TYBaker
Feb 8, 2023 12:58 EST Associated Press KCRA Sacramento, CA
House GOP questions ex-Twitter execs about handling of Hunter Biden reporting
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https://www.kcra.com/article/house-gop-question-ex-twitter-execs-hunter-biden/42798736
Former Twitter executives conceded Wednesday that they made a mistake by blocking a story about Hunter Biden, the president’s son, from the social media platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, but adamantly denied Republican assertions that they were pressured by Democrats and law enforcement to suppress the story. “The decisions here aren’t straightforward, and hindsight is 20/20,” Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, testified to Congress. “It isn’t obvious what the right response is to a suspected, but not confirmed, cyberattack by another government on a presidential election.” He added, “Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.” The three former executives appeared before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to testify for the first time about the company’s decision to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article in October 2020 about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. “Today’s hearing is the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s first step in examining the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process," Rep. James Comer, the chairman, said in his opening statement. The witnesses Republicans subpoenaed to testify were Roth, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's former chief legal officer and James Baker, the company's former deputy general counsel.
Democrats brought a witness of their own, Anika Collier Navaroli, a former employee with Twitter's content moderation team. She testified last year to the House committee that investigated the Capitol riot about Twitter's preferential treatment of Donald Trump until the then-president was banned from the site two years ago. Clarified: Are Elon Musk's changes to Twitter impacting democracy and free speech?Clarified: Are Elon Musk's changes to Twitter impacting democracy and free speech? The hearing is the GOP's opening act into what lawmakers promise will be a widespread investigation into President Joe Biden and his family, with the tech companies another prominent target of their oversight efforts. The White House criticized congressional Republicans for staging “a bizarre political stunt,” hours after Biden's State of the Union address where he detailed the bipartisan progress made in his first two years in office. “This appears to be the latest effort by the House Republican majority’s most extreme MAGA members to question and relitigate the outcome of the 2020 election," White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement Wednesday. “This is not what the American people want their leaders to work on.”
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Feb 8, 2023 12:58 EST Associated Press KCRA Sacramento, CA
House GOP questions ex-Twitter execs about handling of Hunter Biden reporting
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https://www.kcra.com/article/house-gop-question-ex-twitter-execs-hunter-biden/42798736
The New York Post first reported in October 2020, weeks before the presidential election, that it had received from Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of a hard drive from a laptop that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved. Twitter blocked people from sharing links to the story for several days. Months later, Twitter’s then-CEO, Jack Dorsey, called the company’s communications around the Post article “not great.” He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” around why it was blocked was “unacceptable.” The newspaper story was greeted at the time with skepticism due to questions about the laptop’s origins, including Giuliani’s involvement, and because top officials in the Trump administration had already warned that Russia was working to denigrate Joe Biden before the White House election. The Kremlin had interfered in the 2016 race by hacking Democratic emails that were subsequently leaked, and fears that Russia would meddle again in the 2020 race were widespread across Washington. Just last week, lawyers for the younger Biden asked the Justice Department to investigate people who say they accessed his personal data. But they did not acknowledge that that data came from a laptop that Hunter Biden is purported to have dropped off at a computer repair shop. The issue was also reignited recently after Elon Musk took over Twitter as CEO and began to release a slew of company information to independent journalists, what he has called the “Twitter Files.”
The documents and data largely show internal debates among employees over the decision to temporarily censor links to the story about Hunter Biden. The tweet threads lacked substantial evidence of a targeted influence campaign from Democrats or the FBI, which has denied any involvement in Twitter's decision-making.
Nonetheless, Republicans including Comer, R-Ky., have used the Post story, which has not been independently verified by The Associated Press, as the basis for what they say is another example of the Biden family's “influence peddling." One of the witnesses on Wednesday, Baker, is expected to be the target of even more Republican scrutiny. Baker was the FBI’s general counsel during the opening of two of the bureau’s most consequential investigations in history: the Hillary Clinton investigation and a separate inquiry into potential coordination between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Republicans have long criticized the FBI’s handling of both investigations. For Democrats, Navaroli is expected to counter the GOP argument by testifying about how Twitter allowed Trump’s tweets despite the misinformation they sometimes contained. Navaroli testified to the Jan. 6 committee last year that Twitter executives often tolerated Trump's posts despite them including false statements and violations of the company's own rules because executives knew the platform was his “favorite and most-used … and enjoyed having that sort of power.” The Jan. 6 committee used Navaroli's testimony in one of its public hearings last summer but did not identify her by name.
House ‘Weaponization’ hearing to take aim at Justice Department
https://rollcall.com/2023/02/08/house-weaponization-hearing-to-take-aim-at-justice-department/
February 8, 2023 at 12:55pm EST
The House special subcommittee probing the federal government’s “weaponization” will hold its first hearing Thursday with testimony from two Republican senators and a focus on the Justice Department and an alleged bias against conservatives. The hearing sets the stage for one of the most closely watched and politically heated House panels, one with a broad investigative portfolio, subpoena power and the ability to access Intelligence Committee information. The subcommittee already faces criticism from Democrats, who argue conservatives will use it as a political weapon to attack the federal government and push false conspiracy theories. The first hearing will feature testimony from Iowa Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley, who traditionally has had a muscular investigative staff, and Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, now the ranking member on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Johnson and Grassley have repeatedly highlighted alleged bias at the FBI and criticized some Justice Department actions on investigations, such as the handling of a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, the president’s son. Johnson, in a brief interview Tuesday, said he will speak about instances where people in the federal government worked with the media to undermine the truth. “I’ll lay out numerous examples, beyond just what we’ve experienced personally, in terms of the undermining and sabotaging of our investigations,” Johnson said. Grassley, the former Judiciary Committee ranking member, released a minority staff report in 2021 that tried to refute allegations former President Donald Trump attempted to use the DOJ to overturn the result of the 2020 election.
Opening salvo - Former Rep. Tom Davis, now a partner at Holland and Knight, said the testimony from members of Congress “is just kind of the opening salvo to get the audience interested and the base revved up.” Davis said Thursday’s hearing will serve as Republicans’ opening argument on longstanding concerns about bias in the federal government. “It’s already a given among conservatives in this country that the government has been weaponized against them. That Trump was given unfair treatment and Biden was treated with kid gloves,” Davis said. Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said Tuesday the panel will present evidence of a federal government gone awry. “We have a government that now I believe is targeting the very people it is supposed to serve,” Jordan said at a press conference. Jordan said the hearing was one part of an investigation that would expose the federal government’s bias, and that his staff had spoken to dozens of whistleblowers who are “talking about how the Justice Department is operating in such a political fashion and manner.” Also set to testify Thursday are former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard; Thomas Baker and Nicole Parker, both former FBI agents; as well as George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley and Elliot Williams, a former Senate and DOJ counsel who now works as a principal at the Raben Group, a public relations firm, according to a hearing announcement released Wednesday. Committee member Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, D-Va., said the premise that the FBI is biased against conservatives is absurd, saying the agency has a history of being weaponized against figures on the left side of the political spectrum. Connolly also panned Jordan, saying the Republican has a “very sorry history of conflating fabrication with facts.” “Their shopworn tactics — of cherry picking facts, fabricating, promoting conspiracy theories, innuendos, slander — will be their modus operandi as we move forward on this and other efforts,” Connolly said.
Panel dynamics - House Republicans created the panel on a party-line vote last month as part of a deal conservatives struck with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif, to gain the gavel. Jordan has focused so far on longstanding grievances among Republicans, including alleged bias at the DOJ; alleged “targeting” of parents who protested at school board meetings; communications that federal law enforcement had with Twitter and other social media sites about a laptop owned by Hunter Biden; and other issues. Last week Jordan subpoenaed Biden administration officials for documents related to an October 2021 memorandum from the Justice Department that sought to address intimidation and violent threats against school administrators and teachers. The memorandum, which directed federal officials to hold meetings to discuss strategies for addressing the threats, has prompted sustained criticism from conservatives. Republicans say the memorandum was inappropriate and crossed a line by marshaling law enforcement resources.