The Washington Examiner’s Sarah Westwood says Twitter gave “every excuse” about why they suppressed the Hunter Biden story, but it wasn’t enough to keep the truth from coming out.
“They gave every excuse in the book to try to suppress it and eventually they were exposed as being incredibly partisan,” Westwood said Thursday morning on Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria Bartiromo.
TOP FIVE REVELATIONS FROM MUSK’S DISCLOSURE ON HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP SUPPRESSION
Twitter CEO Elon Musk made good on his promise last week to drop new information about the company’s behind-the-scenes machinations about the suppression from 2020.
As House Republicans are preparing to take legal action against former Twitter lawyer James Baker, who was fired on Tuesday for his role in the suppression, Westwood said she wasn’t surprised that material that could be damaging to the social media platform was destroyed.
“Look at the lengths that Twitter executives were willing to go to suppress the Hunter Biden story. It was clear they wanted to take the story off the air,” she told host Maria Bartiromo, adding that it was Baker who was tasked with vetting information.
“This is sort of a sanitized version of the truth that we have so far,” Westwood said.
She also pointed out that Baker was closely allied with President Joe Biden and with Democrats.
They didn’t want any amplification of the story, so they went in search of justification that would allow them to suppress the story and “move the goalpost so many times,” when asked about the New York Post’s story, including making up false stories about the information being stolen, fake, or unable to be verified, Westwood explained.
The actions of Baker, who was also the person who pushed the Russia collusion “lie” during the 2020 election cycle, brought Republicans’ fears to light and gave them weight.
“I think that’s the frustrating thing for a lot of Republicans [and] conservatives watching this … this confirms what they had suspected all along about Twitter,” Westwood said.
“If you sort of expressed the view that Twitter was … in a partisan manner, suppressing this story to help Biden, that was sort of painted as a conspiracy theory and now we’re seeing hard evidence that that was true,” she added.
Mainstream media outlets lashed out at Musk and journalist Matt Taibbi, who was tasked with going through the so-called Twitter Files and providing analysis. When asked if it was surprising to see reporters attacking each other, Westwood said no.
“I think that a lot of the mainstream media reporters have no problem ‘eating their own’ if they cross the party line. And Matt Taibbi has been the target of that kind of criticism for a while,” she said.
“He’s someone who was a classically liberal writer for years and he sort of stayed in the center of the [liberalism],” Westwood told Fox host Joe Concha, adding that Taibbi has been a champion of freedom of speech and pushing back against the power of corporations.
“The rest of the Democratic Party sort of shifted to back elitism … [and] the consolidation of government power and corporate power in these really concerning ways like we’re seeing with Twitter,” she said.
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Westwood gave examples such as Twitter colluding with the FBI and the Biden administration to suppress stories about COVID-19 and even Democrats who were unfavorable, calling the hypocrisy “unsurprising.”
“It’s not surprising to see people who hold themselves up to support free speech squashing [Taibbi’s] actual support of it,” she added.
