House GOP Wastes No Time, Takes Action to Hold Ousted Twitter Execs Accountable for 'Suppressing ... Information About the Biden Family'
The earliest days of the Republican-controlled House are already showing results.
The three former Twitter executives responsible for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story — a story that could well have turned the 2020 election — have gotten a formal invitation from the chairman of the House Oversight Committee to explain their decision to the American people.
The answers are going to shape the rest of the Joe Biden presidency — and the nation’s view of the FBI.
🚨BIDEN FAMILY INVESTIGATION NEWS
@RepJamesComer presses @SecYellen for the Biden family & their associates’ SARS and calls on former @Twitter execs who censored the laptop story to testify the week of February 6th.Time for answers.https://t.co/PcgO3EJJKB
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) January 11, 2023
In letters released Wednesday, Kentucky Rep. James Comer wrote Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former head of legal policy; Yoel Roth, the social media giant’s former head of “trust and safety”; and James Baker, Twitter’s former general counsel, notifying them that their attendance is required on Capitol Hill “the week of Feb. 6.”
They have until Jan. 18 to reply. As National Review noted, if they don’t wish to appear voluntarily, the committee can take steps to compel it.
All three have left the company since mega-billionaire Elon Musk purchased it. Gadde and Baker were fired.
Roth resigned, explaining in an interview with journalist Kara Swisher that he’d concluded that Twitter under Musk’s leadership would be a never ending series of disasters.
“I realized that even if I spent all day every day trying to avert whatever the next disaster was, there were going to be the ones that got through,” he said.
All three played key roles in the Twitter decision in October 2020 to suppress the New York Post’s rock-solid reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop that has since yielded a plethora of information about the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s family.
Comer’s letter didn’t beat around the bush:
“On Dec. 6, 2022, I wrote to you requesting your appearance at a Committee hearing during the 118th Congress. Your attendance is necessary because of your role in suppressing Americans’ access to information about the Biden family on Twitter shortly before the 2020 election.” [Emphasis added.]
On one level, the appearance of the three is going to be anticlimatic. As the release of the internal company communications known as the “Twitter Files” has already shown, the suppression of the Post’s laptop coverage was based on the fiction that it violated Twitter’s policy on “hacked materials.”
That wasn’t true. It was the contents of a laptop a Wilmington, Delaware, computer repair shop owner had because the customer who dropped it off — almost certainly a drugged-out Hunter Biden — had never picked it up.
Moreover, the Twitter execs knew when they were doing it that the materials weren’t hacked, but couched the decision in lawyerly language.
In the first installment of the “Twitter Files” Dec. 2, journalist Matt Taibbi reported that Twitter’s then vice president of global communications wrote on a shared email thread, “Can we truthfully claim this is part of the policy?”
To that, Baker responded: “There are some facts that indicate the materials may have been hacked, while there are others indicating the computer may have been abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop access to it for at least some purposes. We simply need more information.”
Those words would not have been credible even without knowing who had written them.
There were no “facts” indicating the laptop had been hacked. The Post story explained quite clearly its provenance. It had been left in the repair shop. It had been seized by the FBI in December of 2019, but the repair shop owner made a copy of the hard drive. He gave that copy to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who eventually gave it to the Post.
But knowing that the author of those words was Baker, a former FBI general counsel who was instrumental in the bureau’s sham investigation into “Russia collusion” that plagued the Donald Trump presidency, they are even less credible.
Further “Twitter Files” revelations have since shown the poisonous, dangerous relationship between the FBI and Twitter — what Taibbi described as a “master-canine” dynamic in which, according to the New York Post, the FBI treated Twitter like a “subidiary,” essentially flagging posts that it wished suppressed. And the FBI wanted the Hunter Biden laptop story suppressed badly.
And that brings the appearance of Gadde, Roth and, most importantly, Baker, to another level.
It’s a matter of public record that the FBI has had the original laptop since December 2019. There is simply no way that the nation’s premier law enforcement agency was unaware of its explosive contents during the election campaign.
That means, it’s inconceivable that the top leadership of the FBI was ignorant about what the laptop had to say about Hunter Biden, about the Biden family, and about the man who was running for president of the United States against Trump, an incumbent president the FBI’s leadership had opposed going back to the 2016 election and its anti-Trump activities then.
(Does the name of former FBI Director James Comey ring a bell? How about Peter Strzok or Lisa Page? Andrew McCabe?)
Is all of that going to be cleared up out in the open when Gadde, Roth and, most importantly, Baker are questioned under oath by newly empowered Republicans in the House? Does anyone seriously think all three will start sobbing, pointing fingers and declaring that, yes, the country has been taken over in a bloodless coup staged by the Democratic Party and the men and women at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington?
(As an aside, in Dante’s Inferno, the eighth circle of Hell is reserved for frauds, just one above the ninth circle, which he assigned to traitors. That might be relevant to some people someday.)
Does anyone think there’s going to be a public admission that the American people had been betrayed by the lords of social media and by the executives, editors and foot soldiers of the legacy media who are using the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution to betray the same Constitution?
Probably not. But it’s importance shouldn’t be underestimated. Had the Hunter Biden laptop story not been suppressed, it’s a very real possibility the country would be midway through Trump’s second term by now, which means all of the disasters of the Biden presidency — the Afghanistan debacle, the destruction of the American energy industry, runaway inflation, an illegal immigration invasion — would not be with us.
The impact of the decision to censor the laptop story is going to be with the country as long as the cursed ramifications of the cursed Biden presidency are — which is to say, forever.
But this is the beginning of the GOP’s chance to use its majority in the House of Representatives to untangle the snakepit of conspiracies that surrounded the 2020 presidential election and the stench of despotism that surrounds the Biden administration today, including Attorney General Merrick Garland and the politicized FBI.
As the saying goes, elections have consequences.
As the House Oversight Committee gears up, the country should be seeing that in action.
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