The most recent ‘Twitter Files’ revealed how an FBI official-turned Twitter lawyer sent a letter thanking the Bureau for its help suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Jim Baker, who before serving as deputy general counsel for Twitter held a similar role for the FBI, worked closely with Bureau when it teamed up with the social media company to fight what it called election interference from foreign nations.
Baker and the FBI worked together to try to push the narrative that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop had been hacked from another source by Russian agents and placed on the laptop that was later found at a Delaware repair shop, and that the laptop never belonged to Biden at all.
As a result of those efforts Twitter blocked The New York Post’s reporting of the story on the social media website. At the end of the process, the latest Twitter files revealed that Baker and his team agreed to sign a letter to the FBI agents who worked on the project, thanking them for their efforts.
The revelations are the latest to come out of the Twitter Files, which Elon Musk has been releasing to demonstrate the social media company’s past censorship initiatives.
Today’s batch of Twitter Files were reviewed and released by journalist Michael Shellenberger, who along with journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss have been combing through piles of internal Twitter communications dating to before Musk’s takeover.
Shellenberger found that less than two hours after Hunter Biden’s attorney found out about the New York Post’s story about the laptop, FBI agent Elvis Chan sent a collection of documents to Twitter’s then-head of site integrity Yoel Roth.
Hours after The Post published their laptop story the next day, it was almost immediately censored by Twitter and thus undermined in the public eye.
The files showed that as Hunter Biden was earning millions in foreign business dealings, the FBI had advised Twitter to be on the lookout for Russian misinformation about him.
‘During all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation,’ Shellenberger wrote.
Despite those efforts by the FBI, Twitter executives found there had been ‘very little’ Russian activity that raised any suspicions.
‘Indeed, Twitter executives *repeatedly* reported very little Russian activity. E.g., on Sept 24, 2020, Twitter told FBI it had removed 345 ‘largely inactive’ accounts ‘linked to previous coordinated Russian hacking attempts.’ They ‘had little reach & low follower accounts,’ he wrote.
Despite Twitter continually finding nothing suspicious, the FBI repeatedly reached out to the social media company and requested further information about their information, which Twitter declined to disclose.
But in July 2020 Chan arranged security clearances for Twitter officials so they can be told about election interference it is expecting to see in the Trump-Biden runoff.
Baker became involved at this time because he had previously held top secret security clearance during his work for the FBI – during which he had bene involved in one of the Bureau’s investigations into Donald Trump.
Once Baker was given clearance, Shellenberger wrote that the FBI fed him information intended to influence Roth and other Twitter executives into believing that the laptop story was hacked.
* Article from: dailymail.co.uk
