dChan
Anonymous ID: d67ef2 Dec. 20, 2022, 10:05 a.m. No.17987505   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>17987268

FBI pressured Twitter, sent trove of docs hours before Post broke Hunter laptop story

 

The FBI pressured Twitter to suppress The Post’s blockbuster scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop by warning it could be part of a Russian “hack and leak” operation — even while knowing the concern was unfounded, according to internal company records made public Monday. The latest release of the “Twitter Files” authorized by new owner Elon Musk also provided more examples of former top FBI lawyer Jim Baker’s role in cracking down on The Post’s reporting while he worked as Twitter’s deputy general counsel, a job from which Musk fired him earlier this month. Documents posted on Twitter by independent journalist Michael Shellenberger showed that Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, was contacted by FBI Agent Elvis Chan just hours before The Post published the first laptop story on Oct. 14, 2020. Chan used a special, one-way communication channel to send Roth and at least one other person 10 documents on the night of Oct. 13, 2020, and asked them to confirm receipt, Shellenberger found. Approximately two-and-a-half hours earlier, Hunter Biden attorney George Mesires had called and emailed Delaware computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac after learning from The Post that the first article based on files recovered from the abandoned laptop would be published the next day.

 

“I am a lawyer for Hunter Biden and I appreciate you reviewing your records on this matter,” Mesires wrote to Mac Isaac. At 5 a.m. on Oct. 14, The Post published the first of many scoops exposing questionable overseas business dealings conducted by Hunter Biden — details of which were hidden in plain sight on the hard drive of his laptop. Mac Isaac had tipped off the FBI about criminal evidence on the laptop, and the feds confiscated the computer back in December 2019. Nine months later, having heard nothing from investigators, Mac Issac gave a copy of the laptop to Trump lawyer Rudy Guiliani. Giuliani, in turn, supplied The Post with the trove of damning content. But The Post’s story was suppressed by Facebook and Twitter, which temporarily banned the outlet in the wake of its publication. It was also ignored or discredited by mainstream outlets, many of whom quietly substantiated the report months later.

 

Although the contents of the documents Chan sent are unknown, the timing is suspect and was in keeping with the FBI’s efforts to squelch free speech on the platform on grounds of guarding against “foreign interference in elections,” Shellenberger said.

 

Chan’s move also came after he arranged “temporary Top Secret security clearances for Twitter executives” so the FBI could alert them to purported threats beginning 30 days before the Nov. 3, 2020, election. In July 2020, three months before The Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, Chan emailed Roth suggested that beginning 30 days before Election Day, Twitter executives would be granted temporary security clearances to discuss purported threats with FBI officials. “You get to pick who they would be,” Chan wrote. Roth subsequently admitted in a sworn declaration that the feds had primed him to view any reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop as a “Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation.” And Chan later admitted under oath that the FBI warnings were exaggerated. “Through our investigations, we did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016,” Chan said, apparently referring to the infamous Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails.

 

Chan’s damning testimony came in a sworn deposition last month tied to a lawsuit — filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana — that alleges the federal government and Biden administration leaned on social media companies to suppress free speech. Chan also insisted that no one had mentioned Hunter Biden’s laptop to him before The Post broke the story and that he had not discussed it with anyone at Twitter. Internal documents published by Shellenberger revealed that Roth occasionally pushed back against Chan’s concerns about foreign meddling in the months before the 2020 election, and “resisted FBI efforts to get Twitter to share data outside of the normal search warrant process” early that year.

 

In June 2020, Roth responded to a Chan inquiry about an NBC report that foreign-controlled Twitter bots spreading misinformation about a purported government communications blackout amid protests in Washington DC following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

 

https://nypost.com/2022/12/19/fbi-reached-out-to-twitter-before-post-broke-hunter-biden-laptop-story/

Anonymous ID: d67ef2 Dec. 20, 2022, 10:12 a.m. No.17987532   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Wall Street is attacking Tesla stock to try to reign Enon in.

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/20/stocks-making-the-biggest-moves-midday-gilead-sciences-moderna-tesla-and-more.html

Anonymous ID: d67ef2 Dec. 20, 2022, 10:17 a.m. No.17987554   🗄️.is 🔗kun

CBS finally reports on #TwitterFiles and outright lies that there is no government involvement in twitter. Pretty typical.

 

Twitter Files: What they are and why they matter

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-files-matt-taibbi-bari-weiss-michael-shellenberger-elon-musk/

Anonymous ID: d67ef2 Dec. 20, 2022, 10:25 a.m. No.17987581   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Twitter Files: RNC demands FEC reopen investigation into censorship of Hunter Biden stories

 

The Republican National Committee is demanding the Federal Election Commission reopen an investigation into Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story after the release of internal records by the social media giant known as the "Twitter Files." In October 2020, the RNC filed a complaint with the FEC alleging that Twitter’s censorship of stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, his overseas business dealings and then-candidate Joe Biden's alleged knowledge of those dealings amounted to an "illegal corporate in-kind political contribution" to the Biden campaign. The FEC dismissed the complaint in August 2021. However, on Tuesday, the RNC pressed the commission to reopen the matter due to what it calls "bombshell revelations" regarding Twitter’s censorship practices, which the party alleges contradicts "factual assertions" made by Twitter when responding to the initial complaint. "These revelations, commonly referred to as the ‘Twitter Files,’ expose how previous senior management took active measures to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and other information harmful to the Democratic Party and its candidate," RNC chief counsel Matthew Raymer wrote in a letter to the FEC, obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital.

 

Twitter CEO Elon Musk outsourced the release of internal Twitter records on the matter to Substack journalist Matt Taibbi, who published a lengthy thread detailing the platform’s censorship and the internal decisions that were made. At the time, Twitter Safety alleged that the articles on Hunter Biden were in violation of its "hacked materials policy." The RNC pointed to the first installment of the "Twitter Files," which revealed it was "routine" for Twitter staff and executives "to remove or otherwise suppress individual tweets at the Biden campaign’s request." One record made public showed a Twitter executive forwarding a list of individual tweets to another with the statement, "More to review from the Biden team." The other executive responded, "Handled these." The RNC also questioned Twitter’s claims that it suppressed the Hunter Biden story "in accordance with established policies and procedures."

 

"Instead, it appears that senior executives at Twitter knew that the company’s existing ‘Hacked Materials Policy’ did not clearly apply, and yet they suppressed the story anyway," Raymer wrote to the FEC. Raymer said the actions Twitter took to suppress the story "far exceeded Twitter’s usual practice in suppressing material known to be hacked." "This directly contradicts the Declaration of Yoel Roth, formerly head of Twitter’s Site Integrity team, which Twitter submitted in response to the RNC’s complaint," Raymer wrote, citing past comments made by Roth, which suggested the policy basis was hacked materials but was "an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear." The RNC claims that the "Twitter Files" release calls into question the company’s claims that it suppressed the Hunter Biden stories in accordance with its existing "Hacked Materials Policy"—a policy that senior executives at Twitter knew "did not clearly apply, and yet they suppressed the story anyway." The complaint pointed to Twitter's response to the RNC's initial complaint, which claimed that Twitter suppressed the story due to its "Private Information Policy." The RNC said "neither Roth nor anyone else" raised that "supposed concern" in the records released to the public in the "Twitter Files."

 

"We understand this will not change the FEC’s determination in our Complaint, since the FEC took the position that even active, partisan censorship by Twitter would not violate current law," the RNC wrote. However, the RNC said Twitter "may have made false representations to the Commission in violation of" U.S. code. "The RNC therefore respectfully requests that the FEC re-examine Twitter’s response, and the Declaration of Yoel Roth in particular, in light of these revelations and refer any false statements therein to the Department of Justice for further investigation," Raymer wrote.

 

The FEC did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment on whether it will reopen its review of the complaint.

 

The White House has characterized the "Twitter Files" as a "distraction."

 

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/rnc-demands-fec-reopen-investigation-twitter-censorship-hunter-biden

Anonymous ID: d67ef2 Dec. 20, 2022, 10:31 a.m. No.17987596   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>7626 >>7707 >>7827 >>7885

FBI Paid Twitter Millions, Had Close Relationship With Execs And Staff, Emails Show

 

  • The FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million dollars between October 2019 and February 2021 as compensation for the time its employees spent managing their requests, according to internal documents published by author Michael Shellenberger Monday, as part of the ongoing “Twitter Files.”

 

  • After the Hunter Biden laptop story broke, a member of the FBI’s Office of the General Counsel spoke with Twitter’s then-Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker, a former FBI agent, in a private call, Shellenberger reported.

 

  • “Obviously, [our work with the FBI] is close-hold and we will never get public credit, but I would like to thank our FBI counterparts who worked so well with us this election cycle,” wrote an unidentified Twitter employee, asking others to sign a thank-you letter to the FBI in December, 2020, according to Shellenberger.

 

The FBI paid Twitter millions as a reimbursement for the time the company spent processing the FBI’s requests, according to internal documents published by author Michael Shellenberger Monday, in the most recent installment of Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s ongoing “Twitter Files.”

 

In an email with the subject line “Run the business – we made money!” an employee, whose name was redacted, reports to then-Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker, that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million dollars between October 2019 and February 2021, Shellenberger reported. Baker, a former FBI agent, was the agency’s general counsel during Operation Crossfire Hurricane, and approved the surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page via improper use of the Steele dossier, according to a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general. The FBI and Twitter enjoyed a close relationship in the run-up to the 2020 elections, with the FBI promising “no impediments to information sharing” between the two groups in a Sept. 16, 2020 meeting between social media executives and intelligence community staff. In a previous installment of the “Twitter Files,” journalist Matt Taibbi said he had not found evidence that the FBI or intelligence community was involved in Twitter’s decision to suppress access to a New York Post story about a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, but new documents from Shellenberger indicated that the FBI was, in fact, involved. The Post’s original October 14, 2020, story was based on a laptop, apparently belonging to Biden, containing a 2015 email linking then-Vice President Joe Biden to his son Hunter’s business dealings with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Prior to the story’s release, the FBI issued warnings to social media platforms that there was likely to be a Russian “hack-and-leak” operation prior to the election — Twitter’s then-head of trust and safety Yoel Roth testified that he had been explicitly warned of a leak targeting Hunter Biden — despite not having any evidence of such an operation being underway, Shellenberger reported, citing the testimony of FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan. On October 13, 2020, the Post informed Biden, and his lawyer, George Mesires, that they intended to publish their story on the laptop the next day, prompting Mesires to email the owner of the repair shop that gave the Post access to the laptop just before 7:00 p.m. EST, Schellenberger reported. The same day, at 9:22 p.m. EST, Chan sent ten documents to Twitter via the site’s “Teleporter” portal, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter, Schellenberger reported. Chan, however, followed-up, directly emailing Roth and asking for Twitter to confirm it had received the documents, which Roth did two minutes later, according to Shellenberger. On Oct. 14, after the Post’s story was published, several internal messages from Baker — one of which cites “reliable cybersecurity experts” — push back against Roth’s claim that the story wasn’t a violation of their policies, according to Shellenberger. However, the FBI had taken possession of the laptop in December of 2019, making it “inconceivable” that the agency was unaware that the Post’s story was accurate, according to Shellenberger.

 

Just after 10:00 a.m. EST, Roth sends an email to Twitter staff, notifying them that “the suggestion from experts – which rings true – is there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware,” Shellenberger reported. Later the same day, just after 3:30 p.m. EST, Baker held a phone call — alone — with Matthew Perry at the FBI’s Office of the General Counsel.

 

https://dailycaller.com/2022/12/19/fbi-paid-twitter-millions/