The FBI’s coordination with social media companies ahead of the 2020 presidential election, revealed in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” is galvanizing long-held suspicions that the FBI ran defense for then-candidate Joseph R. Biden as his links to son Hunter Biden’s potentially illegal business schemes emerged.
Mr. Musk’s steady drip of internal documents has exposed the extent to which the FBI worked with company executives to moderate content on the platform. It included weekly meetings with Twitter executives before the company suppressed the New York Post’s October 2020 report exposing emails found on Hunter Biden’s now-infamous laptop computer. The emails refuted Mr. Biden’s claims that he didn’t know about and wasn’t involved in his son’s overseas ventures.
During those meetings, which also included officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, Twitter executives were cued to rumors that Hunter Biden would be the target of a “hack and leak operation.”
The FBI took possession of the laptop in December 2019, 10 months before the newspaper published materials from the computer, raising questions as to whether the bureau actively sought to discredit materials they had already authenticated.
“The key facts are: The FBI had the laptop,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican and the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “Then you’ve got the FBI talking to all of the social media platforms. The whole idea was that the Hunter Biden story was this Russian misinformation operation, but it looks like the misinformation operation was the other way around.
via joemiller