The latest batch of “Twitter Files” released by CEO Elon Musk show the FBI sent numerous censorship requests to the social media platform over the Hunter Biden laptop story in the days before the 2020 presidential election.
The deluge of requests became so steady that one leading attorney for the tech company called it “odd.”
DOJ/FBI ignored Weiner laptop, wiped Mueller team phones, etc. Why would we expect anything different with Hunter Biden laptop. https://t.co/UuaL9ibHVD
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) December 27, 2022
This revelation comes just after the Bureau released a statement decrying attention paid to its actions as the work of “conspiracy theorists” spreading “misinformation.”
Stacia Cardille, who was then a Twitter legal executive, emailed the company’s then-deputy general counsel Jim Baker with her concerns. She said the agency has people “in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations.”
Cardille said she dealt with at least 10 censorship requests in just five days. Baker responded minutes later observing that it was “odd” for the Bureau to be so interested in policy violations on the social media platform.
The abandoned Hunter Biden laptop and the secrets it revealed should have exploded onto the news scene in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. That did not happen, and the FBI is now shown to be front and center in the effort to keep the news from American voters.
As independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s revelations show, both the FBI’s Baltimore office and its headquarters were searching for keywords to trigger censoring posts related to the story.
Both, perhaps not coincidentally, were also involved in the laptop investigation.
And now the FBI is pointing its powerful finger at “conspiracy theorists” and using that favorite term of those who want to suppress free speech — disinformation.
This blowback comes after multiple whistleblowers alleged to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that efforts were undertaken to “improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation.”
It is a stretch to interpret the FBI’s actions before the election as anything other than their own attempts at censoring the laptop news and even disinformation. As the Twitter Files exposed, the agency’s contact with the company was “constant and pervasive,” and it deserves investigation.
