The ‘Twitter Files’ Miss the Real Scandal: FBI Interference in the 2020 Election

Reading between the lines of all available evidence, you can find an organized effort by the bureau to put its thumb on the scale for Joe Biden’s campaign.

I can appreciate clever. It’s when people — especially government officials — insult my intelligence that I get angry. And we should all be angry over the United States government’s interference in the 2020 presidential election, hot on the heels of its self-abasement during and in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.

The FBI, as the pointy end of the executive-branch spear, would have us believe that it in no way intentionally interfered in the 2020 election. Yet the evidence that it did so, and that its doing so was part of a yearslong pattern, is by leaps and bounds stronger than the evidence that the Trump campaign corruptly conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election — the baseless allegation, energetically promoted by the bureau, that inflamed the country for two years.

I’ve laid out much of the 2020 evidence here at NR and in the New York Post — the latter piece coming after Elon Musk, Twitter’s new top honcho, made some of the platform’s internal correspondence relating to the 2020 campaign available to journalist Matt Taibbi, who reported on it publicly in a series of tweets. Taibbi’s reporting is important, but I was surprised by the weakness of his observation that, beyond a “general” warning about “possible foreign hacks,” there appeared to be no evidence of FBI complicity in the pre-election social-media suppression of the Post’s reporting on damning information from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

To summarize, three months before the Post reported on the laptop, there was already not only a Hunter Biden criminal investigation but a Senate Republican investigation of the scandal the media-Democrat complex continues to bury: the cashing in on Joe Biden’s political influence by his family members, with his knowing and willful involvement, to the tune of millions of dollars that poured into Biden family coffers from agents of corrupt and authoritarian regimes, including some, such as China and Russia, that are hostile to the United States.

Obviously worried about the potential effect of these revelations on their party’s presidential nominee, congressional Democrats turned to some of their many sympathizers in the FBI brass. These included Timothy Thibault, who ran the Bureau’s Washington field office until he was forced into early retirement over anti-Republican, anti-conservative posts on his social-media account, and Brian Auten, an intelligence analyst who played an important role in the deeply misleading FISA-warrant applications the FBI filed in federal court, leading the judges to believe the 2016 Trump campaign had colluded with the Kremlin. Through these officials, the FBI helped Democrats peddle a political narrative that the evidence of foreign money lining the Bidens’ pockets was “Russian disinformation” — notwithstanding that much of this evidence was simply money-trail records generated by financial institutions, easily verifiable.

That is, before there ever was a Hunter Biden laptop story, the FBI hadn’t just helped Democrats craft a political storyline to dismiss evidence of Biden family corruption; bureau whistleblowers also reported to Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) that Thibault took internal steps both to bury the Biden investigation and obscure his rationale for doing so. Thibault, as previously noted, has since been pushed into early retirement. Auten, who reportedly cobbled together the intelligence “assessment” used to undermine the evidence of Biden family corruption, remains the subject of an internal disciplinary probe due to his actions in connection with Russiagate.

Moreover, even though the public did not know about the Hunter Biden laptop in the summer of 2020, when the FBI was already helping Democrats debunk the evidence of Biden family corruption, the FBI knew all about it, and about the likelihood that its existence would leak.

John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer repairman to whom an apparently strung-out Hunter brought the laptop, tried to give it to the bureau in October 2019. At that time, the FBI expressed no interest in taking it. But, given that there was a Justice Department probe under way, investigators subsequently decided they’d better grab it. So, as Isaac has recounted, two agents (whom he identifies by the last names of Wilson and DeMeo) showed up at his shop in December 2019 with a grand-jury subpoena for the laptop’s hard drive, which he surrendered. The bureau thus knew that the laptop contained explosive information, that Isaac had undoubtedly retained a copy of that information, and that it was likely he had or would share the information, especially given how reluctant the FBI had been to take possession of it.

It was within that context that Twitter and Facebook chose to suppress the Post’s reporting on the laptop.

As the Post’s Miranda Devine has reported, the FBI conducted weekly briefings for the social-media platforms in the run-up to the 2020 election. Why was the FBI, a government law-enforcement agency, briefing social-media companies? The bureau is generally not in the habit of sharing investigative information with private parties. But here, it was sticking to its overblown storyline that the Kremlin carried out cyber-espionage operations — hacking — in order to interfere in the 2016 election for the benefit of Donald Trump. I say “overblown” because the publication of hacked Democratic National Committee emails had no discernible impact on the 2016 election (there were no embarrassing Hillary Clinton–DNC emails), and the allegation that the Russian government was responsible, while plausible, is not supported by strong evidence (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Still, because the “Russia hacked the election” narrative was the FBI’s pretext for investigating the Trump campaign as if it were colluding with the Kremlin, the FBI continues to scaremonger about Russian election-interference. In truth, Russia has always interfered in our elections (as our government routinely interferes in Russia’s internal politics). Historically, this fact never seemed to bother Democrats until some of that interference was directed against them, but they needn’t be too concerned, since the Russians have not been nearly as effective as the FBI when it comes to election interference.

But I digress. When FBI agents met weekly with Twitter and Facebook in the run-up to the 2020 election, they weren’t doing it for their health. They were doing it to convey to both companies that, just as Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, it was undoubtedly trying to do so again in 2020. (In fact, the Post reports that the briefings were led by one of the FBI’s top cybersecurity agents, Elvis Chan, for whom Russia’s 2016 machinations have become the source of a postgraduate thesis and semi-celebrity.) The very unsubtle message, since it was coming from the government’s top law-enforcement agency, was that the companies should carefully police their platforms, lest they be accused of disseminating foreign disinformation and undermining election integrity. In fact, agent Laura Dehmlow, who runs the bureau’s “Foreign Influence Task Force,” reportedly hectored Twitter in March 2020 over the imperative that media platforms be “held accountable” for allowing “disinformation” to be spread. The FBI was not in a position to order the companies to suppress information. It was, however, well-positioned to make them fear that the failure to suppress information it might perceive as dodgy could result in serious legal consequences.

With this as background, Yoel Roth, who was a top Twitter executive in autumn 2020 and has since left the company, has provided a sworn declaration to the Federal Election Commission, in which he asserts that the FBI provided Twitter with alerts about what the bureau anticipated would be “hack and leak” operations. And not just that: Roth says that the FBI expressly alerted Twitter that there could be a dump of derogatory information about Hunter Biden in particular.

The FBI concedes that it briefed the social-media companies to be on alert for “hack and leak” operations and “foreign message indicators.” It claims, however, that it did not get so specific as to invoke Hunter Biden’s name as a potential target. That is what agent Chan recently testified in a lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general, which alleges government collusion with the social-media companies to suppress political speech. Chan acknowledged that Hunter Biden’s name came up in a briefing that occurred after the Post broke the laptop story, but he maintains that it was broached by a Facebook executive in a question to agent Dehmlow, who declined to comment on the Biden probe.

The dueling accounts of whether Hunter’s name was invoked are a sideshow. Patently, in the October 2020 run-up to the presidential election, (a) the FBI was well aware that there could be imminent media coverage about the laptop that the bureau possessed and had known about for a year; (b) the FBI had collaborated with Democrats to develop a narrative dismissing the evidence of Biden family corruption as Russian disinformation; and (c) the FBI was conducting briefings with social-media companies to convey, heavy-handedly, that they should exercise their discretion in favor of suppressing from their platforms anything that might be perceived as a repeat of 2016 — i.e., any information that could be construed, however tenuously, as the product of Russian hacking, or as disinformation intended to hurt Democrats and help Trump.

Furthermore, we know Twitter is not the only outfit that says this. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook (now Meta), recounted on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Facebook limited dissemination of the Biden laptop reporting because the FBI told the company to be on the lookout for a redux of Russia’s 2016 election interference. The FBI indicated that it had reason to believe there could be “some kind of dump that’s similar to that,” Zuckerberg recalled.

Was Hunter’s name mentioned? That question is irrelevant, because it didn’t need to be. You didn’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing.

At Twitter, there were internal gusts, too. By 2020, it had hired former FBI general counsel James Baker as one of its top lawyers. He was smack in the middle of the deliberations over suppressing the Biden laptop reporting.

How surprised should we be by that? Baker was the FBI general counsel in 2016–17. He was a top adviser to then-director Jim Comey during the time when Comey assured then-president Trump that Trump himself was not a suspect in the Russiagate probe, even though, throughout that time, the bureau was telling the FISA court under oath — in applications reviewed by Baker and approved by Comey — that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Kremlin. Baker was in the prep session for then-director Comey’s January 6, 2017, briefing of Trump on the Steele dossier — the briefing in which Comey told Trump that the bureau had gotten this questionable reporting about Trump’s being compromised by the Russians, yet conveniently neglected to mention that the bureau had been relying on Steele’s reporting, under oath, in the FISA court. Baker was among Comey’s top advisers when Comey told Trump it would be improper for him to publicly announce that Trump was not a suspect, and then when Comey gave House testimony in which he announced to the world that the FBI was conducting a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia — an investigation, the director gratuitously added, that could result in criminal charges. (At the time, the FBI did not have a shred of evidence that the Trump campaign had conspired with Russia. In fact, weeks earlier, Igor Danchenko, the principal source for the Steele-dossier information, had told Auten and other investigators that the dossier was rife with fabrications and exaggerations — a fact the FBI withheld from the FISA court, as it continued relying on the Steele dossier in FISA-surveillance applications.) And Baker was the FBI lawyer who agreed to take a meeting with his old friend, Clinton campaign and DNC lawyer Michael Sussmann, so that Sussmann could provide the bureau with data supposedly showing that Trump had a communications back-channel to Vladimir Putin. That is, Baker accepted partisan opposition research from a campaign operative, yet agreed to treat the data as evidence to be prioritized for investigation on the laughable pretense that Sussmann was not coming to the FBI in his partisan capacity, but as a patriotic private citizen and former government lawyer who was deeply concerned about national security. The FBI’s headquarters then concealed from its own field investigators that Sussmann was the source of the data, and the documentation pursuant to which the investigation proceeded falsely stated that the data had come from the Justice Department, of all places.

These guys are old pros when it comes to, shall we say, massaging information to get what they want. The FBI can always say, “Hey, we never told the FISA court that Trump might personally be a Russian agent, only that the campaign Trump was running might be a Russian agent.” The FBI can always say, “We truthfully told the FISA court that we’d found Danchenko credible when we interviewed him . . . we just didn’t mention that what we found him credible about was his assertion that the dossier we were relying on was bogus.” In the same spirit, the FBI may well be able to say, “We never said the name ‘Hunter Biden’ when we briefed the social-media companies.” But the point is that the message the FBI willfully conveyed to Twitter was: If you suddenly see a story unfavorable to the Bidens that comes from a computer, assume that the underlying information has been hacked, and the Russians are probably at it again, just like in 2016. And in this instance, the bureau could be confident that Twitter was being advised by Baker, a man steeped in FBI practice and dizzying bureau-speak. Baker, in his inimitably Bakery way, would surely advise Twitter to exercise caution because it couldn’t be sure the laptop information wasn’t hacked, and Twitter would get the message that suppression was warranted.

And, well, whaddya know? Turns out Baker advised “caution” because, after all, Twitter couldn’t be sure the laptop information wasn’t hacked, and Twitter decided that suppression was warranted.

As if we needed more, then came the 51 former national-security officials who, in a jaw-dropping election-eve proclamation, went all in on the Democrat/FBI storyline that the laptop reporting was Russian disinformation. Naturally, the Gang of 51 was led by the two top former Obama officials, Jim Clapper (director of national intelligence) and John Brennan (CIA director), who had worked most closely with the FBI in peddling the 2016 Russian interference and Trump–Russia collusion narratives.

The proclamation is itself classic disinformation: It is careful not to come out and say the Biden story is Russian disinformation . . . only that our crack national-security pros keenly discern all the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” If you pressed them on it, Clapper, Brennan, et al., would claim they weren’t trying to deceive anyone by exploiting for partisan gain their privileged access to the nation’s intelligence secrets, no siree. They’d point you to the fine print: the proclamation’s fleeting admissions that, actually, the Gang of 51 has no idea whether the laptop data are “genuine,” and similarly lacks any hard “evidence of Russian involvement.”

But they sure got their point across, didn’t they? The social-media execs relied on this disingenuous, hyperpolitical, factually baseless proclamation to fortify themselves in the conclusion that the Biden reporting should be suppressed as hacked Russian disinformation. And Joe Biden himself pronounced, in a presidential debate watched by tens of millions of Americans, that the laptop story must be disinformation because, after all, dozens of former national-security officials — bipartisan, professional, patriotic, credible — had said so.

Here is the most galling part: They think we’re morons. They think they’re so very clever, manipulating words and putting their thumbs on the scale with the power we entrust to them. They think they’ve covered their tracks with so much deniability that we, the benighted rabble, could not hope to keep up with them.

I guess we’ll see if they’re right.