twitter.com/aONKCROEOd
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022
Assuming someone’s lying, they had better be keeping track of all these details.
There’s quite a few of them they’re going to have to juggle.
