FBI Tried to ‘Discredit’ Importance of Hunter Biden’s Business Deals: ‘Twitter Files: Part 7’

According to a report by Michael Shellenberger released on Monday, the FBI made an “organized effort” to target social media and news companies that reported on the Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

In this seventh installment of the “Twitter Files,” Shellenberger presents “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.”

According to Shellenberger, screenshots of emails posted by him reveal that the FBI had been putting pressure on Twitter leading up to the 2020 election, as officials frequently contacted the company for reports on alleged foreign influence. The emails, he states, repeatedly requested “information from Twitter that Twitter has already made clear it will not share outside of normal legal channels.” The FBI had requested evidence of foreign interference, but Twitter indicated that they had not found anything significant.

An email from a Twitter staffer stated, “We haven’t yet identified activity that we’d typically refer to you (or even flag as interesting in the foreign influence context).” Another email, written by former trust and safety chief Yoel Roth, mentioned that “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 Epoch Times provides background:

On Oct. 13, a day before the New York Post released its report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, lawyer George Mesires emailed Delaware computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac that both the younger Biden and Mesires learned from the NY Post that its story on the laptop would be published the next day. Mac Isaac has said that a man who appeared to be Hunter Biden left the laptop at his shop before the FBI recouped it in December 2019, according to interviews he’s given.

About two hours after Mesires emailed Mac Isaac, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent 10 documents to Twitter’s then-chief of site security, Yoel Roth, through a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter, according to a screenshot Shellenberger posted Monday.

Hours after the New York Post ran its bombshell story the next day, Twitter and Facebook moved to limit the reach of the story, even going so far as to block Twitter users from sharing or direct messaging it. Facebook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in August confirmed to podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI approached Facebook and warned about Russian disinformation ahead of the election.

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