House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he plans to issue subpoenas to 51 former U.S. intelligence officials who downplayed the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the fall of 2020 as a likely Russian disinformation scheme.
A letter, issued in October 2020, alleged that “Russians, according to media reports and cybersecurity experts, targeted Burisma late last year for cyber collection and gained access to its emails.” However, it was later revealed that the younger Biden had left his laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop, which was the source of emails, messages, and lewd photos that were published online.
“Why did they sign it?” McCarthy said in the Dec. 10 interview. “Why did they lie to the American public? ... Why did you use the reputation that America was able to give to you? More information, but use it for a political purpose and lie to the American public?”
None of the former intelligence officials who signed the letter have recanted their statement that the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation plot designed to sway the election. A number of legacy news outlets who previously echoed those claims, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, later conceded that the laptop was authentic.
Also on Dec. 10, McCarthy indicated that he plans to investigate whether Facebook and Google worked to suppress reports about the 2020 election. The GOP leader said that those firms became an arm of the federal government so they shouldn’t have protections afforded under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
McCarthy’s remarks to Fox News come as Republicans are slated to retake the House majority in 2023. The House will meet on Jan. 3 to choose its next speaker from the entire floor.
At least five Republican lawmakers have publicly said they won’t back McCarthy’s bid for speaker. Those detractors have said that they have about two-dozen other members who will join them.
‘Open’
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told Fox News, in response to McCarthy’s statement, that he’s willing to support congressional hearings into Twitter’s actions ahead of the 2020 election.“I have said I am open to hearings in Congress on this. There are two competing values. On the one hand, we don’t want censorship. We don’t want to have people censored or boxed out, or shadow-banned and removed from Twitter because of their viewpoint,” he said.
On Offense?
But some pro-Democrat groups signaled this weekend that amid the bevy of promised investigations into Hunter and Joe Biden, they‘ll fight back. It comes as the president has said that he’ll make a decision on whether to run for the White House after the holiday season is over.“They feel that there is a whole counternarrative missing because of the whole Hunter-hater narrative out there,” liberal activist David Brock, the former head of Media Matters, told The Washington Post after attending a meeting on how to discuss defending the younger Biden.
Brock told The Washington Post he’s planning a new group, Facts First USA, in response to the House Republican investigations into Hunter Biden himself, although he didn’t make reference to Twitter’s suppression of the NY Post’s story.
“What we really got into was more the meat of it, the meat of what a response would look like,” he told the Washington Post.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre weighed in on the Twitter controversy when questioned about it during a news briefing. Jean-Pierre said that the White House “was not involved” in Twitter’s decision in late 2020.
“It’s up to private companies to make these decisions,” she said in response to Baker’s departure at Twitter. In another comment, Jean-Pierre said it is “not healthy” for Musk to be releasing the firm’s internal communications.
