According to a new report by the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, Facebook executives allegedly suppressed the explosive Hunter Biden laptop story to curry favor with the expected Biden-Harris administration.
The FBI reportedly misled tech companies by claiming that the October 2020 revelation of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was Russian disinformation, leading Facebook to internally consider hiding the details to please the White House.
A Facebook employee called the New York Post’s October 2020 article “exact content expected for hack and leak,” setting the stage for its censorship.
Nick Clegg, Facebook’s then-VP of Global Affairs, wrote to VP of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan, “Obviously, our calls on this could colour the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than almost anything else.”
Over at Microsoft, an employee stated, “FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,” as part of the congressional findings.
The New York Post insisted it had verified the laptop files’ authenticity over almost a month and noted that the FBI had possessed Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop since December 2019.
The files originated from a Delaware computer repairman, not Russia. This repairman, John Paul Mac Isaac, turned over the laptop to the FBI, believing it held critical data pointing to international corruption, and later provided file copies to the New York Post.
The FBI cautioned tech companies about Russian interference, then the FBI stayed quiet while 51 former intelligence officials and Joe Biden himself suggested the files were Russian-sourced.
Post-election, other news outlets corroborated the story, and federal prosecutors used the laptop files in court.
Congressional Republicans now argue that the FBI and Big Tech collaborated to hinder Donald Trump’s 2020 election campaign.
One Facebook employee acknowledged in a July 2020 message that the company “influenced the 2020 elections,” stating, “When we get hauled up to Capitol Hill to testify on why we influenced the 2020 elections we can say we have been meeting for YEARS with USG to plan for it.”
The report concludes that if the FBI’s goal was genuinely to assist social media in combating foreign influence, it should have disclosed that the Post story’s allegations were based on credible information within its possession.
