Indian Americans at center of ‘Hunter Biden story’
TWO Indian Americans - Congressman Ro Khanna and Vijaya Gadde - prominently figure in President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop story whose full disclosure Twitter CEO Elon Musk has announced would be released on the microblogging site.
Musk said on Friday (2) that he would release details about what he characterized as Twitter’s ‘suppression’ of a controversial story done by the New York Post newspaper about Hunter Biden’s laptop that was published before the 2020 US election.
He also tweeted that it would be ‘awesome’ and there would be a ‘live Q&A’ on the topic.
The story claimed to contain emails retrieved from a laptop belonging to Hunter. The New York Post said it learned of the emails’ existence from Trump’s ex-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and obtained the emails from Trump’s personal lawyer at the time Rudy Giuliani.
Twitter initially limited the distribution of the story, citing concerns that it could be the result of a foreign disinformation campaign. But the social media company quickly backtracked on its response, with then-CEO Jack Dorsey calling the decision to block the link ‘unacceptable.’
Khanna is the Democratic Congressman representing Silicon Valley in the US House of Representatives, while Gadde, an attorney, served as general counsel and the head of legal, policy, and trust at Twitter, before she was fired by new boss and CEO Musk.
A series of tweets along with internal communications of Twitter was released by writer Matt Taibbi regarding the allegations that the social media platform during the 2020 election cycle had suppressed news and information related to the laptop of Hunter.
According to the information released by Taibbi, Khanna appears to have questioned the decision of Twitter to restrict access to an investigative report of the New York Post newspaper on the laptop of Hunter.
As the information started coming in, Musk in a tweet said: ‘Ro Khanna is great.’ Khanna in a confidential email to Gadde opposed the so-called censorship by Twitter.
‘The story now has become more about censorship than relatively innocuous emails,’ Khanna wrote to Gadde.