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FBI met weekly with Big Tech ahead of the 2020 election, agent testifies
To give a short explainer, the talented Matt Taibbi posted internal Twitter documents around the 2020 presidential election which demonstrated how political operations – such as the Biden presidential campaign and the DNC – petitioned the company to remove “offending” tweets. Twitter complied. The Trump White House would make similar requests, but as Taibbi observe, “this system wasn’t balanced.” Instead, it was based on contacts. And as you can imagine, Twitter’s staff, especially at the highest levels, was far left and supported the Democrats.
The FBI's collusion with Facebook & Twitter to censor the bombshell New York Post story about the Bidens' corruption provided far greater election interference than anything Russia ever did.
Attorneys General for Missouri and Louisiana released the full 386-page transcript from their November 29th, 2022, deposition of FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, which was taken as part of a landmark lawsuit against the Biden Administration for colluding with social media companies to censor Americans.
Elvis Chan warned Twitter before the 2020 election to expect “hack-and-leak operations’’ specifically involving “Hunter Biden,” according to a sworn declaration by Twitter’s former head of site integrity, Yoel Roth.
“These expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020,” Roth said. “I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
“The warnings were so specific that Twitter immediately censored The Post’s scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop on Oct. 14, 2020, citing its “hacked materials” policy,” Miranda Devine wrote in the New York Post’s coverage of the story.
“The extraordinary revelation for the first time lays bare how the FBI was involved in pre-bunking the story of the laptop, which had been in the bureau’s possession for almost a year.”
While Chan denies ever specifically naming Hunter Biden in the transcript of his deposition released today, “Chan’s testimony contradicts a previous sworn statement by Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of site integrity, stating that the FBI had named Hunter when warning the company about expected “hack-and-leak operations’’ before the election,” said Devine.
The first one I remember was when a NYT reporter supposedly drove a Tesla cross country. In the article the reporter wrote how often the Tesla broke down, didn't perform, etc. Musk turned around and said Tesla had all the computer records of the trip and the NYT was a bunch of bunk.
The FBI now wants the court to agree to keep the new records shielded from Brian Huddleston, a Texas resident who filed a lawsuit against the bureau over its ignoring a Freedom of Information request for records on Rich.
Twitter Files Overshadow The Bigger Scandal: FBI Lied To Tech Giants To Interfere In Election
I do not find it comforting that a hyper-partisan private organization dedicated to a specific ethnic grievance is training FBI agents.
‘Twitter Files’ Make it Clear: We Must Abolish the FBI
written by ron paul
monday december 19, 2022
As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.
The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the “private” social media company to censor comments and ban commenters they did not like.
The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a US government entity that included the FBI as well as other US intelligence agencies expressly forbidden from domestic activities, numbered 80 agents engaged regularly in telling Twitter which Tweets to censor and which accounts to ban. The Department of Homeland Security brought in outside government contractors and (government-funded) non-governmental organizations to separately pressure Twitter to suppress speech the US government did not like.
US Federal government agencies literally handed Twitter lists of Americans it wanted to see silenced, and Twitter complied. Let that sink in.
This should be a massive scandal and likely it would have been had it occurred under a Trump Administration. Indeed, Congress would be gearing up for Impeachment 3.0 if Trump-allied officials had engaged in such egregious behavior. But since these US government employees were by-and-large acting to suppress pro-Trump sentiment, all we hear are crickets.
What is interesting about these Twitter revelations is how obsessed the FBI and its government partners were with satire and humor. Even minor Twitter accounts with small numbers of followers were constantly flagged by the Feds for censorship and deletion. But knowledge of history helps us understand this obsession: in Soviet times the population was always engaged in joking about the ineptitude, corruption, and idiocy of the political class. Underground publications known as samizdat were rich with satire, humor, and ridicule.
Tyrants hate humor and cannot withstand satire. That is clearly why the FBI (and CIA) was determined to see a heavy hand raised against any American poking fun at the deep state.
There is good news in all of this, however. As Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote over the weekend, a new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll found that even though the mainstream media has ignored the “Twitter files,” Americans have not. Nearly two-thirds of respondents believe that Twitter was involved in politically-motivated censorship in advance of the 2020 election. Some 70 percent of those polled believe Congress must take action against this corporate/state censorship.
As Professor Turley points out, although the First Amendment only applies to the US government, “it does apply to agents or surrogates of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed between its former officials and the government.”
So now we have proof that the FBI (along with US intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security) have been acting through “private” social media companies to manipulate what Americans are allowed to say when they communicate with each other.
Is there anything more un-American than that? Personally, I find it sickening.
We do not need the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies viewing us as the enemy and attacking our Constitution. End the Fed…and End the Federal Bureau of Investigation!
Abigail Marone 🇺🇸
@abigailmarone
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@HawleyMO
: The FBI deliberately interfered not one, but two separate presidential elections... there have got to be repercussions for that.
We're going to have to have a conversation about the future of the FBI and what it's doing in our democracy.
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They have become a tool of state oppression of citizens, like the old East German Stasi. They actively incite crime to get people to commit it in order to then "catch" them and justify their budget.
https://patrick.net/post/1340257/2021-07-24-the-fbi-is-orchestrating-its-own-terror
https://patrick.net/post/1340349/2021-07-29-no-army-of-insurrectionists-appeared-on
https://patrick.net/post/1340084/2021-07-13-fbi-tells-americans-to-report-family
But for BLM, they studiously look the other way and never prosecute...
The best way we can defend ourselves is to cut off their funding. We need to make a national movement out of this.
Local police deserve our funding and support, but the FBI deserves defunding and hard prison time for its upper management.