FBI Held Weekly Meetings with Twitter ahead of 2020 Election, Warned of Hunter Biden ‘Hack-and-Leak’ Operations
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The FBI alerted Twitter in weekly meetings ahead of the 2020 presidential election to anticipate “hack-and-leak operations” related to Hunter Biden by foreign state actors, providing the company a pretext to immediately bury the New York Post‘s laptop bombshell when it broke just weeks ahead of the election.
Organized by FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, as many as seven D.C.-based FBI agents held weekly meetings with Twitter and Facebook executives during the 2020 race, Chan testified in an ongoing lawsuit, the Post’s Miranda Devine reported. The lawsuit, launched by Republican attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana, alleges that the White House and federal agencies colluded with tech companies to censor speech along ideological lines on social-media platforms.
Chan told Missouri solicitor general John Sauer Tuesday that the FBI made Twitter aware of an incoming “hack and leak” operation but did not say whether Hunter Biden was a key part. Chan’s testimony contradicts a sworn declaration that Yoel Roth, former head of safety and integrity at Twitter, made to the Federal Elections Commission on December 21, 2020, in which he said the FBI warnings mentioned Hunter Biden specifically.
“I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter,” Roth told the Federal Election Commission. “I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
Roth, who resigned after Elon Musk’s recent takeover of Twitter, led the team responsible for suppressing the Post’s exposure of Hunter Biden’s shady foreign business dealings, which relied on documents taken from a laptop that allegedly belonged to Hunter. Twitter prevented users from circulating the story and from sharing the link with other users via private message. Mainstream publications, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, later confirmed the authenticity of much of the content retrieved from the computer, which was abandoned at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019.
Since departing, Roth has made public appearances offering deeper insight into his reasoning for censorship of right-wing thought. At a recent conference, Roth called the Libs of TikTok account and the Babylon Bee “dangerous” and “f***ed up.” Libs of TikTok calls attention to woke excess by reposting unedited content from leftist cultural warriors while the Babylon Bee satirizes much of the same content.
On Friday, Musk dropped the first installment of “The Twitter Files,” a collection of internal documents revealing the scope of the company’s censorship of the groundbreaking report. Email correspondence analyzed by journalist Matt Taibbi confirmed that the company’s first justification for the blackout was that the story violated its “hacked materials policy.” Some senior leadership expressed skepticism over the validity of that excuse, leading to internal confusion, according to emails.
In an email dated October 24, the “Biden team” asked Twitter to scrub scandalous content, including pornographic photos of Hunter Biden leaked from the laptop. The Biden campaign also asked Twitter to delete a parody Biden presidential ad featuring his son smoking what appears to be a crack pipe, according to archives.
“If Twitter is doing one team’s bidding before an election, shutting down dissenting voices on a pivotal election, that is the very definition of election interference. . . . Frankly Twitter was acting like an arm of the Democratic National Committee. It was absurd,” Musk said during a live Q&A session on Saturday.
