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Elon Musk’s Twitter Files part 7 was released Monday morning by Michael Shellenberger.
Part 7: The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop.
In Twitter files Part 6, we saw the constant contact the FBI had with Twitter.
“In Twitter Files #7, we present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published.” Michael Shellenberger said.
The story begins in December 2019 when a Delaware computer store owner named John Paul (J.P.) Mac Isaac contacts the FBI about a laptop that Hunter Biden had left with him.
By Aug 2020, Mac Isaac still had not heard back from the FBI, even though he had discovered evidence of criminal activity. And so, he emails Rudy Giuliani, who was under FBI surveillance at the time.
Keep in mind that, Rudy Giuliani already had this laptop since sometime in 2019.
In early October, Giuliani gives it to the New York Post.
At 9:22 pm ET (6:22 PT), FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter.
The next day, October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Every single fact in it was accurate.
And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans.
It was all hands-on deck to influence Twitter and other platforms.
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.
The FBI did the same thing to Facebook, according to Zuckerberg himself.
The FBI warnings of a Russian hack-and-leak operation relating to Hunter Biden were not based on any new intel.
“Through our investigations, we did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016,” admitted FBI agent Elvis Chan in Nov.
The FBI reported very little Russian activity.
Twitter executives repeatedly debunked false claims by journalists of foreign influence on its platform.
Yoel Roth debunked one of WaPo’s fake news articles alleging foreign influence in a pro-Trump tweet.
In January 2020, Yoel Roth resisted FBI efforts to get Twitter to share data outside of the normal search warrant process.
However, pressure from the IC community to share Twitter information.
“We have seen a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our API policies. They are probing & pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to congressional staff).”
The FBI repeatedly asked Twitter for evidence of foreign influence.
Despite Twitter’s pushback, the FBI repeatedly requests information from Twitter that Twitter execs have already made clear they will not share outside of normal legal channels.
Then, in July 2020, the FBI’s Elvis Chan arranges for temporary Top Secret security clearances for Twitter exes so that the FBI can share information about threats to the upcoming elections.
On August 11, 2020, FBI agent Chan shares information with Roth relating to the Russian hacking organization, APT28, through the FBI’s secure, one-way communications channel, Teleporter.
Yoel Roth recently told a podcaster @karaswisher that he had been primed to think about the Russian hacking group APT28 before news of the Hunter Biden laptop came out.
In Aug, 2020, FBI’s Chan asks Twitter: does anyone there have top secret clearance?
When someone mentions Jim Baker, Chan responds, “I don’t know how I forgot him” — an odd claim, given Chan’s job is to monitor Twitter, not to mention that they worked together at the FBI.
Jim Baker worked as FBI general counsel and was one of the architects of Spygate.
As general counsel of the FBI, Baker played a central role in making the case internally for an investigation of President Trump.
Baker wasn’t the only senior FBI exec involved in the Trump investigation to go to Twitter.
As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — “Bu alumni” — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.
Efforts continued to influence Twitter’s Yoel Roth. In Sept 2020, Roth participated in an Aspen Institute “tabletop exercise” on a potential “Hack-and-Dump” operation relating to Hunter Biden. The goal was to shape how the media covered it — and how social media carried it.
The organizer was Vivian Schiller, the former CEO of NPR, former head of news at Twitter; former Gen. manager of NY Times; former Chief Digital Officer of NBC News. Attendees included Meta/FB’s head of security policy and the top nat. sec. reporters for @nytimes@wapo and others.
By mid-Sept, 2020, Chan & Roth had set up an encrypted messaging network so employees from FBI & Twitter could communicate. They also agree to create a “virtual war room” for “all the [Internet] industry plus FBI and ODNI” [Office of the Director of National Intelligence].
Then, on Sept 15, 2020 the FBI’s Laura Dehmlow, who heads up the Foreign Influence Task Force, and Elvis Chan, request to give a classified briefing for Jim Baker, without any other Twitter staff, such as Yoel Roth, present.
On Oct 14, shortly after @NYPost publishes its Hunter Biden laptop story, Roth says, “it isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy, nor is it clearly in violation of anything else,” but adds, “this feels a lot like a somewhat subtle leak operation.”
In response to Roth, Baker repeatedly insists that the Hunter Biden materials were either faked, hacked, or both, and a violation of Twitter policy. Baker does so over email, and in a Google doc, on October 14 and 15.
And yet it’s inconceivable Baker believed the Hunter Biden emails were either fake or hacked. The @nypost had included a picture of the receipt signed by Hunter Biden, and an FBI subpoena showed that the agency had taken possession of the laptop in December 2019.
As for the FBI, it likely would have taken a few *hours* for it to confirm that the laptop had belonged to Hunter Biden. Indeed, it only took a few days for journalist @peterschweizer to prove it.
By 10 am, Twitter execs had bought into a wild hack-and-dump story. “The suggestion from experts – which rings true – is there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware”.
At 3:38 pm that same day, October 14, Baker arranges a phone conversation with Matthew J. Perry in the Office of the General Counsel of the FBI.
The influence operation persuaded Twitter execs that the Hunter Biden laptop did *not* come from a whistleblower. One linked to a Hill article, based on a WaPo article, from Oct 15, which falsely suggested that Giuliani’s leak of the laptop had something to do with Russia.
There is evidence that FBI agents have warned elected officials of foreign influence with the primary goal of leaking the information to the news media. This is a political dirty trick used to create the perception of impropriety.
In 2020, the FBI gave a briefing to Senators Grassley and Johnson, claiming evidence of “Russian interference” into their investigation of Hunter Biden. The briefing angered the Senators, who say it was done to discredit their investigation.
“The unnecessary FBI briefing provided the Democrats and liberal media the vehicle to spread their false narrative that our work advanced Russian disinformation.”
Notably, then-FBI General Counsel Jim Baker was investigated *twice,* in 2017 and 2019, for leaking information to the news media.
“You’re saying he’s under criminal investigation? That’s why you’re not letting him answer?” Meadows asked.
“Yes”.
In the end, the FBI’s influence campaign aimed at executives at news media, Twitter, & other social media companies worked: they censored & discredited the Hunter Biden laptop story. By Dec. 2020, Baker and his colleagues even sent a note of thanks to the FBI for its work.
The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time. “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” reports an associate of Jim Baker in early 2021.
47. And the pressure from the FBI on social media platforms continues In Aug 2022, Twitter execs prepared for a meeting with the FBI, whose goal was “to convince us to produce on more FBI EDRs”. EDRs are an “emergency disclosure request,” a warrantless search.
