The Post on the Twitter Files

Through the Twitter Files we have learned in some detail how the FBI and the intelligence community conspired to suppress the New York Post’s October 2020 reporting on the Biden family corruption. Jesse O’Neill reports on the latest revelations in the New York Post story “FBI pressured Twitter, sent trove of docs hours before Post broke Hunter laptop story.” The Post also runs the valuable companion editorial “Evidence shows FBI, Biden campaign and Twitter worked together to suppress Hunter story.” For those seeking to understand this incredibly important story the Post editors provide useful background in the editorial. The editors write:

Members of the intelligence community, and censors at Twitter, stress that they just didn’t know the Hunter Biden laptop was real, so they erred on the side of caution. “It has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” the infamous letter from 50 former officials said.

Now we know that was a lie.

The FBI already had Hunter’s laptop — it was handed over to them by the owner of a Delaware repair shop, the same man who would provide it to The Post nearly a year later.

It’s also increasingly obvious that the FBI had a heads up that the information was about to be published.

The Twitter Files show how Yoel Roth, the platform’s head of trust and safety, was briefed by the FBI about possible “misinformation,” and that Hunter’s name was specifically brought up.

The latest bombshell, released Monday by journalist Michael Shellenberger, shows an intriguing timeline:

* The Post calls Hunter Biden’s lawyer for comment the day before publication.

* The lawyer calls John Paul Mac Isaac, the computer repairman. Side note, for all those who accused The Post of not doing due diligence on the laptop: We never provided the lawyer with Mac Isaac’s name. Told that we had Hunter’s laptop, he knew which repair shop to call, which provided another level of confirmation. Also: Hunter and the Biden campaign never denied the laptop was his, they just disparaged how we got it.

* A little more than two hours after the lawyer’s phone call to Mac Isaac, “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,” Shellenberger writes. What’s in those documents? We don’t know, but …

* The Post publishes the first Hunter Biden story the next day, and Twitter moves almost immediately to ban us.

It’s impossible to believe that Chan and other officials in the FBI — not to mention the still-well-connected former intelligence operatives who signed that letter — didn’t know that Hunter Biden’s files were already in the wild. And that they knew they weren’t “hacked” or made up.

Knowing that eventually the information would leak, “experts” spent months prepping for how to suppress it. Shellenberger notes that in September 2020, a month before The Post broke the news, Roth “participated in an Aspen Institute ‘tabletop exercise’ on a potential ‘Hack-and-Dump’ operation.” The “example” they came up with? Hunter Biden! They outlined a fake scenario where Burisma documents were leaked online outlining payments to the former vice president’s son.

So, of course, when legitimate news about Hunter Biden did break, Roth was ready to doubt everything.

What the Twitter Files show is not caution, but a coordinated effort between the Biden campaign and the FBI to cast aspersions and limit the reach of a story damaging to Joe Biden.

Republicans have promised an investigation when they take control of the House, and we welcome more transparency. Our suggestion for first witnesses? Chan and Roth. What was in those 10 files? What did Chan already know about the Hunter Biden laptop? And what did he tell Twitter?

Perhaps then the rest of the press will decide that collusion between the FBI, a political campaign and a social media company is worthy of coverage.

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