House Republicans grilled former Twitter Inc. executives over their alleged cooperation with the FBI to squelch the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the opening salvo in their probe into the Biden family finances.
(Bloomberg) — House Republicans grilled former Twitter Inc. executives over their alleged cooperation with the FBI to squelch the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the opening salvo in their probe into the Biden family finances.
At a hearing Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee focused on the platform’s decision to limit distribution of the unflattering piece by the New York Post that Republicans say show the younger Biden traded on his family name, published just weeks before the 2020 election that then-President Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden.
The hearing began just hours after Biden’s State of the Union address to Congress.
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House Oversight Chair James Comer asserted that the FBI advised senior Twitter executives to question the validity of any Hunter Biden story. He also alleges that the federal government used a private company “to accomplish what it constitutionally cannot: limit the free exercise of speech.”
“We owe it to the American people to provide answers about this collusion to censor information about Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s business schemes,” Comer said.
But James Baker, a former lawyer for Twitter who also previously worked for the FBI, said he did not act “as an agent or an operator of the government” while working for the social media company. Baker acknowledged that many people may disagree with how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden story, but he said the company’s actions were “fully consistent with the First Amendment.”
“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” Baker told the panel. “I did not act unlawfully or otherwise inappropriately in any manner with respect to Hunter Biden’s laptop computer.”
Vijaya Gadde, a former top lawyer at Twitter, testified that when the New York Post first tweeted articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop, some of images or information “looked like they may have been obtained through hacking.”
Gadde said the company applied its 2018 policy to prevent Twitter from being a “dumping ground for hacked materials” and blocked links to articles embedding the source materials.
Twitter, she said, reversed course within 24 hours and should have acted sooner. But “at no point did Twitter otherwise prevent tweeting, reporting, discussing or describing the contents of Mr. Biden’s laptop,” she said.
“People could and did talk about the contents of the laptop on Twitter or anywhere else, including other, much larger platforms, but they were prevented from sharing the primary documents on Twitter,” she said.
Democrats have criticized the GOP-led investigations, saying they are purely political and will take time away from more pressing issues, such as the debt ceiling and inflation.
“House Republicans are making it their top priority to stage a bizarre political stunt” instead of working with Biden on issues he laid out in the State of the Union address, White House spokesman Ian Sams said in a statement.
“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. This is not what the American people want their leaders to work on,” Sams said.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, called the hearing “tragic” in his own opening remarks, pointing to the proliferation of right wing messaging on social media that ultimately led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.
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“If our colleagues wanted to examine a serious problem involving American democracy and social media, it is staring us in the face right now,” Raskin said. “Twitter and other social media companies acted as central organizing and staging grounds for the Jan. 6 violent insurrection against Congress and the Vice President.”
Aside from Baker, the former Twitter executives include Global Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth and employee Anika Collier Navaroli.
The hearing marks the latest attempt to delve into actions by Twitter, now owned by billionaire Elon Musk. In December, Musk had heralded the release of the so-called Twitter Files, internal emails about the New York Post article that were obtained and then tweeted by writer Matt Taibbi, but they failed to produce definitive conclusions on the matter.
The tabloid had claimed that information from Hunter Biden’s laptop showed he introduced a top executive from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, to his father while he was vice president and overseeing the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. Hunter Biden also served on Burisma’s board.
Twitter limited distribution of the story, blocking users from sharing links and pictures. A spokesperson for Twitter at the time said it was in line with its policy on hacked materials.
–With assistance from Jordan Fabian.
(Adds with testimony starting in sixth paragraph)
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