Shortly before the House, newly under Republican control, launched its first big hearings of 2023, a Washington Post-ABC News poll suggested that the American people were quite skeptical of them. It showed that the public felt, by 56 percent to 36 percent, the newly created select subcommittee on the “weaponization of the federal government” was “just an attempt to score political points,” rather than a legitimate committee.
On that count, the initial hearings did not disappoint.
At both a House Oversight Committee hearing and at a later “weaponization” panel hearing, Republican lawmakers spun an elaborate theory. The crux: that the FBI and/or other government officials interfered in the 2020 election by getting social media companies — especially Twitter — to suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
To this day, though, there remains no real evidence that government officials were directly involved in that decision — and now multiple high-ranking former Twitter officials have joined in disputing that claim under oath.
Often the claim was more suggested than directly asserted.
“I think you guys wanted this to be taken down,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told former Twitter executives on Wednesday. “I think you meet with these guys every week. … They send you all kinds of emails. They send you documents on the supersecret James Bond Teleporter. You get information on that. I think you guys wanted to take it down. I think you guys got played by the FBI. And that is the scary part.” (Jordan, chair of the weaponization subcommittee, made those comments at the Oversight Committee hearing.)
And Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) began Wednesday’s hearing thusly: “America witnessed a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence communities to suppress and delegitimize the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents.”
Comer added, “In the months leading up to the laptop story, the FBI advised senior Twitter executives to question the validity of any Hunter Biden story” — a claim that would soon be directly contradicted by a witness.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), at the weaponization subcommittee hearing, cited the “suppression, illegally, of the Hunter Biden laptop story, paid for by the U.S. taxpayers.”
Other Republicans were more direct in alleging government involvement in the supposed suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story:
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) said the FBI “knew it was leaking, they knew it would hurt the Biden campaign, so the FBI used its relationship with Twitter to suppress criminal evidence being revealed about Joe Biden one month before the 2020 elections.”Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Tex.) said the Twitter executives “may have collaborated with U.S. intelligence community regarding stories that y’all didn’t want the public to see.” He added that “the immediacy with which you all acted to censor the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story seems to be very indicative of foreknowledge.”Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who recently left the Democratic Party and has allied with conservative Republicans, testified that “Facebook limited the exposure of the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story just weeks ahead of the 2020 election, only after talking with the FBI.”Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) accused the FBI of “spreading a lie and a bogus claim about it being Russian interference again.”
The backstory here is a bit convoluted. But the essentials go like this: Twitter and Facebook had regular meetings with government officials during the 2020 election. Their stated purpose was to prevent a repeat of past instances in which malign foreign actors hacked and leaked information about political opponents in the United States, which then spread far and wide on social media. This is all in the public record.
That public record does not, however, include any evidence that government officials specifically asked for the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. In fact, CNN has reported that tech executives and government officials have directly disputed that, including in sworn testimony. And the Twitter executives testifying last week echoed that.
“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” said former Twitter deputy general counsel James Baker, who previously worked for the FBI. Baker added that he didn’t recall ever speaking with the FBI about the matter.
Both former Twitter senior director Yoel Roth and former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde testified that they recalled no interactions with the FBI about it.
When Republicans haven’t directly alleged a coordinated, government-led suppression of the Hunter Biden story, they’ve more broadly gestured at the notion that government officials poisoned the well in their meetings with the tech companies.
This is what Comer was referring to when he claimed the FBI preemptively warned Twitter about Hunter Biden stories. And it appears to be what Fallon was getting at with his comments.
But that hasn’t been established, either, and indeed was undercut by testimony Wednesday. The claim appears to be based on an affidavit Roth signed shortly after the 2020 election. In it, he said that “federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October.”
Roth added, “I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
Some Republicans have thus concluded that the government might have known the Hunter Biden story, specifically, was coming and then preemptively sought to get it suppressed.
But Roth has now testified that his affidavit has been misconstrued. He said it wasn’t even law enforcement that raised Hunter Biden’s name, but others from the tech industry who attended the meetings.
“I don’t believe that perspective was shared by law enforcement,” Roth said. “They didn’t endorse it. They didn’t provide that information.”
Roth’s testimony lines up with a November deposition from FBI agent Elvis Chan, who said, “I do not remember us specifically saying ‘Hunter Biden’ in any meeting.” Chan said he recalled one meeting in which an analyst from Facebook broached Hunter Biden. (Some conservative media outlets had suggested Chan’s deposition and Roth’s affidavit contradicted each other.)
This isn’t the only time Republicans have raised such claims, without direct evidence. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who is on the Oversight Committee, told Fox News last week that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had said, in Mace’s words, that the “FBI personally reached out to Facebook and told them and warned them about this story, that they should bury that story. ” In fact, Zuckerberg merely said that the FBI told Facebook to be on “high alert” for propaganda and that he didn’t recall hearing anything specifically about Hunter Biden.
Jordan seized upon an email that Chan sent to Roth and others at Twitter the night before the Hunter Biden story broke, about a “teleporter link for you to download 10 documents.” Some have suggested the documents might have pertained to the upcoming New York Post story. But Roth in his testimony said the documents “did not relate to Hunter Biden,” echoing what an unnamed FBI official recently told CNN.
The theorizing involved in these hearings is an outgrowth of the “Twitter Files,” in which new Twitter owner Elon Musk has shared internal company documents with Substack writers who have been critical of social-media censorship. And the claims echo Musk himself, who has alleged that Twitter broadly acted “under orders from the government to suppress free speech.”
But even one of the writers who has studied the internal emails, Matt Taibbi, has said that “there is no evidence — that I’ve seen — of any government involvement in the laptop story.”
When Comer appeared on CNN before last week’s hearings, he was asked whether he had any “definitive proof” of government involvement.
“I would invite CNN to watch our committee hearing Wednesday and see if you can pick up any new information,” Comer said.
To the extent new information emerged from the hearings, it undercut Comer’s own prepared summary of the situation. And the hearings featured much more political posturing than anything amounting to proof.
