According to a batch of “Twitter Files” published on Monday, the FBI and other intelligence community officers blocked the New York Post’s “laptop from hell” series.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger’s discovery of internal Elon Musk documents suggests that federal agents worked with Twitter’s upper management to censor and disparage the Post’s reporting on evidence of now-President Joe Biden’s business involvement with corrupt and adversarial foreign governments both after and before the October 14, 2020, disclosure of the contents of Biden’s laptop.
Shellenberger claims there was “a concerted attempt by officials of the intelligence community (IC), directed at top executives at the news and social media businesses” to undermine credible reports based on the disk throughout the almost year the FBI possessed it before the Post’s publication.
Shellenberger details the efforts of outside parties to persuade Twitter’s management—many of whom were former agents—that documentation existed showing the Biden family received tens of millions of dollars from Eastern European billionaires. The Chinese Communist Party cooperated with a “Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation,” and then it suppressed news about the stolen materials. Virtually all established media outlets would cite this report in the run-up to the 2020 election as justification for avoiding covering the topic.
Shellenberger claims that Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety and one of its primary censors, was “repeatedly taught” by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies “through all of 2020 to dismiss allegations of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation.” Roth refuted this by pointing out that the FBI has held the Biden scion’s laptop since December 2019 and that “Twitter execs *repeatedly* claimed very little Russian involvement.”
We haven’t seen any evidence to corroborate that notion,” the company said in response to a tweet from @oneunderscore__ @NBC News. That puts the journalism accusations of foreign meddling to rest. According to the results of our inquiry thus far, we have found that this was a very small-scale domestic troll operation,” Shellenberger stated. When pressed for proof of foreign interference, the FBI replied that “Twitter indicates that they aren’t finding anything worth reporting.”
The FBI increased its efforts and coordinated for Twitter’s leadership to be granted Top Secret security clearances so that information on suspected Russian attempts to “interfere” with the election could be shared. Roth stated that the leak of the Biden documents “struck off every single one of my perfectly calibrated APT28 hack-and[leak] campaign warning bells.”
Around the middle of September 2020, the FBI, ODNI, and Twitter officials worked so closely together that they established an encrypted chat network that they termed a “virtual war room.” This was weeks before the Post began breaking the “laptop from hell” story.
The item “obviously violates our Hacked Materials Policy and is not plainly in violation of anything else,” Roth was quoted as saying in a Post piece published on the same day. Jim Baker, a former senior FBI agent who is now Twitter’s deputy counsel, had insisted that the Biden files are “either forged, hacked or both” despite the Post’s revelation of the federal subpoena served on the source when he turned over the hard drive to the FBI in 2019.
By 10 a.m., Twitter’s high management had been fooled by a fake hack-and-dump tale. According to reporter Shellenberger, “experts think,” and “it looks plausible,” that the laptop with the stolen information was discovered in a repair shop in Delaware because it was the subject of a second attack.
A Twitter executive was convinced by the influence operation that Hunter Biden’s laptop did not originate with a whistleblower. “It falsely indicated that Giuliani’s disclosure of the laptop had anything to do with Russia,” he continued, referring to a Washington Post report republished on Hill on October 15.
In the wake of the election, the New York Post’s reporting was allegedly stifled and undermined by the FBI, as claimed by Shellenberger.
The tale of the lost Hunter Biden laptop was hidden and disproven thanks to the FBI’s attempts to persuade influential executives at media outlets, Twitter, and other social media sites. By December 2020, Baker and his staff had expressed their appreciation to the FBI, as recounted by Shellenberger.