The censorship of the New York Post’s “laptop from hell” series on social media platforms was an operation by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and other intelligence community members, according to a tranche of “Twitter Files” released Monday.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger reported, based on documents he obtained from Elon Musk, that federal agents “discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020″ — working with top management at Twitter to censor and disparage the Post‘s reporting on evidence of now-President Joe Biden’s personal business involvement with corrupt and adversarial regimes in Europe and Asia, in the run-up to the 2020 election.
Shellenberger revealed that there was “an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies,” to smear factual and accurate stories based on a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden, which the FBI had in its possession almost a year before the Post’s reporting and knew was authentic.
Shellenberger details how agents outside the company worked to get Twitter management, many of whom were former agents themselves, to embrace the narrative that documents showing the Biden family earning tens of million dollars from Eastern European oligarchs and the Chinese Communist Party were part of a “Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation,” and then censor reporting on those documents on that premise. The narrative would then also be adopted by virtually all of legacy media in the lead up to voting day of 2020, and used to buttress their decision not to report on the material.