House Judiciary Committee Republicans said Thursday that an FBI official told Twitter that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and not Russian disinformation on the day the social-media company censored a New York Post story relying on emails from that laptop.
According to a letter from chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) to FBI director Christopher Wray, Laura Dehmlow, the section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), said in a transcribed interview earlier this month that when Twitter asked whether the laptop was real, an FBI official said: “Yes, it was.” An FBI lawyer on the call then jumped in and said: “No further comment.” Dehmlow could not recall if this information had been relayed to her or whether she actually overheard it.
Internal deliberations were held after that call in which the decision was made that FITF would say “no comment” going forward, according to Dehmlow. The section chief declined to say which FBI official made the decision that FITF would say “no comment” except to state that it “was not [her] decision.” Later on the same day, there was a call between the FBI and social-media company Facebook in which the agency declined comment when asked a similar question about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Jordan’s letter explains.
According to a separate part of the transcribed interview, Dehmlow said that she “would assume” then-FITF section chief Brad Benavides was aware of the laptop’s authenticity. She added that she was “pretty certain” the chief of the Russia unit was also aware.
The Post’s story alleging an influence-peddling scheme involving the president and his family ran early in the morning on October 14, 2020, weeks before the general election. The president has denied the allegations.
The calls the FBI had with Twitter and Facebook occurred later that day.
In the hours following the publication of the story, Twitter blocked the story from being shared and Facebook, which is now called Meta, suppressed the story. According to Jordan, the FBI had constant information-sharing up to that point with social-media companies. It then made the institutional decision to refuse to answer direct questions about the laptop’s authenticity. “Put simply, after the FBI conditioned social media companies to believe that the laptop was the product of a hack-and-dump operation, the Bureau stopped its information sharing, allowing social media companies to conclude that the New York Post story was Russian disinformation,” reads the letter to Wray.
According to New York magazine, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI came to the company and said it should be on high alert as it expected there would be Russian disinformation during the 2020 election similar to the previous presidential cycle. Zuckerberg told Rogan he could not recall whether the FBI mentioned Hunter Biden or his personal data in the warning issued to the company, but said the Post story “fit the pattern” of what they had described.
According to Jordan, had the Hunter Biden story been a product of a Russian disinformation campaign, FITF would have been fully authorized to warn the companies of such a campaign. Dehmlow explained: “If there is a foreign malign influence operation and we’ve got specific details about how those actors are propagating information operations, influence operations on platforms, that’s something we could share the specific details of.”
Jordan added during a Thursday hearing that even the account of Judiciary Committee Republicans was prevented from sharing the Post’s story.
During the hearing, Judiciary Committee Democrats cited another part of Dehmlow’s testimony to rebut the parts of the deposition made public by their Republican colleagues.
According to ranking member Stacey Plaskett (D., Virgin Islands), Dehmlow was asked: “If someone…were to leave this interview and were to suggest or imply or state that when you said the laptop was real — that it meant that the FBI had affirmatively determined in October 2020 that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden, that the contents belonged to Hunter Biden, and that the contents had not been manipulated in some way, they would be misrepresenting what you said, correct?”
Dehmlow responded: “They would be misrepresenting what I said because I don’t have much knowledge of that.”
Plaskett said she was introducing this into the record because the “committee likes to misrepresent or leave off complete sentences of what individuals said.” She added that an answer of no comment is typically “what they say when there’s an ongoing investigation.”
The FBI took possession of the laptop from a Delaware computer-repair shop in December 2019, according to the date on a copy of the grand-jury subpoena, as explained by New York magazine. John Paul Mac Isaac kept a copy of the laptop’s hard drive for himself as insurance and the contents would later make their way to the New York Post.
Representative Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.) tried to draw a distinction between the laptop and the hard drive during his questioning Thursday. However, the Washington Post has verified the authenticity of thousands of emails from the hard drive provided to the paper by a Republican strategist. While the paper noted its forensic analysts thought the data was sloppily handled and could not verify all of it, they also could not find clear evidence of tampering in their examinations. The Washington Post has gone on to report on Hunter Biden’s Chinese business dealings relying on some of these emails.
The Thursday Judiciary hearing comes after a federal judge banned officials from coordinating with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content. The injunction from Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana applied to officials from the DOJ and FBI as well as other agencies, but was lifted by the Fifth Circuit as it reviews the case.
Doughty mentioned the FBI’s behavior during the 2020 election in his preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden.
“The FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling. The FBI had the laptop in their possession since December 2019 and had warned social-media companies to look out for a ‘hack and dump’ operation by the Russians prior to the 2020 election,” Doughty wrote.
“Even after Facebook specifically asked whether the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, Dehmlow of the FBI refused to comment, resulting in the social-media companies’ suppression of the story. As a result, millions of U.S. citizens did not hear the story prior to the November 3, 2020 election,” Doughty continued.
Jordan argued in his letter that the refusal of FBI officials to verify the authenticity of the laptop allowed “widespread censorship.” The Judiciary Committee chairman demanded Wray send further information and documents relating to these meetings and the FITF’s work by August 3, 2023.