Protecting Biden and his family from any negative news coverage prior to Election Day meant once again leveraging powerful federal agencies and Democratic lawmakers
to play along.
They got the band back together—to the extent the original members ever broke up in the first place.
Recent disclosures by independent journalist Matt Taibbi confirmed what other reporters have been covering for the better part of two years: According to files obtained by Elon Musk, the new owner and CEO of Twitter, the social media platform protected Joe Biden and his family from a major and potentially election-altering scandal as millions of Americans were voting early for president in October 2020. Years of denials and dismissals related to Hunter Biden’s lucrative shakedown of hostile nations, including Russia and China, were set to explode just a few weeks before Election Day.
Big Tech—and the government—was ready. Immediately after the New York Post published damning material retrieved from Hunter Biden’s laptop contradicting Joe Biden’s longtime protestations that he had nothing to do with his son’s profiteering gigs, Twitter claimed the reporting was based on “hacked material” and in violation of the company’s terms of service.
“Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe,’” Taibbi wrote in a lengthy tweet thread on Friday.
The Post’s Twitter account was frozen for two weeks; Twitter users were forbidden from sharing articles on the site. Kayleigh McEnany, Donald Trump’s press secretary at the time, was locked out of her account for sharing the Post’s story. Amid internal confusion as to the company’s shaky explanation for censoring the coverage of Biden’s laptop, Twitter’s general counsel defended the move. James Baker told employees that “caution was warranted” and claimed “some facts . . . indicate that the materials may have been hacked.”
If Baker’s name sounds familiar—and not in a good way—it should. Baker served as former FBI Director James Comey’s top lawyer during Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s attempt to sabotage Trump’s campaign and presidency with claims he had been in cahoots with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.
Baker’s fingerprints are etched indelibly on any number of Russiagate-associated scams, from seeking the first illicit FISA warrant on the Trump campaign to promoting the falsehood of suspicious links between Trump and a Russian bank. (Jonathan Turley calls Baker the “Kevin Bacon of the Russian collusion scandals.”)
And this is where Taibbi’s tweetstorm took an odd and easily disproved turn. Taibbi says he saw “no evidence of any government involvement in the laptop story.” Now, giving Taibbi the benefit of the doubt—perhaps former Twitter executives wisely purged records between the company and government officials before being escorted out of headquarters—maybe he didn’t see any specific correspondence confirming the participation of federal agencies in the scandal. But the evidence is in full view and has been since the summer of 2020.
First, recall that Biden family corruption was the worst kept secret in Washington, and one that threatened to derail Biden’s third run for the presidency. His team took aggressive steps early in the campaign to halt media coverage of Hunter Biden’s extensive overseas business arrangements. In 2019, Biden deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield, currently the White House communications director, blasted the New York Times for publishing a quasi-critical piece questioning Hunter’s multimillion dollar paycheck from Burisma and his father’s efforts as vice president to stop the Ukrainian government’s inquiry into the corrupt...
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