FBI pressured Twitter, sent trove of docs hours before Post broke Hunter laptop story
The FBI sprang into action within hours of the New York Post reaching out to Hunter Biden for comment on his scandalous laptop, pressuring Twitter’s top watchdog to release non-existent information on foreign hacking and warning social media executives, without evidence, that the laptop’s discovery was part of a Russian “hack and leak” operation.
That’s a key finding of the latest installment of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” revealed Monday by independent journalist Michael Shellenberger, who reports that then-Twitter Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth was prepped on censoring The Post’s exposé by attending a “tabletop exercise” on hacked materials, organized and attended by media elites.
The internal Twitter documents released Monday show that an FBI agent contacted Roth hours before The Post published its Oct. 14, 2020 piece about Hunter Biden’s questionable overseas business dealings. That was less than a month before the election pitting Hunter’s dad, Joe Biden, against incumbent President Donald Trump.
FBI San Francisco Special Agent Elvis Chan sent 10 documents to Roth and at least one other person on the night of Oct. 13, 2020, via a special one-way communications channel, according to independent journalist Michael Shellenberger. Chan asked Roth and his colleagues to confirm they had received the documents.
Approximately two-and-a-half hours earlier, Shellenberger went on, Hunter Biden attorney George Mesires had called and emailed Delaware computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac after learning from The Post that the first article based on files recovered from the abandoned laptop would be published the next day.
“I am a lawyer for Hunter Biden and I appreciate you reviewing your records on this matter,” Mesires wrote to Mac Isaac.
It is not clear what was in the documents Chan emailed to Roth, who played a key role in suppressing The Post’s bombshell.
But the timing is uncanny and, as Shellenberger reported, Chan’s action was in keeping with a larger effort by the FBI to squelch speech on the platform in the name of guarding against “foreign interference in elections.”
In July 2020, Chan had arranged “for temporary Top Secret security clearances for Twitter executives so that the FBI can share information about threats to the upcoming elections,” Shellenberger wrote, as he published a screenshot of the FBI agent’s email to Roth about the arrangement.
Roth said three months later in a sworn declaration that the feds had primed him to dismiss reports of the soon-to-be first son’s laptop as a “Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation,” but Chan later admitted under oath that the warnings were overblown, Shellenberger wrote on Twitter Monday.
“Through our investigations, we did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016,” Chan said in a sworn deposition last month in connection with a lawsuit filed by Missouri and Louisiana alleging the federal government and Biden administration leaned on social media companies to suppress speech.
Chan also insisted that no one had mentioned Hunter Biden’s laptop to him before The Post broke the story and that he had not discussed it with anyone at Twitter.
Catch up on Twitter’s censorship of The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story
- Happening now: Latest “Twitter Files” reveals how workers pushed for new policy to ban Trump
- Our original report: Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad
- Editorial: Why has the public turned against “experts”? Twitter’s secret shadow bans show why
- Dorsey bows out: Musk warns Dorsey evidence of Twitter censorship “may have been deleted”
- Musk’s musings: Elon Musk: Twitter blacklisting proves “the inmates were running the asylum”
Internal documents published by Shellenberger revealed that Roth had pushed back against Chan’s concerns of foreign election meddling in the months before the 2020 contest, and “resisted FBI efforts to get Twitter to share data outside of the normal search warrant process” early that year.
Roth responded to a Chan inquiry about an NBC report of foreign-controlled bots spreading misinformation about a purported government communications blackout amid civil rights protests in Washington DC in June of that year.
“We haven’t seen anything to support that claim. Our review thus far shows a small-scale domestic troll effort that was amplified in some creative ways by real people – but not a significant bot or foreign angle,” Roth wrote to the agent on June 2, according to Shellenberger.
On Aug. 31, Roth told Chan that there was no evidence to support a Washington Post story that made “a lot of insinuations about foreign interference” on political messaging on the platform.
The FBI continued to “repeatedly” request information from Twitter that company executives refused to volunteer, before arranging for the Top Secret security clearances, emails released in the data dump revealed.
Three months before the election, Chan shared information with Roth “relating to the Russian hacking organization, APT28,” and in September Roth “participated in an Aspen Institute “tabletop exercise” on a potential “Hack-and-Dump” operation relating to Hunter Biden,” Shellenberger wrote.
“The goal was to shape how the media covered it — and how social media carried it,” the author said.
It was organized, reports Shellenberger, by Vivian Schiller, a former top executive at media organizations such as NPR, the New York Times and NBC News, in addition to Twitter. Attendees included Facebook’s head of security policy and the top national security reporters for The Times and the Washington Post, Shellenberger said.
The documents were released as part of Twitter owner Musk’s efforts to pull back the curtain on how the social network has handled high-profile content moderation decisions, including banning then-President Donald Trump after his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Over the past two weeks, Musk has been releasing internal documents to a handpicked group of journalists who are digging through them and posting excerpts on Twitter.
Musk and his allies promote these tweet threads — dubbed the “Twitter Files” — as bombshell revelations proving that Twitter intentionally muzzled conservatives because of their political views.
Disgraced FBI official turned Twitter general counsel Jim Baker signed letter THANKING Bureau officials for helping him SUPRESS Hunter Biden laptop story, latest Twitter Files reveal
The most recent batch of ‘Twitter Files’ showed how former FBI official and then-lawyer for Twitter Jim Baker helped suppress the Hunter Biden story. Baker and the FBI worked together to convince Twitter that the laptop story was misinformation planted by foreign agents to disrupt the presidential election. After they succeeded in banning The New York Post’s reporting on the story, Baker and his team signed a letter thanking the FBI for their efforts.
Frederick Douglas eloquently says, “Find out just what People will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress” –
And yet millions refuse to consider what’s being done because acceptance might be uncomfortable or shake their ideological foundation. What do you do when you find out your “God” isn’t who/what you believed? They do the Sargent Schultz
The 2020 Presidential election was very close. Really came down to six cities (eg. GA decided by 12k votes). I’m not a constitutional scholar but this seems unprecedented in U.S. history. The 2020 election should be invalidated and rerun. I know it won’t be but it should be.
The surveillance agencies are interfering with honest elections.
The FBI basically interfered in the election to throw it to Biden.
They falsely implied that that the story was “Russian disinfo” and suppressed and discredited it on that basis when in fact they knew it was true.
DeSantis will need to clean house at the Bureau, maybe replace it completely.