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December 19, 2022

The most damning Twitter File just dropped, highlighting FBI wrongdoing

By Andrea Widburg

Michael Shellenberger has published the latest exposé on Twitter, and this time, it’s not Twitter that looks corrupt; it’s the FBI, which knowingly lied to social media outlets about the Hunter Biden laptop. It’s impossible to believe that it did so for any other reason than to affect the outcome of the 2020 presidential election by hiding Joe Biden’s corruption.

Let’s get the most important point out first: The FBI knew at all relevant times that Hunter Biden’s hard drive was the real deal and that every bit of information on it—crooked dealings with foreign governments, money laundering for Joe, sexually obsessive videos, drug usage—was entirely legitimate. Nevertheless, the FBI aggressively worked with Twitter and other social media outlets to suppress this fact by falsely claiming that the hard drive was “Russian disinformation” or a hack.

Shellenberger’s Twitter thread exposing this manifest election interference is extremely long, so I’ll summarize the high points. The thread itself is at the end of this post.

Image by Andrea Widburg

1. FBI officials always knew that Biden’s hard drive was real.

2. The day before the NY Post wrote about the laptop, the FBI was reaching out to Yoel Roth on its special one-way FBITwitter line.

3. The NY Post publishes its completely accurate exposé, which Twitter and other social media companies immediately censor. What happened? The FBI.

4. Long before the NY Post story, when word was getting out about Hunter’s laptop and its intersection with Joe Biden, the FBI continuously told Twitter and Facebook to dismiss the information as a Russian “hack and leak” operation, even though the FBI conceded it had no information of hacks and leaks in 2020.

5. Twitter itself had almost no evidence of Russian intrusion on the site. The FBI, though, was so insistent about getting Twitter to share what little info it had that even Roth pushed back. Nevertheless, in July 2020, the FBI gets temporary top secret clearances for Twitter executives to “share information” about election threats. The continuous pressure primed Roth to believe anything the FBI said about alleged “Russian disinformation.”

6. At this point, Shellenberger notes that Twitter’s upper management was teeming with employees who worked for the FBI, including Jim Baker, many of whom were affiliated with James Comey’s anti-Trump campaign.

7. In September, the prestigious left-wing Aspen Institute had a “tabletop exercise” to prep social media and traditional media people for a “hack-and-dump” relating to Hunter Biden—all aimed at shaping coverage.

8. By mid-September, the FBI had created an encrypted virtual war room for itself, Twitter executives, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

9. A month before the NY Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, the FBI’s Laura Dehmlow (head of the Foreign Influence Task Force) and Elvis Chan (the senior agent who communicated most frequently with Twitter) gave a classified briefing to Jim Baker. Again, the agents knew the laptop was real.

10. Right after the Post story broke, Roth was troubled that he couldn’t find a clear reason to ban it. Baker—who knew otherwise—insisted that the laptop was faked, hacked, or both.

11. Within hours of the story's publication, primed by the FBI’s and Baker’s lies, Twitter believed the hacking narrative. That same day, Baker had a phone call with Matthew Perry in the FBI’s General Counsel Office.

12. The FBI persuaded Twitter that the laptop did not come from a whistleblower.

13. The FBI may have created a false warning to elected officials about foreign influence, a warning they could then leak to the media.

14. The FBI then falsely and unnecessarily briefed Sens. Grassley and Johnson, saying the Russians were interfering with their investigation into Hunter Biden, again shaping the narrative.

15. Thanks to the FBI’s pressure, social media and traditional news outlets censored the absolutely true Hunter Biden laptop story that showed Hunter’s and his father’s corruption.

16. While the FBI was pushing Twitter so hard, it was paying Twitter for staff time: $3,415,323 by February 2021. This is important because Sundance, at the Conservative Treehouse, has consistently said that Twitter didn’t make money from advertisements; instead, it was a government-funded communication operation (although I can’t find the specific post in which he said it).

Here’s the coda to the above narrative showing the FBI actively trying to interfere in an election by knowingly and falsely claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was fake so that the FBI could get social and traditional media outlets to censor the story. A recent TIPP poll reported that more than half of American voters would have been at least somewhat likely to change their votes had they known the truth.

The above is my summary. Here’s Michael Shellenberger’s complete “Twitter Files: Part 7”:

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