While Elon Musk, new owner of Twitter has been exposing secret communications between Team Biden and several politically motivated employees of the social media platform and while an FBI agent recently testified he was in charge of a “command post” that made direct requests to social media companies to remove “misinformation”, Joe Biden’s White House has denied its involvement in anything related to censorship of Twitter contents.
Last year, then-White Press secretary Jen Psaki admitted the administration was “flagging” alleged misinformation – “problematic posts” – for removal from Facebook, which also censored the laptop story.
So, Twitter general counsel James Baker – a former top FBI official at the center of the “Russia collusion” hoax – was fired for allegedly “vetting” the internal communications designated for release by new owner Elon Musk, New York Post reporter Steven Nelson wanted to know if anyone in the Biden administration was “in touch” with Baker regarding his activities.
“So, it’s up to private companies to make these types of decisions”, said press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “We were not involved. I can say that. We were not involved”.
See Jean-Pierre’s response:
Twitter files released by Musk document the company’s censorship of New York Post stories presenting evidence tying then-presidential candidate Joe Biden to his family’s global influence-peddling operation, which made multi-million-dollar deals with the likes of Chinese Communist Party companies, and Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.
Baker – who was hired by Twitter in June 2020 – was fired Tuesday, Musk said, due to “concerns” about his “possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue”.
Later, investigative journalist Matt Taibbi – who reported the initial “Twitter Files” release last week – revealed Baker was “vetting” the internal documents, delaying the release of a second batch of files to Taibbi and independent journalist Bari Weiss.
Files reported by Weiss showed that contrary to the claims of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others, prominent conservative figures were being “shadowbanned”, meaning the distribution of their tweets was severely curbed. Musk also has confirmed that Twitter shadow-banned some political candidates while they were running for office.
Baker, while with the FBI, was alleged to be the source of the Mother Jones story that first reported the bogus, anti-Trump “Steele Dossier” of Russian propaganda prior to the 2016 election. Baker also was at the center of the investigation of the since-debunked claim that Donald Trump had a communications backchannel with Vladimir Putin through a Russian bank. The FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into the claim after Hillary Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann pushed the allegations to Baker and the bureau.
On Monday, Jean-Pierre was asked by Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich if the White House believed that the decisions by Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election “were made appropriately in light of” the revelation that the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee had a direct line of communication to Twitter.
She dismissed it as “old news”.
“So look, we see this as a, an interesting or a coincidence, if I may, that, that he would so haphazardly, Twitter was so haphazardly pushed this distraction,” Jean-Pierre said. “That is a, that is full of old news, if you think about it”.
