FBI agents who covered up Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 must not get away with it
On the eve of the 2020 election, FBI agents discussed an active money-laundering case against Hunter Biden just hours after casting doubt on the authenticity of his incriminating laptop during meetings with social media companies, according to newly redacted chat logs obtained by Sen. Chuck Grassley.
The FBI’s refusal to confirm the laptop’s existence and instead allow a false narrative to take hold that it was Russian disinformation came on the same day that The Post published bombshell emails from the device revealing Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s lucrative influence-peddling schemes when he was vice president.
“Actually what kind of case is the laptop thing?” FBI agent Elvis Chan asks FBI analyst Peter Courtney at 5:28 p.m. on Oct. 14, 2020.
“Corruption? campaign financing?”
Courtney replies: “CLOSE HOLD ‐ its a money laundering case on hunter biden.”
Truth silenced
Earlier that day, during an FBI meeting with Twitter (now X) about election interference, a Twitter employee had asked about the authenticity of the laptop in light of the Post story. Courtney began to respond that the laptop was real, when an FBI lawyer interrupted to say that the FBI had “no further comment,” according to later congressional testimony by Laura Dehmlow, then the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force section chief.
“Courtney messed up,” an attorney from the FBI’s Office of the General Counsel messages Chan half an hour after his exchange with Courtney. “We cannot comment.”
The FBI lawyer is believed to have worked under former FBI general counsel James Baker, who was conveniently parachuted into Twitter six months before the election, where he would be instrumental in discussions about censoring The Post.
Later that evening the FBI lawyer told FBI agent Brady Olson that Courtney had been “admonished . . . but he wont shut up . . . Nobody on call is authorized to comment upon NY Post story . . . i’ve told Courtney. twitter is treating as disinformation.”
Yes, indeed, Twitter did treat The Post’s true and factual story as “disinformation” and censored it within hours of publication that morning, citing its “hacked materials” policy. Facebook did the same. The malign actions of the social media companies were a direct result of months of concerted prebunking of the story by the FBI, which had taken possession of the laptop in December 2019 and knew full well the political damage it would do to the presidential campaign of Joe Biden, because it put the lie to his claims that he knew nothing about his son’s overseas business dealings.
In dozens of meetings leading up to the 2020 election, the FBI had conditioned social media companies to recognize information about the laptop as Russian disinformation, according to the Twitter files and later congressional testimony.
Yoel Roth, then Twitter’s chief censor, disclosed in a sworn statement that, during these meetings, the FBI “communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors . . . likely in October [that potentially] would involve Hunter Biden.”
But after all that, on the very day that the accurate story about the laptop appeared in The Post, the FBI suddenly clammed up. It allowed the social media companies to conclude that the story was Russian disinformation that needed to be censored for “election integrity” purposes.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment