Over the last two weeks, a team of journalists that includes me has enjoyed extraordinary access to the internal emails and other documents of the social media platform Twitter. The only condition we agreed to was to first publish our findings on Twitter, which I have done so twice, first, on December 10 in Twitter Files Part 4: The Removal of Donald Trump, and yesterday in Twitter Files Part 7: The FBI and the Hunter Biden Laptop. This report was made possible by Bari Weiss and The Free Press, an exciting new publication to which I am proud to contribute.
In Twitter Files Part 6, the journalist Matt Taibbi described an FBI relentlessly seeking to exercise influence over Twitter, including over its content, its users, and its data. In Twitter Files Part 7, I present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published.
The story begins in December 2019 when a Delaware computer store owner named John Paul (J.P.) Mac Isaac contacts the FBI about a laptop that Hunter Biden had left with him. On Dec 9, 2019, the FBI issues a subpoena for and takes Hunter Biden's laptop.
It likely would have taken a few hours for the FBI to confirm that the laptop had belonged to Hunter Biden. Indeed, it only took a few days for the journalist Peter Schweizer to prove it. And yet the FBI did nothing to investigate the many signs of criminal activity revealed by emails and other documents on the laptop.
After waiting patiently for months to hear back from the FBI, Mac Isaac in August 2020 emailed Rudy Giuliani, and gave him a copy of the laptop. Giuliani was under FBI surveillance at the time and thus FBI almost certainly knew what had happened. In early Octoberg, Giuliani shared the laptop’s hard drive and its contents with The New York Post.
Then, a series of strange events occurred. Shortly before 7 pm ET on October 13, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, emailed Mac Isaac. Hunter and Mesires had just learned from The New York Post that its story about the laptop would be published the next day.
Two hours later, an FBI Special Agent in San Francisco named Elvis Chan sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter.
The next day, October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. The article was accurate and has stood the test of time. And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censored the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and — more importantly — undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans.
Why is that? What, exactly, happened?
Two weeks ago, Taibbi described the debate inside Twitter over its decision to censor a wholly accurate article. Since then, we have discovered new info that points to an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter and other platforms.
