1. TWITTER FILES: PART 7

The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop

How the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020
In Twitter Files #6, we saw the FBI relentlessly seek to exercise influence over Twitter, including over its content, its users, and its data.

In Twitter Files #7, we present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published.
The story begins in December 2019 when a Delaware computer store owner named John Paul (J.P.) Mac Isaac contacts the FBI about a laptop that Hunter Biden had left with him

On Dec 9, 2019, the FBI issues a subpoena for, and takes, Hunter Biden's laptop.

nypost.com/2020/10/14/ema… ImageImageImage
By Aug 2020, Mac Isaac still had not heard back from the FBI, even though he had discovered evidence of criminal activity. And so he emails Rudy Giuliani, who was under FBI surveillance at the time. In early Oct, Giuliani gives it to @nypost

nypost.com/2020/10/14/ema…
Shortly before 7 pm ET on October 13, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, emails JP Mac Isaac.

Hunter and Mesires had just learned from the New York Post that its story about the laptop would be published the next day. Image
7. At 9:22 pm ET (6:22 PT), FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter. Image
8. The next day, October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Every single fact in it was accurate. Image
9. And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans.

Why is that? What, exactly, happened?
10. On Dec 2, @mtaibbi described the debate inside Twitter over its decision to censor a wholly accurate article.

Since then, we have discovered new info that points to an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms

11. First, it's important to understand that Hunter Biden earned *tens of millions* of dollars in contracts with foreign businesses, including ones linked to China's government, for which Hunter offered no real work.
Here's an overview by investigative journalist @peterschweizer
12. And yet, during all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian “hack and leak” operation.

This is from a sworn declaration by Roth given in December 2020.

fec.gov/files/legal/mu… Image
13. They did the same to Facebook, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “The FBI basically came to us [and] was like, ‘Hey... you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016 election. There's about to be some kind of dump similar to that.'"
14. Were the FBI warnings of a Russian hack-and-leak operation relating to Hunter Biden based on *any* new intel?

No, they weren't

“Through our investigations, we did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016,” admitted FBI agent Elvis Chan in Nov. ImageImageImageImage
15. Indeed, Twitter executives *repeatedly* reported very little Russian activity.

E.g., on Sept 24, 2020, Twitter told FBI it had removed 345 “largely inactive” accounts “linked to previous coordinated Russian hacking attempts.” They “had little reach & low follower accounts." Image
16. In fact, Twitter debunked false claims by journalists of foreign influence on its platform

"We haven’t seen any evidence to support that claim” by @oneunderscore__ @nbc News of foreign-controlled bots.

“Our review thus far shows a small-scale domestic troll effort…” ImageImage
17. After FBI asks about a WaPo story on alleged foreign influence in a pro-Trump tweet, Twitter's Roth says, "The article makes a lot of insinuations... but we saw no evidence that that was the case here (and in fact, a lot of strong evidence pointing in the other direction).” ImageImage
18. It's not the first time that Twitter's Roth has pushed back against the FBI. In January 2020, Roth resisted FBI efforts to get Twitter to share data outside of the normal search warrant process. ImageImage
19. Pressure had been growing:

“We have seen a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our API policies. They are probing & pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to congressional staff).” Image
20. Time and again, FBI asks Twitter for evidence of foreign influence & Twitter responds that they aren’t finding anything worth reporting.

“[W]e haven’t yet identified activity that we’d typically refer to you (or even flag as interesting in the foreign influence context).” ImageImage
21. Despite Twitter’s pushback, the FBI repeatedly requests information from Twitter that Twitter has already made clear it will not share outside of normal legal channels. Image
22. Then, in July 2020, the FBI’s Elvis Chan arranges for temporary Top Secret security clearances for Twitter executives so that the FBI can share information about threats to the upcoming elections. Image
23. On August 11, 2020, the FBI's Chan shares information with Twitter's Roth relating to the Russian hacking organization, APT28, through the FBI's secure, one-way communications channel, Teleporter. Image
24. Recently, Yoel Roth told @karaswisher that he had been primed to think about the Russian hacking group APT28 before news of the Hunter Biden laptop came out.

When it did, Roth said, "It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leap campaign alarm bells."
25. In Aug, 2020, FBI’s Chan asks Twitter: does anyone there have top secret clearance?

When someone mentions Jim Baker, Chan responds, "I don't know how I forgot him" — an odd claim, given Chan's job is to monitor Twitter, not to mention that they worked together at the FBI. ImageImage
26. Who is Jim Baker? He's former general counsel of the FBI (2014-18) & one of the most powerful men in the U.S. intel community.

Baker has moved in and out of government for 30 years, serving stints at CNN, Bridgewater (a $140 billion asset management firm) and Brookings ImageImageImageImage
27. As general counsel of the FBI, Baker played a central role in making the case internally for an investigation of Donald Trump

wsj.com/articles/fbi-t…
28. Baker wasn't the only senior FBI exec. involved in the Trump investigation to go to Twitter.

Dawn Burton, the former dep. chief of staff to FBI head James Comey, who initiated the investigation of Trump, joined Twitter in 2019 as director of strategy.
29. As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — "Bu alumni" — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals. Image
30. Efforts continued to influence Twitter's Yoel Roth.

In Sept 2020, Roth participated in an Aspen Institute “tabletop exercise” on a potential "Hack-and-Dump" operation relating to Hunter Biden

The goal was to shape how the media covered it — and how social media carried it ImageImageImageImage
31. The organizer was Vivian Schiller, the fmr CEO of NPR, fmr head of news at Twitter; fmr Gen. mgr of NY Times; fmr Chief Digital Officer of NBC News

Attendees included Meta/FB's head of security policy and the top nat. sec. reporters for @nytimes @wapo and others Image
32. By mid-Sept, 2020, Chan & Roth had set up an encrypted messaging network so employees from FBI & Twitter could communicate.

They also agree to create a “virtual war room” for “all the [Internet] industry plus FBI and ODNI” [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]. ImageImage
33. Then, on Sept 15, 2020 the FBI’s Laura Dehmlow, who heads up the Foreign Influence Task Force, and Elvis Chan, request to give a classified briefing for Jim Baker, without any other Twitter staff, such as Yoel Roth, present. Image
34. On Oct 14, shortly after @nypost publishes its Hunter Biden laptop story, Roth says, “it isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy, nor is it clearly in violation of anything else," but adds, “this feels a lot like a somewhat subtle leak operation.” Image
35. In response to Roth, Baker repeatedly insists that the Hunter Biden materials were either faked, hacked, or both, and a violation of Twitter policy. Baker does so over email, and in a Google doc, on October 14 and 15. ImageImageImage
36. And yet it's inconceivable Baker believed the Hunter Biden emails were either fake or hacked. The @nypost had included a picture of the receipt signed by Hunter Biden, and an FBI subpoena showed that the agency had taken possession of the laptop in December 2019. ImageImageImage
37. As for the FBI, it likely would have taken a few *hours* for it to confirm that the laptop had belonged to Hunter Biden. Indeed, it only took a few days for journalist @peterschweizer to prove it.
38. By 10 am, Twitter execs had bought into a wild hack-and-dump story

“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” Image
39. At 3:38 pm that same day, October 14, Baker arranges a phone conversation with Matthew J. Perry in the Office of the General Counsel of the FBI Image
40. The influence operation persuaded Twitter execs that the Hunter Biden laptop did *not* come from a whistleblower.

One linked to a Hill article, based on a WaPo article, from Oct 15, which falsely suggested that Giuliani’s leak of the laptop had something to do with Russia. ImageImageImage
41. There is evidence that FBI agents have warned elected officials of foreign influence with the primary goal of leaking the information to the news media. This is a political dirty trick used to create the perception of impropriety.
42. In 2020, the FBI gave a briefing to Senator Grassley and Johnson, claiming evidence of “Russian interference” into their investigation of Hunter Biden.

The briefing angered the Senators, who say it was done to discredit their investigation.

grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…
43. “The unnecessary FBI briefing provided the Democrats and liberal media the vehicle to spread their false narrative that our work advanced Russian disinformation.” ImageImageImageImage
44. Notably, then-FBI General Counsel Jim Baker was investigated *twice,* in 2017 and 2019, for leaking information to the news media.

“You’re saying he’s under criminal investigation? That’s why you’re not letting him answer?” Meadows asked.

“Yes”

politico.com/story/2019/01/…
45. In the end, the FBI's influence campaign aimed at executives at news media, Twitter, & other social media companies worked: they censored & discredited the Hunter Biden laptop story.

By Dec. 2020, Baker and his colleagues even sent a note of thanks to the FBI for its work. Image
46. The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time.

“I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” reports an associate of Jim Baker in early 2021. Image
47. And the pressure from the FBI on social media platforms continues

In Aug 2022, Twitter execs prepared for a meeting with the FBI, whose goal was “to convince us to produce on more FBI EDRs"

EDRs are an “emergency disclosure request,” a warrantless search. Image
In response to the Twitter Files revelation of high-level FBI agents at Twitter, @Jim_Jordan said, “I have concerns about whether the government was running a misinformation operation on We the People.”

nypost.com/2022/12/17/twi…
Anyone who reads the Twitter Files, regardless of their political orientation, should share those concerns.

/END
Correction: This event occurred on June 25, 2020, not in September. ImageImageImage

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More from @shellenberger

Jul 16
I’m afraid I have some terrible news. The governor of America’s largest and richest state has just signed a law that puts 10 million children and adolescents in grave danger of medical mistreatment.

The media headlines have it wrong. They claim that California Governor Gavin Newsom’s new law protects children by stopping public schools from outing their new gender to their parents.

It does just the opposite. It makes children vulnerable to irreversible and lifelong medical abuse and mistreatment. And it is all based on the pseudoscientific idea that some children are born into the wrong bodies and that we can change a person’s sex through drugs and surgery.

For any of this to make sense, you have to understand what’s happening in Britain. Several years ago, the government appointed a well-respected pediatrician named Hillary Cass to investigate whether it was ethical to block the puberty of children, give them opposite-sex hormones, and perform surgeries on their bodies to make them feel better about their gender. Dr. Cass came back a few weeks ago and said no, absolutely not.

Around the same time, the British government banned puberty blockers nationwide. And, just a few days ago, the new Labor Party government affirmed that it would maintain the former government’s ban.

In her report, Cass said that the so-called “social transition,” whereby a child adopts the identity of the opposite sex, is not a neutral act and has psychological consequences. This means it is the first step toward medical intervention.

What Gavin Newsom has done is actively prevented schools from informing parents that their children have been put on a medical pathway.

This is an outrageous attack on the rights of children and parents. Children have a right to go through puberty. No adult should be able to block their puberty. And parents have a right to know if their child thinks that they are the opposite sex or were born into the wrong body.

We have seen with leaked internal documents of the leading gender medicine group, WPATH, that these medical interventions, namely puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery, are not only irreversible but result in sterilization and loss of sexual function.

Children or adolescents are simply not mature enough to understand the effects of so-called “gender-affirming care.” They cannot, in other words, give their informed consent.

The new law creates the grave risk that activist teachers, students, and outside groups will convince their children that they were born into the wrong body, and hide their “social transition” from parents, which will lead to harmful medical mistreatment.

As such, the law that Newsom just signed is the opposite of what both children and their parents need. We need schools to immediately warn parents if their children think they are the opposite sex.

After all, this is a diagnosable psychiatric condition known as “gender dysphoria.” And if your child has a psychiatric disorder, whether anxiety, depression, an eating disorder, or gender dysphoria, you have a right to know.

And schools must stop teaching children, or allowing other people to teach children, the pseudoscientific and dehumanizing ideas that it’s possible to be born into the wrong body and possible to change one’s sex.

As such, either the legislature, the courts, or a ballot initiative will be required to nullify Newsom’s law. Until then, it is important to spread the word to parents that California public schools are fundamentally unsafe for the millions of children who attend them.
The politicians — @GavinNewsom @EleniForCA @AGRobBonta @XavierBecerra @JoeBiden @KamalaHarris — must immediately stop this grotesque violation of human rights.

The whole world is watching.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 13
Now might be a good time for our political leaders to tone down the rhetoric.
A mentally ill homeless drug addict attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband and NBC blamed Trump and the GOP.

Somehow I doubt NBC will blame Biden for the near-assassination of Trump. Image
Read 6 tweets
Jul 12
Take a good look at this man. His intent is to censor the entire Internet, including in the United States. He hates our freedom because it exposes his lies. He treats “1984” as a guidebook. He is a totalitarian menace, and we must do everything we can to remove him from power.
What Breton is doing is flagrantly illegal. He is violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the EU Constitution, and the French Constitution. US, EU, and other lawmakers around the world should demand Breton be fired and investigated for his attack on freedom.
Breton must be stopped at all costs. The longer he is allowed to stay in his position the more powerful and dangerous he becomes.

We are witnessing an EU coup against our fundamental freedom in real time.

The EU must fire Breton or face serious consequences for his pathological totalitarian behavior.
Read 6 tweets
Jul 11
Business owners and district attorneys in California have proposed a moderate ballot measure to stop rampant shoplifting and fentanyl deaths. Gov @GavinNewsom says he will oppose it. I suspect Kamala and Biden will, too.

The reason is that Soros is one of their biggest donors. It is his law that decriminalized shoplifting and hard drugs. Soros will likely give Gavin's consultants tens of millions to kill the law.

It will be interesting to watch Gavin, Kamala, and Biden defend their obviously immoral Soros-funded pro-crime agenda, which led a half million people to flee the state and has turned the downtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles into lawless wastelands.

These are deeply creepy people who do not care about the thousands of mentally ill addicts they're letting foreign drug dealers poison every year.

The mainstream media in California takes money from Soros and campaigned for the legalization of drug dealing and shoplifting. They have been lying about this issue for years. So please share this information so we can get the truth out.
Voters passed the Soros-funded Prop 47 in 2014. Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris made it harder to mandate drug treatment because it effectively decriminalized hard drug dealing, public drug use, and theft under 950 dollars, with no incentive to enter rehab.

That combination proved devastating. Prop 47 allowed shoplifters and thieves to break the law with impunity, often to support their deadly drug habit.

The money addicts make from selling their stolen goods goes to drug dealers, so in effect, our laws subsidize the Sinaloa drug cartel, which has pioneered new forms of extreme violence.

That’s why so many stores, from Walgreens and Old Navy to Nordstrom’s and Macy’s, have closed and left California.

There is a better way. We need to mandate rehabilitation, not prison, for people who repeatedly break the law to support their addiction. We need to crack down on open-air dealing of fentanyl, which is killing our people. And we need to make it illegal to steal from retail stores, and hold people accountable.

Gavin Newsom is trying to kill the new ballot initiative, Proposition 36. It is essential that we stop him. Californians need the Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act. Please visit to learn more.CASafecommunities.com
If @KamalaHarris becomes the Democratic nominee for president, you can expect criticism of her for campaigning for Proposition 47 and misleading voters about it.

As California's Attorney General at the time, Harris wrote the 100-word summary for voters. And, as AG, she oversaw the lab that analyzes DNA.

And yet Harris failed to mention in her summary that Prop 47 would drastically reduce the DNA samples collected by police, which proved devastating for prosecuting perpetrators of rape and murder.Image
Read 6 tweets
Jun 28
Many Democrats want to replace Biden with California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Doing so would be a disaster for the nation. Please consider these three key facts, and watch the video below for an overview:

1. Newsom's policies led directly to homelessness increasing by 31% in California, even as it decreased by 18% in the rest of the US from 2010-2020. Homelessness increased another 7.5% between 2022 and 2023.

2. Newsom's policies led directly to skyrocketing crime. One out of four San Francisco residents polled say they were a victim of crime in the last year, and 42% say they were a victim more than once.

3. Rising crime and homelessness, high taxes, and unaffordable housing under Newsom has resulted in people fleeing the state. The state's total population declined by 573,000 from its peak in 2020.

I have interviewed hundreds of homeless people in California. Many, if not most, are from out of state. Many said they came to California so they could be paid to use hard drugs, in many cases to self-medicate severe mental illness. And many are assaulted and left to die, resulting in far higher rates of drug death than other parts of the nation.

Don't believe the hype: Newsom is not compassionate. He only cares about himself, and his policies result in grotesque cruelty.
Newsom demanded that we decriminalize up to $950 in shoplifting and the possession of hard drugs. The result has been an influx of homeless addicts who shoplift to support their deadly habit. Many of us have endorsed a reform of the law (Prop. 47). Leaked emails show that @GavinNewsom tried to undermine the reforms, which voters are likely to pass this November.

cbsnews.com/sacramento/new…Image
Newsom, and the mainstream news media say there’s been no increase in crime and that crime levels are lower in California than in other states. But that’s a lie.

It's true that the increase in crime isn't just in California. But it's worse here.

California politicians know this. In a single week last April, someone burglarized the home of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, someone stole the suitcase of Congressman Adam Schiff in the Bay Area, and someone else punched the police officer protecting the mayor of San Jose.

In California, we have the fewest police per capita than at any point since 1991.

Newsom has done more than anyone to implement the policies of George Soros, one of his major funders.

Newsom enables and defends addiction.

“Clean and sober is one of the biggest damn mistakes this country's ever made,” said Newsom. “If you're like me, I've been known to have a glass of wine at night watching some of the nightly news. We all need to self-medicate periodically.”

For Newsom to compare his chardonnay sipping to people smoking fentanyl is grotesque.

Over 100,000 people died last year from hard drugs. People die in San Francisco at far higher rates than the rest of the country.

Yes, the epidemic started with prescription drugs. But Newsom made it worse by making drugs more available and opposing the tough love that addicts and criminals alike need to get their lives together.
Read 8 tweets
Jun 27
Over the last two decades, scientists and the media published thousands of articles claiming that climate change would destroy small atoll islands due to sea level rise.

And the climate change was our fault. "You're making this island disappear," claimed @CNN
It was all a big lie. Scientists have known since 2018 that, "Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise."
And now, six years after scientists published that study, which found that 89% of the islands were stable or had increased in size, the New York Times has finally informed its readers of this "surprising climate find."
In truth, it's only "surprising" to readers of New York Times, CNN, and the rest of the mainstream news media because they brainwashed their readers into believing that the islands were disappearing, causing an epidemic of adolescent climate anxiety culminating in the toxic disinformation of @GretaThunberg

The Times writes today that "atoll nations like the Maldives... seemed doomed to vanish... Of late, though, scientists have begun telling a surprising new story."

Of late? The year 2018 is "of late"? No, it's not.

There was never evidence that the islands were disappearing; it was only a theory. The scientists simply assumed that sea level rise was the only factor in the size of islands and denied the obvious reality that islands can grow.Image
Image
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They said that climate change was "killing" the Great Barrier Reef.
In truth, there is more coral on the Great Barrier Reef than at any point since they started studying it.Image
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They said climate change was making wildfires more intense.

In truth, better forest management to reduce wood fuel accumulation makes them less intense, even with hotter temperatures, as everyone always knew:

Image
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Read 16 tweets

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