WASHINGTON — A trio of former bigwigs at Twitter told the House Oversight Committee Wednesday they could not recall major facts about the decision to suppress The Post’s bombshell October 2020 stories on Hunter Biden’s laptop — though one claimed the decision was based in part on the social media giant’s own echo chamber rather than the demands of federal law enforcement.
Under questioning led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), former Twitter deputy general counsel James Baker, ex-head of trust and safety Yoel Roth and former policy director Vijaya Gadde took turns deflecting allegations of “collusion” between the FBI and Twitter to censor The Post.
“Simple question, did you talk to the FBI about the Hunter Biden story?” Jordan asked Baker point-blank at one point.
“To the best of my recollection, I did not talk to the FBI about the Hunter Biden story before that day,” replied Baker, referencing Oct. 14, 2020, when The Post published the first of its world-exclusive reports.
“Did you talk to them after?” Jordan pressed, to which Baker said, “I do not recall.”
Moments later, as Jordan pressed further, Baker seemed to contradict himself: “Sitting here today, I don’t recall speaking with the FBI at all about the Hunter Biden matter — the laptop.”
“Then why did you answer the way you did?” Jordan asked rhetorically.
Later in the hearing, Jordan pressed Baker again, this time over whether he had any conversations with the 51 former intelligence officials who implied that the laptop was Russian misinformation.”Have you talked to any of those 51 prior to that letter being sent on the 19th [of October, 2020] or after?” Jordan asked.
“Sir, I can’t remember who’s on that group,” answered Baker, kicking off a tortuous back-and-forth.
“[James] Clapper, [John] Brennan, [Michael] Morell —” Jordan offered.
“I’ve talked to those people during the course of my career, yes,” Baker replied.
Jordan pressed, “Have you talked to them in your time at Twitter?” But Baker said, “I can’t remember who’s on that list, so I’m afraid —”
“How about the three I just mentioned?” Jordan followed up. “Did you talk with Mr. Clapper, Mr. Brennan or anyone else that he knows of who signed that letter?”
Finally, Baker said, “I don’t recall discussing that publication they did about the Hunter Biden laptop with any of those people.”
Roth also claimed to have forgotten the exact contents of 10 documents sent to him and another Twitter executive by San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan via a special transmission platform called Teleporter on the night of Oct. 13, 2020, hours before the first laptop story was published.
“Twitter didn’t give me access to my laptop [before the hearing], but Special Agent Chan has said publicly and the FBI has confirmed that those documents did not relate to Hunter Biden and that’s my recollection,” insisted Roth, who resigned his position in November of last year.
Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) expressed incredulity at the lapses in memory — saying it didn’t pass “the smell test” for the former executives to claim not to recall any conversations with the FBI before censoring The Post.
“You’re talking to these people for weeks and months — years — prior to this leaking. They have specifically told you in October that there’s going to be a leak potentially involving Hunter Biden’s laptop that legitimately and literally prophesied what happened and you didn’t contact any of them?” Armstrong scoffed.
“No sir, I did not,” Roth said.
“Ms. Gadde, did you talk to anyone from the FBI?” Armstrong turned.
“Not to the best of my recollection,” she said.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) told Roth that it “seems highly coincidental, knowing that the FBI had the laptop” that the authorities would warn Twitter about a potential release of hacked documents before the election.
“There is a coincidence there, and I really can’t speak to how it came about,” Roth said.
Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) said “the fact that the FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop — heck, it was in their possession for a year before the election — is appalling.”
Deflections were pervasive during attempted questioning, with Baker in one instance invoking attorney-client privilege while refusing to answer Jordan’s query about his involvement in “[content] suppression in a proper way” — a reference to his specific phrasing earlier in the hearing.
“Unfortunately, sir, I think I’m constrained from answering that question any more fully than in my testimony because of attorney-client privilege,” Baker said, despite Twitter’s corporate stance currently being in favor of transparency on such decisions.
Internal emails revealed late last year reveal that after The Post published its first laptop scoop, Roth seemed reluctant to take any action to censor the initial laptop reporting, writing that The Post’s story “isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy, nor is it clearly in violation of anything else.”
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Baker pushed back hard, insisting there were “some facts that indicate the materials may have been hacked,” and claiming: “I’ve seen some reliable cybersecurity folks question the authenticity of the emails in another way (i.e. that there is no metadata pertaining to them that has been released and the formatting looks like they could be complete fabrications).”
Despite Baker’s claim, The Post published a picture of a computer store receipt signed by Hunter Biden and an FBI subpoena for the laptop in 2019. By that point, the computer had been in the bureau’s possession for 10 months.
By 10:12 a.m., just over five hours after the article was published, Roth sent an internal email saying that a “consensus from experts monitoring election security and disinformation” found the piece “looks a lot like a hack-and-leak,” and recommended attaching a warning to the article as it was shared on Twitter. That afternoon, Baker — a former FBI general counsel who was investigated twice while at the bureau for leaking information to reporters — arranged a call with FBI lawyer Matthew Perry.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) seized on that exchange, asking Roth if “you can name for me, today, any of the experts that seemed to have a consensus at 10:12 a.m. on the morning of October 14?”
“Twitter did not give me access to any of my documents or emails to prepare for this hearing,” Roth answered. “And so unfortunately, I can’t give you a direct answer.”Biggs was not satisfied, asking Roth: “Were there experts? Were there people that you consulted that were cybersecurity experts between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. on that day?”
“My recollection is that we were following discussions about this incident as they unfolded on Twitter,” Roth answered. “So cybersecurity experts were tweeting about this incident and sharing their perspectives. And that informs some of Twitter’s judgment here.”
Gadde, who received a $12.5 million severance package when she was fired by new Twitter CEO Elon Musk, claimed to lawmakers that The Post’s reporting was censored in large part because photos from Hunter’s laptop “looked like they may have been obtained through hacking.”
“In 2018, we had developed a policy intended to prevent Twitter from becoming a dumping ground for hacked materials,” she said before adding: “It became clear that Twitter had not fully appreciated the impact of that policy on free press and others.”
“In hindsight, Twitter should have reinstated The Post account immediately,” Gadde went on before admitting that Hunter Biden never claimed to the company that the laptop was hacked rather than legally provided to The Post.
Roth added that “Twitter made a mistake” by blocking The Post’s reporting and locking the newspaper out of its accounts.Republicans on the committee were not satisfied with that explanation, with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) calling Twitter “basically a subsidiary of the FBI.”
“I think you guys got played,” Jordan told Roth. “… I think you guys wanted [the story] to be taken down, I think you meet with these guys every week, we know that’s been established in the Twitter files, you had weekly meetings with Mr. Chan in the run-up to the election. They send you all kinds of emails, they send you documents on the super-secret James Bond Teleporter, you get information on that. I think you guys wanted to take it down. I think you guys got played by the FBI. And that’s the scary part.”
Democrats played defense at the hearing and tried to redirect discussion to focus instead on Twitter not doing more to restrict speech ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
“This is a real issue unlike something that happened a couple years ago for 24 hours that has already disappeared in the sands of time, but this is facing us today,” said ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). “I was skeptical about revisiting the whole New York Post thing where there have already been congressional hearings and they’ve already apologized for their little lapse, but [Jan. 6] is a serious issue.”
Later in the hearing, Raskin dismissed what he called a “wild cyber goose chase” that failed to turn up any evidence that the government or the Biden campaign pressured Twitter to censor the story.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) even claimed that the laptop was “half fake.” She did not provide any examples of forged content.
At one point, the electricity suddenly went out in the hearing room — plunging lawmakers, witnesses and spectators into total darkness and forcing staffers to open window drapes to let in some light. The bizarre interruption forced a one-hour recess, prolonging the hearing.
Before and after the lights went out, the committee chased key breadcrumbs left by Musk’s internal disclosures after he took over the platform in October, including that the FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million from October 2019 to February 2021 to process its moderation requests.“Do I think that that’s a valuable use of the FBI’s time?” Roth said under questioning from Jordan. “No, but I don’t see in a request for review a problem under the First Amendment.”
“Well, I sure do,” Jordan answered.
The Post’s first laptop article revealed that Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, emailed Hunter in 2015 to thank him for the “opportunity to meet your father” — contradicting Joe Biden’s September 2019 claim that he’d “never spoken” with his son about “his overseas business dealings” and his August 2019 claim that “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses.”
Hunter earned up to $1 million per year to serve on the Burisma board from 2014 to 2019, beginning when his father was put in charge of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.
A second October 2020 bombshell from The Post described Joe Biden’s alleged role in Hunter Biden and his uncle Jim Biden’s business venture with the company CEFC China Energy, which was reputed to be part of Beijing’s “Belt and Road” foreign influence campaign.
A May 13, 2017, email from the laptop said the “big guy” would get 10% of the deal. Former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski alleges that he discussed the CEFC partnership with Joe Biden in May 2017, and both Bobulinski and another former Hunter Biden partner, James Gilliar, identified Joe Biden as the “big guy.”
Hunter and James Biden earned $4.8 million from CEFC China Energy in 2017 and 2018, according to the Washington Post’s later review of Hunter Biden laptop documents, and an October 2017 email identifies Joe Biden as a participant in a call about CEFC’s attempt to purchase US natural gas.
