Commentary
In issuing an Independence Day injunction freezing federal government-led speech policing, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty heaped particular scorn on the FBI for its interference in the 2020 presidential election, namely by grooming and deceiving social media companies into suppressing the New York Post’s
Hunter Biden laptop story.
New revelations (
pdf) emanating from the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about the Bureau’s apparent press to quash the laptop story—just as authorities, including the FBI (
pdf), allegedly
hid the laptop itself—show the effort to have been perhaps even more egregious than Judge Doughty knew.
The still-burgeoning scandal appears to be a case study in how the mass public-private surveillance and censorship regime operated to advance its political interests—in this instance, interests of the highest order in helping its favored presidential candidate secure victory.
Seen in its broader context, the government-driven effort to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story should now firmly be understood to have been one leg of a concerted, long-running campaign by the U.S. security state to
protect the Bidens through obstructing investigations into their alleged corruption and possible criminality, and to protect itself through covering up the obstruction.
As the limited discovery in Missouri v. Biden shows, and Judge Doughty’s memorandum in support of the since-stayed injunction recounts, in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the FBI regularly engaged in meetings with social media companies directly and alongside other government agencies convened by the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
The purported aim was to help social media companies combat
foreign misinformation and disinformation. These efforts were driven by dubious arguments that Russia had influenced the 2016 presidential election, giving rise to a
censorship-industrial complex that would be turned on Americans.
The Weaponization Subcommittee notes (
pdf) that the FBI participated in more than 30 such meetings in the nine months preceding the 2020 election. Critically, these meetings occurred after the FBI had gained possession of and authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The confabs included social media companies’ in-house censorship officers, euphemistically referred to as “trust and safety” personnel. They were responsible for “content moderation” and devising the platforms’ terms of service policies.
These teams’ rosters were and
often are dominated by ex-national security apparatus officials—ones who apparently share the same censorious views as the agencies they once served.
During the meetings, the FBI and other federal authorities repeatedly warned the platforms to be on the lookout for “hack and dump” or “hack and leak” operations during the 2020 election cycle—operations that, by implication, could affect political contests.
According to Elvis Chan (
pdf), an FBI official leading engagement with the social media platforms, while the bureau didn’t explicitly ask the companies to change their hacked material policies, it did frequently follow up to ask whether they had changed said policies, as the FBI wanted to know how they would treat such materials.
This favored national security apparatus tactic of not commanding social media companies to censor broad categories of content, or specific posts or accounts, but instead to suggest policies or forward examples of offending content and then ask whether the platforms took related action—against a steady drumbeat of pressure to censor from other government actors and NGOs—would play out again and again in evidence produced in Missouri v. Biden, the Twitter Files, and in
congressional oversight.
Certainly, it proved effective in the case of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Amid the warnings from federal authorities about coming foreign information operations, many of the platforms updated their terms of service policies to stipulate that the posting of “hacked materials” would violate them.
Chan would
warn Twitter site integrity head Yoel Roth weeks before the election of the efforts of a Russian hacking organization, which would later “set off ... hack-and-leak campaign alarm bells” on the morning the New York Post published its story, he has
said.
Mr. Roth would draft a sworn declaration (
pdf) in December 2020 indicating that he learned in the industry meetings between federal authorities and social media platforms that the feds “expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October,” and “that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
Mr. Chan didn’t corroborate that Hunter Biden’s name was mentioned in the CISA-led meetings. A peer at CISA also deposed in Missouri v. Biden didn’t dispute Mr. Roth’s claims.
Irrespective of whether authorities tipped off social media platforms to a coming Hunter Biden story specifically, just-released excerpts from an interview between Chan’s colleague Laura Dehmlow and Weaponization Subcommittee investigators now show they went to still further lengths to get the platforms to kill it.
According to Ms. Dehmlow, the current FBI Section Chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF)—a central participant in the 2020 meetings with social media companies—when the New York Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story, not just the FBI officials who had authenticated the laptop but also members of the task force themselves knew the laptop was real.
What’s more, Ms. Dehmlow revealed (
pdf) that in a previously scheduled meeting with Twitter in which she and other FBI officials participated, coincidentally taking place on Oct. 14, 2020, the very day the NY Post’s story dropped, “somebody from Twitter essentially asked whether the laptop was real, and one of the FBI folks who was on the call [an analyst in the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division embedded in FITF] did confirm that, ‘yes, it was,’ before another participant [an FBI lawyer] jumped in and said, ‘no further comment.’”
Irrespective of the admission the analyst made before being cut off on the call with Twitter, the platform persisted in censoring the laptop story based on a
contrived theory driven by “experts” that the material was hacked—a theory the FBI assuredly could have dispelled.
Subsequently, according to Ms. Dehmlow’s account, FBI officials huddled over what they would tell social media companies about the laptop in future meetings. They decided to say, “No comment.”
After Ms. Dehmlow did just that when asked by Facebook about the veracity of the NY Post’s story in a later Oct. 14 meeting, it deamplified the story, as Mark Zuckerberg would later put it, because the FBI had put the platform “on guard” that “there’s about to be some kind of dump ... similar” to the laptop story.
So in sum, Ms. Dehmlow revealed that the FBI shut up an official who would have disclosed the truth, and then instituted a policy not to speak the truth about the story.
The bureau did so, according to Ms. Dehmlow, knowing that it would have been fully authorized to “share ... specific details” with platforms had the story been part of a foreign malign influence operation.
Judge Doughty remarked, before these disclosures, that he found the Bureau’s “failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation ... particularly troubling.”
“As a result,” Judge Doughty added, “millions of U.S. citizens did not hear the story prior to the November 3, 2020 election.”
Again, the FBI seemingly groomed the social media companies, and then it deceived them—and by extension, we the people were deceived.
Other aspects of the Hunter Biden laptop story scandal continue to linger.
Among them: Was the FBI priming social media platforms to censor the NY Post’s story, knowing that it was coming?
As the NY Post’s Miranda Devine has
detailed, during 2020, the FBI was surveilling then-President Donald Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s online cloud.
It would have then had “access to emails in August 2020” from John Paul Mac Isaac “disclosing information damaging to Joe Biden from the laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at his store in April 2019.”
“The FBI also had access to my messages with Giuliani in October discussing when The Post would publish the story,” Ms. Devine said.
Thus, she said, “It looks very much as if the FBI pre-bunked a story it knew was coming about Hunter Biden.”
The government’s involvement in hobbling the Hunter Biden laptop story didn’t end with its dealings with social media companies either.
As the Weaponization Subcommittee revealed in a separate probe, when 51 ex-intelligence community bigwigs got together to draft a letter claiming that the NY Post’s story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) seemed to
fast-track the letter for public release. Not only that, but it appears that in at least one instance, a then-active PCRB employee proactively solicited (
pdf) a signature for the letter. Was this the full extent of the CIA’s involvement in discrediting the story?
Either way, its effect was devastating. The ex-officials leaked the letter to Politico, which ran with a headline reading in part, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.”
Then-candidate Biden was able to use the words of the former intelligence chiefs as a shield to dismiss charges leveled at him by President Trump in the final 2020 presidential debate.
The information operation aimed at deceiving the American people and defending now-President Biden worked.
Given this success, and with the actors having paid little price for it, one can only wonder what information operations our ruling elites have in store for 2024.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
