GOP’s Hunter Biden Obsession Enters Overdrive With ‘Twitter Files’ Hearing
House Republicans have made clear they intend to do everything they can to cast President Biden as the ringleader of a global crime racket that he’s now using the White House to facilitate. The House Oversight Committee, led by a guy who just a few days ago wondered if the alleged Chinese spy balloon was carrying bioweapons from Wuhan, is going to be responsible for a big chunk of this effort. It will hold its first hearing on Wednesday to investigate, what else, Hunter Biden stuff.
More specifically, the hearing — dubbed “Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social Media Bias, Part 1: Twitter’s Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Story” — will examine Twitter’s decision to suppress the New York Post’s reporting on the younger Biden’s laptop, which Republicans believe contains evidence that the family is indeed engaged in some sort of nefarious enterprise involving Ukraine and China. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety; James Baker, its former deputy general counsel; and Vijaya Gadde, its former chief legal officer, have been subpoenaed and are all expected to testify.
“In the runup to the 2020 presidential election, Big Tech and the Swamp colluded to censor reporting about the Biden family’s shady business schemes,” James Comer (R-Ky.) the committee’s chair, said in a statement. “The U.S. intelligence community and the FBI frequently communicated with Big Tech and advised Twitter executives to question the validity of any Hunter Biden story — before the New York Post ever reported on it. We also know members of Twitter’s top censorship team debated how they could justify limiting the spread of the story. They landed on a policy that even some among them doubted.”
The idea Comer and his colleague on the Oversight Committee want to push is that Twitter was colluding with Democrats to kill the story, and that the decision was made based on political concerns — rather than concerns about the legitimacy of the story and whether the platform’s policy permitted it. The irony here is that the hearing comes after Twitter, now under Elon Musk’s ownership, leaked internal communications about the decision to certain journalists with clear political biases, who then dressed them up and released them as part of a series dubbed the “Twiter Files.”
The “Twitter Files” pertaining to the platform’s decision to suppress the New York Post’s reporting don’t contain anything resembling actual evidence that it was done for political purposes, despite how the dump was framed by Musk and his right-wing allies. “The public deserves to know what really happened,” he wrote of the material that he did not release to the public, instead filtering it through journalists like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and others who had already accused Big Tech of being in cahoots with the Democratic establishment.
The Twitter Files mostly revealed what was already known about the decision, including that Twitter employees struggled over how to handle the story. The platform ultimately tamped down the story’s reach, preventing it from appearing as a recommendation, before removing links to it. Republicans have argued — and Musk and his journalist cronies have suggested — that Twitter did this to bury an unflattering story about Joe Biden in the months before the 2020 election. The Twitter Files, however, reveal sincere deliberations about how the bizarre saga of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop winding up in the New York Post may have violated the platform’s policy against hacked materials.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and CEO at the time, said as much during an appearance before Congress in 2021, while admitting the decision was a mistake. “It was not to do with the content, it was to do with the hacked materials policy,” he explained. “We had the incorrect interpretation. We don’t write policy according to any particular political leaning. If we find any of it, we write it out.”
The confusion surrounding what to do about the Hunter Biden story isn’t out of character for Twitter, which has long struggled to navigate sensitive news events. Rolling Stone last month obtained a Jan. 6 Committee draft summary detailing the chaos behind the scenes as the platform sat on its hands while extremists used it to foment outrage before, during, and after the Capitol riot. Twitter brass appeared clueless as lower-level employees implored them to take action. “Do you want to have more blood on your hands?” Anika Collier Navaroli, a Twitter safety employee, asked top executive Del Harvey when Harvey questioned whether Trump could inspire more violence following the Jan. 6 attack.
One of Twitter’s main concerns as it allowed extremism to flourish, according to the draft summary, was upsetting Republicans who have long accused the platform of censoring conservative voices. “The sheer scale of Republican post-election rage paralyzed decisionmakers at Twitter and Facebook, who feared political reprisals if they took strong action,” the summary concluded. It was Twitter, of course, that allowed Trump to dominate the news cycle and get elected in the first place, yet another irony in the GOP’s unrelenting crusade to destroy Big Tech platforms.
It’s unclear what Comer and Republicans on the Oversight Committee expect to glean from grilling Roth, Baker, and Gadde further about Twitter’s suppression of the story, or what else may be revealed at the hearing on Wednesday. Comer met privately with Musk in Washington, D.C., last month, and told CNN that the hearing may “incorporate some private conversations with some high-level people at Twitter” who support the idea that the government played a role in the story’s suppression. (It’s worth noting that Trump was president and Bill Barr was attorney general as all of this was happening.)
It barely even matters, though. Comer’s main concern seems to be creating the impression of impropriety if not criminality surrounding Biden and, in this case, the Democratic Party’s relationship with Big Tech. There are few things that create that impression more than a show hearing featuring a bunch of gray-haired politicians pounding the table and demanding answers — even if those answers are already out there.