A top House Republican investigator is calling on Twitter owner Elon Musk to hand over any and all company records related to the social media giant’s decision to suppress stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive ahead of the 2020 election.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, called on Twitter’s new billionaire owner to cooperate with the congressional request after the Republican says the company’s former CEO, Parag Agrawal, ignored a document preservation request back in April.
“Committee Republicans are investigating the Biden family’s pattern of influence peddling to enrich themselves and President Biden’s involvement in these schemes,” Comer wrote to Musk on Friday. “As part of this investigation, Committee Republicans are reviewing the role Big Tech — including Twitter — played in supporting the Biden campaign in 2020 by suppressing certain stories implicating the Bidens.”
HOUSE GOP FOCUSES ON HUNTER BIDEN’S CHINESE BUSINESS ASSISTANT
Comer added: “We hope you will correct this error made by the company’s former leadership and provide Americans with transparency. To that end, we request Twitter provide information regarding its previous leaders’ decision to limit information that may have affected the 2020 election.”
Just after the Twitter deal was announced, Musk tweeted in April that “suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.”
“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk tweeted last Thursday, adding, “Twitter cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!”
The New York Post reported in October 2020 that emails from the laptop showed evidence of shady business dealings tied to Ukraine and China. When the publication attempted to post the articles on its Twitter account, the social media company said that doing so violated its rule against sharing “hacked” materials.
The day after Twitter blocked the New York Post’s mid-October stories on Hunter Biden, Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix.”
But for weeks, the company continued to lock the New York Post’s Twitter account, insisting the outlet delete its tweets on the younger Biden.
Facebook also limited the dissemination of the New York Post story.
“We believe open communication and access to information is a fundamental principle for any free people, and the American people deserve to know the reason Twitter suppressed or censored the Biden laptop story shortly before the 2020 election,” Comer told Musk, adding that “Committee Republicans are concerned Twitter inappropriately censored the Hunter Biden laptop story to influence the 2020 Presidential Election.”
The House Republicans asked Musk to hand over “all documents and communications to, from, between and among Twitter and Twitter employees related to the October 2020 New York Post articles on Hunter Biden’s laptop” by Nov. 11 and also asked him to provide all of the records between Twitter and the FBI or any other U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agency related to the laptop.
Comer also asked for access to “all documents and communications regarding the decision to censor or suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story on Twitter’s platform.”
Dorsey testified before the Senate in November 2020, after Joe Biden defeated then-President Donald Trump.
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“We made a quick interpretation, using no other evidence, that the materials in the article were obtained through hacking, and according to our policy, we blocked them from being spread,” Dorsey said. “Upon further consideration, we admitted this action was wrong and corrected it within 24 hours.”
Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos, a cyber forensics expert and former Secret Service agent, conducted an examination of the laptop for the Washington Examiner this year, concluding that “the hard drive is authentic.”
