Blocking Hunter Biden story an error
Former Twitter executives tell House panel they made a mistake, but were not pressured by FBI
Former Twitter officials acknowledged that blocking the spread of a news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was a mistake, but they told lawmakers the action was not politically motivated or directed by FBI or U.S. intelligence officials.
The comments came at the start of a hearing House Republicans scheduled to probe the social media company’s alleged cooperation with the FBI to squelch the story about the now-infamous laptop, the opening salvo in their investigation into the finances of President Joe Biden’s family.
At a hearing Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee focused on the platform’s decision to limit distribution of the unflattering piece by the New York Post that Republicans say show the younger Biden traded on his family name, published just weeks before the 2020 election that then-President Donald Trump lost to Biden.
The hearing began just hours after Biden’s State of the Union address to Congress.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer asserted that the FBI advised senior Twitter executives to question the validity of any Hunter Biden story. He also alleges that the federal government used a private company “to accomplish what it constitutionally cannot: limit the free exercise of speech.”
“We owe it to the American people to provide answers about this collusion to censor information about Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s business schemes,” Comer said.
But James Baker, a former lawyer for Twitter who also previously worked for the FBI, said he did not act “as an agent or an operator of the government” while working for the social media company. Baker acknowledged that many people may disagree with how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden story, but he said the company’s actions were “fully consistent with the First Amendment.”
“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” Baker told the panel. “I did not act unlawfully or otherwise inappropriately in any manner with respect to Hunter Biden’s laptop computer.”
Vijaya Gadde, a former top lawyer at Twitter, testified that when the New York Post first tweeted articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop, some images or information “looked like they may have been obtained through hacking.”
Gadde said the company applied its 2018 policy to prevent Twitter from being a “dumping ground for hacked materials” and blocked links to articles embedding the source materials.
Twitter, she said, reversed course within 24 hours and should have acted sooner. But “at no point did Twitter otherwise prevent tweeting, reporting, discussing or describing the contents of Mr. Biden’s laptop,” she said.
“People could and did talk about the contents of the laptop on Twitter or anywhere else, including other, much larger platforms, but they were prevented from sharing the primary documents on Twitter,” she said.
The former officials’ testimony did not sit well with Republicans. “You exercised an amazing amount of clout and power over the American electorate,” Republican Andy Biggs said, even if just for a short period.
Democrats have criticized the GOPled investigations, saying they are purely political and will take time away from more pressing issues, such as the debt ceiling and inflation.
“House Republicans are making it their top priority to stage a bizarre political stunt” instead of working with Biden on issues he laid out in the State of the Union address, White House spokesman Ian Sams said in a statement.
“This appears to be the latest effort by the House Republican majority’s most extreme MAGA members to question and re-litigate the outcome of the 2020 election. This is not what the American people want their leaders to work on,” Sams said.
The committee’s first Biden-centric hearing attracted a crowd, with visitor seats full and staff standing along the side walls of the room. Most committee members were in attendance and appeared to be listening intently to the opening statements from the witnesses.
Behind Comer on the dais was as poster of the front page of the New York Post the day it ran the Hunter Biden story, featuring “Biden Secret E-mail” as the headline and a picture of Biden and his son.