Did the FBI catch and kill the Hunter Biden laptop story?
Tiana Lowe
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Elon Musk‘s tenure running Twitter has hardly lived up to high expectations on the Right, but as the latest installment of the document dump called the Twitter Files reaffirms, any destruction of the old regime running the social media giant is an improvement. While Musk has oscillated between speech liberation and draconian speech moderation in public, the previous Twitter bureaucracy acted as an agent of the illiberal security state, suppressing speech in secret while publicly promoting a facade of free expression.
According to Michael Shellenberger, whom Musk granted unfettered access to Twitter’s internal communications, the FBI instructed Twitter to silence the since-vindicated Hunter Biden laptop story long before the New York Post published their exclusive bombshell. By mid-September 2020, Twitter and the FBI had established an encrypted messaging system allowing the federal government to send one-way document dumps to the corporation. On Oct. 13, the night before the New York Post published their story, the FBI sent 10 documents to Twitter, presumably evidence of the “Russian disinformation” the FBI had spent a year warning would muddle the 2020 election.
DEMOCRATS THINK HUNTER BIDEN MUST BE INVESTIGATED
Was that document dump an advance leak of the laptop story? Well, let’s consider the facts. According to the documents presented by Shellenberger, Twitter’s former Trust and Safety lead Yoel Roth had previously participated in a “tabletop exercise” gaming out how Twitter would suppress not just any “hacked” information dump about any figure related to the 2020 election, but specifically how to handle a “Burisma leak” about Hunter Biden. Furthermore, the FBI had already granted security clearance to select Twitter staff, many of whom were previously employed at the FBI. When the New York Post story went live, Roth conceded that it didn’t violate extant Twitter policy, but he said, “my personal view on this, unsubstantiated by hard evidence as yet, is that this feels a lot like a somewhat subtle leak operation.”
If we come to the logical conclusion that the FBI tipped off Twitter specifically about the Hunter Biden laptop story, it seems as though federal law enforcement engaged in a corrupt media strategy called “catch and kill” on behalf of the man working to unseat the head of the executive branch.
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That president, Donald Trump, was very familiar with the use of catch and kill for personal gain. To illustrate the process using an example, the “catch” involves a media establishment or individual paying for the rights to a story with the intention of burying it or “killing it.” In his eponymous book about the practice, Ronan Farrow alleged that the parent company of the National Enquirer did exactly this on behalf of Trump to silence stories of his extramarital affairs. But although there were questions of whether Trump ran afoul of campaign finance regulations, Trump used the capacity of private industry to allegedly enact catch and kill for personal gain.
What it appears the FBI might have done here is subpoena the Biden laptop to kill the story. It was only after nearly a year of silence from the Bureau that the laptop repair man who complied with the subpoena, John Paul Mac Isaac, went to Rudy Giuliani with the contents. Then, the FBI used its relationship with Twitter to try and kill the story as it surfaced to the public. For this reason, of all the troubling Twitter Files, this is the most damning yet.