Impeached don’t mean javkshit. It means the other spoilt brats are pissed off for not having thought of it first.Which is why Trump is twice impeached
Omnibus : Hunter Biden
- Thread starter B00Mer
- Start date
Who thinks Paul Revere was a hero? He didn't even finish his ride. He was stopped and arrested. Dr. Prescott made it all the way to Concord.
Decent silversmith, though.
And twice acquittedWhich is why Trump is twice impeached
Senate Acquits Trump In Impeachment Trial — Again
Seven Republicans joined with all Democrats and independents to vote to convict the former president for inciting an insurrection, but the tally is short of the two-thirds vote needed.
www.npr.org
House GOP pushes Hunter Biden probe despite thin majority
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Colleen Long
Publishing date:Nov 19, 2022 • 1 day ago • 5 minute read
WASHINGTON — Even with their threadbare House majority, Republicans doubled down this week on using their new power next year to investigate the Biden administration and, in particular, the president’s son.
But the midterm results have emboldened a White House that has long prepared for this moment. Republicans secured much smaller margins than anticipated, and aides to President Joe Biden and other Democrats believe voters punished the GOP for its reliance on conspiracy theories and Donald Trump-fueled lies over the 2020 election.
They see it as validation for the administration’s playbook for the midterms and going forward to focus on legislative achievements and continue them, in contrast to Trump-aligned candidates whose complaints about the president’s son played to their most loyal supporters and were too far in the weeds for the average American. The Democrats retained control of the Senate, and the GOP’s margin in the House is expected to be the slimmest majority in two decades.
“If you look back, we picked up seats in New York, New Jersey, California,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist and public affairs executive. “These were not voters coming to the polls because they wanted Hunter Biden investigated — far from it. They were coming to the polls because they were upset about inflation. They’re upset about gas prices. They’re upset about what’s going on with the war in Ukraine.”
But House Republicans used their first news conference after clinching the majority to discuss presidential son Hunter Biden and the Justice Department, renewing long-held grievances about what they claim is a politicized law enforcement agency and a bombshell corruption case overlooked by Democrats and the media.
“From their first press conference, these congressional Republicans made clear that they’re going to do one thing in this new Congress, which is investigations, and they’re doing this for political payback for Biden’s efforts on an agenda that helps working people,” said Kyle Herrig, the founder of the Congressional Integrity Project, a newly relaunched, multimillion-dollar effort by Democratic strategists to counter the onslaught of House GOP probes.
Inside the White House, the counsel’s office added staff months ago and beefed up its communication efforts, and staff members have been deep into researching and preparing for the onslaught. They’ve worked to try to identify their own vulnerabilities and plan effective responses. But anything the House seeks related to Hunter Biden, who is not a White House staffer, will come from his attorneys, who have declined to respond to the allegations.
Rep. James Comer, incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said there are “troubling questions” of the utmost importance about Hunter Biden’s business dealings and one of the president’s brothers, James Biden, that require deeper investigation. He said they were examining the president, too.
“Rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government is the primary mission of the Oversight Committee,” said Comer, R-Ky. “As such, this investigation is a top priority.”
Republican legislators promised a trove of new information this past week, but what they have presented so far has been a condensed review of a few years’ worth of complaints about Hunter Biden’s business dealings, going back to conspiracy theories raised by Trump.
Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2014, around the time his father, then vice president, was helping conduct the Obama administration’s foreign policy with Ukraine. Senate Republicans have said the appointment may have posed a conflict of interest, but they did not present evidence that the hiring influenced U.S. policies, and they did not implicate Joe Biden in any wrongdoing.
Republican lawmakers and their staff for the past year have been analyzing messages and financial transactions found on a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden. They long have discussed issuing congressional subpoenas to foreign entities that did business with him, and they recently brought on James Mandolfo, a former federal prosecutor, to assist with the investigation as general counsel for the Oversight Committee.
The difference now is that Republicans will have subpoena power to follow through.
“The Republicans are going to go ahead,” said Tom Davis, a Republican lawyer who specializes in congressional investigations and legislative strategy. “I think their members are enthusiastic about going after this stuff … there are a lot of unanswered questions. Look, the 40-year trend is parties under-investigate their own and over-investigate the other party. It didn’t start here.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed the GOP focus on investigations as “on-brand” thinking.
“They said they were going to fight inflation, they said they were going to make that a priority, then they get the majority and their top priority is actually not focusing on the American family, but focusing on the president’s family,” she said.
Even some newly elected Republicans are pushing back against the idea.
“The top priority is to deal with inflation and the cost of living. … What I don’t want to see is what we saw in the Trump administration, where Democrats went after the president and the administration incessantly,” Rep.-elect Mike Lawler of New York said on CNN.
Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business work are already under federal investigation, with a grand jury in Delaware hearing testimony in recent months.
While he never held a position on the presidential campaign or in the White House, his membership on the board of the Ukrainian energy company and his efforts to strike deals in China have long raised questions about whether he traded on his father’s public service, including reported references in his emails to the “big guy.”
Joe Biden has said he’s never spoken to his son about his foreign business, and nothing the Republicans have put forth suggests otherwise. And there are no indications that the federal investigation involves the president.
Trump and his supporters, meanwhile, have advanced a widely discredited theory that Biden pushed for the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor to protect his son and Burisma from investigation. Biden did indeed press for the prosecutor’s firing, but that was a reflection of the official position of not only the Obama administration but many Western countries and because the prosecutor was perceived as soft on corruption.
House Republicans also have signaled upcoming investigations into immigration, government spending and parents’ rights. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray have been put on notice as potential witnesses.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, incoming Judiciary Committee chairman, has long complained of what he says is a politicized Justice Department and the ongoing probes into Trump.
On Friday, Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into the presence of classified documents at Trump’s Florida estate as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.
Trump, in a speech Friday night at his Mar-a-Lago estate, slammed the development as “the latest in a long series of witch hunts.”
Of Joe and Hunter Biden, he asked, “Where’s their special prosecutor?”
Matt Mackowiak, a Republican political strategist, said it’s one thing if the investigations into Hunter Biden stick to corruption questions, but if it veers into the kind of mean-spirited messaging that has been floating around in far-right circles, “I don’t know that the public will have much patience for that.”
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Colleen Long
Publishing date:Nov 19, 2022 • 1 day ago • 5 minute read
WASHINGTON — Even with their threadbare House majority, Republicans doubled down this week on using their new power next year to investigate the Biden administration and, in particular, the president’s son.
But the midterm results have emboldened a White House that has long prepared for this moment. Republicans secured much smaller margins than anticipated, and aides to President Joe Biden and other Democrats believe voters punished the GOP for its reliance on conspiracy theories and Donald Trump-fueled lies over the 2020 election.
They see it as validation for the administration’s playbook for the midterms and going forward to focus on legislative achievements and continue them, in contrast to Trump-aligned candidates whose complaints about the president’s son played to their most loyal supporters and were too far in the weeds for the average American. The Democrats retained control of the Senate, and the GOP’s margin in the House is expected to be the slimmest majority in two decades.
“If you look back, we picked up seats in New York, New Jersey, California,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist and public affairs executive. “These were not voters coming to the polls because they wanted Hunter Biden investigated — far from it. They were coming to the polls because they were upset about inflation. They’re upset about gas prices. They’re upset about what’s going on with the war in Ukraine.”
But House Republicans used their first news conference after clinching the majority to discuss presidential son Hunter Biden and the Justice Department, renewing long-held grievances about what they claim is a politicized law enforcement agency and a bombshell corruption case overlooked by Democrats and the media.
“From their first press conference, these congressional Republicans made clear that they’re going to do one thing in this new Congress, which is investigations, and they’re doing this for political payback for Biden’s efforts on an agenda that helps working people,” said Kyle Herrig, the founder of the Congressional Integrity Project, a newly relaunched, multimillion-dollar effort by Democratic strategists to counter the onslaught of House GOP probes.
Inside the White House, the counsel’s office added staff months ago and beefed up its communication efforts, and staff members have been deep into researching and preparing for the onslaught. They’ve worked to try to identify their own vulnerabilities and plan effective responses. But anything the House seeks related to Hunter Biden, who is not a White House staffer, will come from his attorneys, who have declined to respond to the allegations.
Rep. James Comer, incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said there are “troubling questions” of the utmost importance about Hunter Biden’s business dealings and one of the president’s brothers, James Biden, that require deeper investigation. He said they were examining the president, too.
“Rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government is the primary mission of the Oversight Committee,” said Comer, R-Ky. “As such, this investigation is a top priority.”
Republican legislators promised a trove of new information this past week, but what they have presented so far has been a condensed review of a few years’ worth of complaints about Hunter Biden’s business dealings, going back to conspiracy theories raised by Trump.
Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2014, around the time his father, then vice president, was helping conduct the Obama administration’s foreign policy with Ukraine. Senate Republicans have said the appointment may have posed a conflict of interest, but they did not present evidence that the hiring influenced U.S. policies, and they did not implicate Joe Biden in any wrongdoing.
Republican lawmakers and their staff for the past year have been analyzing messages and financial transactions found on a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden. They long have discussed issuing congressional subpoenas to foreign entities that did business with him, and they recently brought on James Mandolfo, a former federal prosecutor, to assist with the investigation as general counsel for the Oversight Committee.
The difference now is that Republicans will have subpoena power to follow through.
“The Republicans are going to go ahead,” said Tom Davis, a Republican lawyer who specializes in congressional investigations and legislative strategy. “I think their members are enthusiastic about going after this stuff … there are a lot of unanswered questions. Look, the 40-year trend is parties under-investigate their own and over-investigate the other party. It didn’t start here.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed the GOP focus on investigations as “on-brand” thinking.
“They said they were going to fight inflation, they said they were going to make that a priority, then they get the majority and their top priority is actually not focusing on the American family, but focusing on the president’s family,” she said.
Even some newly elected Republicans are pushing back against the idea.
“The top priority is to deal with inflation and the cost of living. … What I don’t want to see is what we saw in the Trump administration, where Democrats went after the president and the administration incessantly,” Rep.-elect Mike Lawler of New York said on CNN.
Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business work are already under federal investigation, with a grand jury in Delaware hearing testimony in recent months.
While he never held a position on the presidential campaign or in the White House, his membership on the board of the Ukrainian energy company and his efforts to strike deals in China have long raised questions about whether he traded on his father’s public service, including reported references in his emails to the “big guy.”
Joe Biden has said he’s never spoken to his son about his foreign business, and nothing the Republicans have put forth suggests otherwise. And there are no indications that the federal investigation involves the president.
Trump and his supporters, meanwhile, have advanced a widely discredited theory that Biden pushed for the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor to protect his son and Burisma from investigation. Biden did indeed press for the prosecutor’s firing, but that was a reflection of the official position of not only the Obama administration but many Western countries and because the prosecutor was perceived as soft on corruption.
House Republicans also have signaled upcoming investigations into immigration, government spending and parents’ rights. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray have been put on notice as potential witnesses.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, incoming Judiciary Committee chairman, has long complained of what he says is a politicized Justice Department and the ongoing probes into Trump.
On Friday, Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into the presence of classified documents at Trump’s Florida estate as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.
Trump, in a speech Friday night at his Mar-a-Lago estate, slammed the development as “the latest in a long series of witch hunts.”
Of Joe and Hunter Biden, he asked, “Where’s their special prosecutor?”
Matt Mackowiak, a Republican political strategist, said it’s one thing if the investigations into Hunter Biden stick to corruption questions, but if it veers into the kind of mean-spirited messaging that has been floating around in far-right circles, “I don’t know that the public will have much patience for that.”
House GOP pushes Hunter Biden probe despite thin majority
Republicans doubled down this week on using their new power next year to investigate the Biden administration and the president's son.
Musk drops internal Twitter files on Hunter Biden laptop saga
Author of the articleostmedia News
Publishing dateec 02, 2022 • 19 hours ago • 2 minute read
New Twitter owner Elon Musk linked to a reporter revealing internal Twitter email exchanges on Friday night detailing the response to a request “from the Biden team” and indicated those on the left politically got preferential treatment to those on the right, according to the New York Post.
Musk had teased earlier in the day: “What really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter will be published on Twitter at 5pm ET!”
He also said it would be “awesome” and then said they were doing some fact-checking.
Musk later tweeted a link to the account of independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who was posting potentially redacted emails from Twitter employees.
Taibbi said they were a series, “based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.”
Taibbi alleged: “Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.”
He went on to mention the “Biden team” making requests and saying someone from Twitter replied, “handled these.”
The former Rolling Stone writer said: “This system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.”
Taibbi alleged Twitter staff “took extraordinary steps to suppress” The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, removing links to the expose shared by users and posting warnings that they may be “unsafe.”
Twitter and Facebook both took censorship measures against The Post when it first published its expose on the trove of emails discovered on Hunter’s laptop in October 2020.
The Post says Twitter prevented users from sharing the article — and even locked The Post out of its Twitter account for more than two weeks and alleged The Post used hacked information. Taibbi said Twitter prevented the sharing of the article by direct message, an extremely uncommon move.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former CEO, said during a congressional hearing on misinformation and social media in March last year that blocking The Post’s report was a “total mistake.”
nypost.com
torontosun.com
Author of the article
ostmedia NewsPublishing date
ec 02, 2022 • 19 hours ago • 2 minute readNew Twitter owner Elon Musk linked to a reporter revealing internal Twitter email exchanges on Friday night detailing the response to a request “from the Biden team” and indicated those on the left politically got preferential treatment to those on the right, according to the New York Post.
Musk had teased earlier in the day: “What really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter will be published on Twitter at 5pm ET!”
He also said it would be “awesome” and then said they were doing some fact-checking.
Musk later tweeted a link to the account of independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who was posting potentially redacted emails from Twitter employees.
Taibbi said they were a series, “based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.”
Taibbi alleged: “Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.”
He went on to mention the “Biden team” making requests and saying someone from Twitter replied, “handled these.”
The former Rolling Stone writer said: “This system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.”
Taibbi alleged Twitter staff “took extraordinary steps to suppress” The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, removing links to the expose shared by users and posting warnings that they may be “unsafe.”
Twitter and Facebook both took censorship measures against The Post when it first published its expose on the trove of emails discovered on Hunter’s laptop in October 2020.
The Post says Twitter prevented users from sharing the article — and even locked The Post out of its Twitter account for more than two weeks and alleged The Post used hacked information. Taibbi said Twitter prevented the sharing of the article by direct message, an extremely uncommon move.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former CEO, said during a congressional hearing on misinformation and social media in March last year that blocking The Post’s report was a “total mistake.”
Hunter Biden laptop bombshell: Twitter invented reason to censor Post’s reporting
There’s nothing to “like” about this. Elon Musk unveiled devastating internal Twitter files on Friday.
nypost.com
Musk drops internal Twitter files on Hunter Biden laptop saga
Musk drops internal Twitter files on Hunter Biden laptop saga
Was there something on the laptop the public didnt need to know about or was harmful to the public?
Fake news .Musk drops internal Twitter files on Hunter Biden laptop saga
Author of the article
Publishing date
New Twitter owner Elon Musk linked to a reporter revealing internal Twitter email exchanges on Friday night detailing the response to a request “from the Biden team” and indicated those on the left politically got preferential treatment to those on the right, according to the New York Post.
Musk had teased earlier in the day: “What really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter will be published on Twitter at 5pm ET!”
He also said it would be “awesome” and then said they were doing some fact-checking.
Musk later tweeted a link to the account of independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who was posting potentially redacted emails from Twitter employees.
Taibbi said they were a series, “based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.”
Taibbi alleged: “Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.”
He went on to mention the “Biden team” making requests and saying someone from Twitter replied, “handled these.”
The former Rolling Stone writer said: “This system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.”
Taibbi alleged Twitter staff “took extraordinary steps to suppress” The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, removing links to the expose shared by users and posting warnings that they may be “unsafe.”
Twitter and Facebook both took censorship measures against The Post when it first published its expose on the trove of emails discovered on Hunter’s laptop in October 2020.
The Post says Twitter prevented users from sharing the article — and even locked The Post out of its Twitter account for more than two weeks and alleged The Post used hacked information. Taibbi said Twitter prevented the sharing of the article by direct message, an extremely uncommon move.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former CEO, said during a congressional hearing on misinformation and social media in March last year that blocking The Post’s report was a “total mistake.”
Hunter Biden laptop bombshell: Twitter invented reason to censor Post’s reporting
There’s nothing to “like” about this. Elon Musk unveiled devastating internal Twitter files on Friday.Musk drops internal Twitter files on Hunter Biden laptop saga
Musk drops internal Twitter files on Hunter Biden laptop saga
Let me correct that - Yep sleepy Joe is corrupt!!
So where is the ambulance chaser when conspiracy theories are proven fact?
Ex-Twitter execs deny pressure to block Hunter Biden laptop story
N.Y. Post report was greeted at the time with skepticism due to questions about computer's origins
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Farnoush Amiri
Published Feb 08, 2023 • 5 minute read
WASHINGTON — Former Twitter executives conceded Wednesday they made a mistake by blocking a story about Hunter Biden, the president’s son, from the social media platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, but adamantly denied Republican assertions they were pressured by Democrats and law enforcement to suppress the story.
“The decisions here aren’t straightforward, and hindsight is 20/20,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, testified to Congress. “It isn’t obvious what the right response is to a suspected, but not confirmed, cyberattack by another government on a presidential election.”
He added, “Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.”
The three former executives appeared before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to testify for the first time about the company’s decision to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article in October 2020 about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.
Emboldened by Twitter’s new leadership in billionaire Elon Musk – whom they see as more sympathetic to conservatives than the company’s previous administration – Republicans used the hearing to push a long-standing and unproven theory that social media companies including Twitter are biased against them.
Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer said the hearing is the panel’s “first step in examining the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process.”
The hearing continues a years-long trend of GOP leaders calling tech company leaders to testify about alleged political bias. Democrats, meanwhile, have pressed the companies on the spread of hate speech and misinformation on their platforms.
The witnesses Republicans subpoenaed were Roth, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer, and James Baker, the company’s former deputy general counsel.
Democrats brought a witness of their own, Anika Collier Navaroli, a former employee with Twitter’s content moderation team. She testified last year to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol riot about Twitter’s preferential treatment of Donald Trump until it banned the then-president from the site two years ago.
The hearing is the GOP’s opening act into what lawmakers promise will be a widespread investigation into President Joe Biden and his family, with the tech companies another prominent target of their oversight efforts.
The White House criticized congressional Republicans for staging “a bizarre political stunt,” hours after Biden’s State of the Union address where he detailed bipartisan progress in his first two years in office.
“This appears to be the latest effort by the House Republican majority’s most extreme MAGA members to question and relitigate the outcome of the 2020 election,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement Wednesday. “This is not what the American people want their leaders to work on.”
The New York Post reported weeks before the 2020 presidential election that it had received from Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of a hard drive from a laptop that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved. Twitter blocked people from sharing links to the story for several days.
Months later, Twitter’s then-CEO, Jack Dorsey, called the company’s communications around the Post article “not great.” He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” around why it was blocked was “unacceptable.”
The newspaper story was greeted at the time with skepticism due to questions about the laptop’s origins, including Giuliani’s involvement, and because top officials in the Trump administration had already warned that Russia was working to denigrate Joe Biden before the White House election.
The Kremlin had interfered in the 2016 race by hacking Democratic emails that were subsequently leaked, and fears that Russia would meddle again in the 2020 race were widespread across Washington.
Just last week, lawyers for the younger Biden asked the Justice Department to investigate people who say they accessed his personal data. But they did not acknowledge that the data came from a laptop Hunter Biden is purported to have dropped off at a computer repair shop.
The issue was also reignited recently after Musk took over Twitter as CEO and began to release a slew of company information to independent journalists, what he has called the “Twitter Files.”
“Thank god for Matt Taibi. Thank god for Elon Musk for allowing us to show the world that Twitter was basically a subsidiary of the FBI,” Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said, referencing one of the independent journalists with access to company files.
The documents and data largely show internal debates among employees over the decision to temporarily censor links to the story about Hunter Biden. The tweet threads lacked substantial evidence of a targeted influence campaign from Democrats or the FBI, which has denied any involvement in Twitter’s decision-making.
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., called the hearing a “fishing expedition” seeking to reheat bogus allegations claiming Biden somehow influenced his son’s business dealings in Ukraine.
Nonetheless, Republicans including Comer, R-Ky., have used the Post story, which has not been independently verified by The Associated Press, as the basis for what they claim is another example of the Biden family’s “influence peddling.”
One of Wednesday’s witnesses, Baker, has been a frequent target of Republican scrutiny.
Baker was the FBI’s general counsel during the opening of two of the bureau’s most consequential investigations in history: the Hillary Clinton investigation and a separate inquiry into potential coordination between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Republicans have long criticized the FBI’s handling of both investigations.
“Even though many disagree with how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden matter, I believe that the public record reveals that my client acted in a manner that was fully consistent with the First Amendment,” Baker said in defending his actions.
For Democrats, Navaroli countered the GOP argument by testifying about how Twitter allowed Trump’s tweets despite the misinformation they sometimes contained.
Navaroli testified to the Jan. 6 committee last year that Twitter executives often tolerated Trump’s posts despite their false statements and violations of the company’s own rules because executives knew the platform was his “favourite and most-used … and enjoyed having that sort of power.”
There has been no evidence that Twitter’s platform is biased against conservatives; studies have found the opposite when it comes to conservative media in particular. But the issue continues to preoccupy GOP members of congress.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called the hearing an “abuse of public resources.”
“We could be talking about health care. We could be talking about bringing down the cost of prescription drugs. We could be talking about abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights,” she said. “But instead we’re talking about Hunter Biden’s half-fake laptop story. I mean this is an embarrassment.”
— Associated Press writers Eric Tucker, Frank Bajak and Barbara Ortutay contributed to this report.
torontosun.com
N.Y. Post report was greeted at the time with skepticism due to questions about computer's origins
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Farnoush Amiri
Published Feb 08, 2023 • 5 minute read
WASHINGTON — Former Twitter executives conceded Wednesday they made a mistake by blocking a story about Hunter Biden, the president’s son, from the social media platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, but adamantly denied Republican assertions they were pressured by Democrats and law enforcement to suppress the story.
“The decisions here aren’t straightforward, and hindsight is 20/20,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, testified to Congress. “It isn’t obvious what the right response is to a suspected, but not confirmed, cyberattack by another government on a presidential election.”
He added, “Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.”
The three former executives appeared before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to testify for the first time about the company’s decision to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article in October 2020 about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.
Emboldened by Twitter’s new leadership in billionaire Elon Musk – whom they see as more sympathetic to conservatives than the company’s previous administration – Republicans used the hearing to push a long-standing and unproven theory that social media companies including Twitter are biased against them.
Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer said the hearing is the panel’s “first step in examining the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process.”
The hearing continues a years-long trend of GOP leaders calling tech company leaders to testify about alleged political bias. Democrats, meanwhile, have pressed the companies on the spread of hate speech and misinformation on their platforms.
The witnesses Republicans subpoenaed were Roth, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer, and James Baker, the company’s former deputy general counsel.
Democrats brought a witness of their own, Anika Collier Navaroli, a former employee with Twitter’s content moderation team. She testified last year to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol riot about Twitter’s preferential treatment of Donald Trump until it banned the then-president from the site two years ago.
The hearing is the GOP’s opening act into what lawmakers promise will be a widespread investigation into President Joe Biden and his family, with the tech companies another prominent target of their oversight efforts.
The White House criticized congressional Republicans for staging “a bizarre political stunt,” hours after Biden’s State of the Union address where he detailed bipartisan progress in his first two years in office.
“This appears to be the latest effort by the House Republican majority’s most extreme MAGA members to question and relitigate the outcome of the 2020 election,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement Wednesday. “This is not what the American people want their leaders to work on.”
The New York Post reported weeks before the 2020 presidential election that it had received from Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of a hard drive from a laptop that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved. Twitter blocked people from sharing links to the story for several days.
Months later, Twitter’s then-CEO, Jack Dorsey, called the company’s communications around the Post article “not great.” He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” around why it was blocked was “unacceptable.”
The newspaper story was greeted at the time with skepticism due to questions about the laptop’s origins, including Giuliani’s involvement, and because top officials in the Trump administration had already warned that Russia was working to denigrate Joe Biden before the White House election.
The Kremlin had interfered in the 2016 race by hacking Democratic emails that were subsequently leaked, and fears that Russia would meddle again in the 2020 race were widespread across Washington.
Just last week, lawyers for the younger Biden asked the Justice Department to investigate people who say they accessed his personal data. But they did not acknowledge that the data came from a laptop Hunter Biden is purported to have dropped off at a computer repair shop.
The issue was also reignited recently after Musk took over Twitter as CEO and began to release a slew of company information to independent journalists, what he has called the “Twitter Files.”
“Thank god for Matt Taibi. Thank god for Elon Musk for allowing us to show the world that Twitter was basically a subsidiary of the FBI,” Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said, referencing one of the independent journalists with access to company files.
The documents and data largely show internal debates among employees over the decision to temporarily censor links to the story about Hunter Biden. The tweet threads lacked substantial evidence of a targeted influence campaign from Democrats or the FBI, which has denied any involvement in Twitter’s decision-making.
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., called the hearing a “fishing expedition” seeking to reheat bogus allegations claiming Biden somehow influenced his son’s business dealings in Ukraine.
Nonetheless, Republicans including Comer, R-Ky., have used the Post story, which has not been independently verified by The Associated Press, as the basis for what they claim is another example of the Biden family’s “influence peddling.”
One of Wednesday’s witnesses, Baker, has been a frequent target of Republican scrutiny.
Baker was the FBI’s general counsel during the opening of two of the bureau’s most consequential investigations in history: the Hillary Clinton investigation and a separate inquiry into potential coordination between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Republicans have long criticized the FBI’s handling of both investigations.
“Even though many disagree with how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden matter, I believe that the public record reveals that my client acted in a manner that was fully consistent with the First Amendment,” Baker said in defending his actions.
For Democrats, Navaroli countered the GOP argument by testifying about how Twitter allowed Trump’s tweets despite the misinformation they sometimes contained.
Navaroli testified to the Jan. 6 committee last year that Twitter executives often tolerated Trump’s posts despite their false statements and violations of the company’s own rules because executives knew the platform was his “favourite and most-used … and enjoyed having that sort of power.”
There has been no evidence that Twitter’s platform is biased against conservatives; studies have found the opposite when it comes to conservative media in particular. But the issue continues to preoccupy GOP members of congress.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called the hearing an “abuse of public resources.”
“We could be talking about health care. We could be talking about bringing down the cost of prescription drugs. We could be talking about abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights,” she said. “But instead we’re talking about Hunter Biden’s half-fake laptop story. I mean this is an embarrassment.”
— Associated Press writers Eric Tucker, Frank Bajak and Barbara Ortutay contributed to this report.
Ex-Twitter execs deny pressure to block Hunter Biden laptop story
Former Twitter executives conceded Wednesday they made a mistake by blocking a story about Hunter Biden from the social media platform.
Ex-Twitter execs deny pressure to block Hunter Biden laptop story
N.Y. Post report was greeted at the time with skepticism due to questions about computer's origins
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Farnoush Amiri
Published Feb 08, 2023 • 5 minute read
WASHINGTON — Former Twitter executives conceded Wednesday they made a mistake by blocking a story about Hunter Biden, the president’s son, from the social media platform in the run-up to the 2020 election, but adamantly denied Republican assertions they were pressured by Democrats and law enforcement to suppress the story.
“The decisions here aren’t straightforward, and hindsight is 20/20,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, testified to Congress. “It isn’t obvious what the right response is to a suspected, but not confirmed, cyberattack by another government on a presidential election.”
He added, “Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.”
The three former executives appeared before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to testify for the first time about the company’s decision to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article in October 2020 about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.
Emboldened by Twitter’s new leadership in billionaire Elon Musk – whom they see as more sympathetic to conservatives than the company’s previous administration – Republicans used the hearing to push a long-standing and unproven theory that social media companies including Twitter are biased against them.
Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer said the hearing is the panel’s “first step in examining the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process.”
The hearing continues a years-long trend of GOP leaders calling tech company leaders to testify about alleged political bias. Democrats, meanwhile, have pressed the companies on the spread of hate speech and misinformation on their platforms.
The witnesses Republicans subpoenaed were Roth, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer, and James Baker, the company’s former deputy general counsel.
Democrats brought a witness of their own, Anika Collier Navaroli, a former employee with Twitter’s content moderation team. She testified last year to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol riot about Twitter’s preferential treatment of Donald Trump until it banned the then-president from the site two years ago.
The hearing is the GOP’s opening act into what lawmakers promise will be a widespread investigation into President Joe Biden and his family, with the tech companies another prominent target of their oversight efforts.
The White House criticized congressional Republicans for staging “a bizarre political stunt,” hours after Biden’s State of the Union address where he detailed bipartisan progress in his first two years in office.
“This appears to be the latest effort by the House Republican majority’s most extreme MAGA members to question and relitigate the outcome of the 2020 election,” White House spokesperson Ian Sams said in a statement Wednesday. “This is not what the American people want their leaders to work on.”
The New York Post reported weeks before the 2020 presidential election that it had received from Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of a hard drive from a laptop that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved. Twitter blocked people from sharing links to the story for several days.
Months later, Twitter’s then-CEO, Jack Dorsey, called the company’s communications around the Post article “not great.” He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” around why it was blocked was “unacceptable.”
The newspaper story was greeted at the time with skepticism due to questions about the laptop’s origins, including Giuliani’s involvement, and because top officials in the Trump administration had already warned that Russia was working to denigrate Joe Biden before the White House election.
The Kremlin had interfered in the 2016 race by hacking Democratic emails that were subsequently leaked, and fears that Russia would meddle again in the 2020 race were widespread across Washington.
Just last week, lawyers for the younger Biden asked the Justice Department to investigate people who say they accessed his personal data. But they did not acknowledge that the data came from a laptop Hunter Biden is purported to have dropped off at a computer repair shop.
The issue was also reignited recently after Musk took over Twitter as CEO and began to release a slew of company information to independent journalists, what he has called the “Twitter Files.”
“Thank god for Matt Taibi. Thank god for Elon Musk for allowing us to show the world that Twitter was basically a subsidiary of the FBI,” Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said, referencing one of the independent journalists with access to company files.
The documents and data largely show internal debates among employees over the decision to temporarily censor links to the story about Hunter Biden. The tweet threads lacked substantial evidence of a targeted influence campaign from Democrats or the FBI, which has denied any involvement in Twitter’s decision-making.
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., called the hearing a “fishing expedition” seeking to reheat bogus allegations claiming Biden somehow influenced his son’s business dealings in Ukraine.
Nonetheless, Republicans including Comer, R-Ky., have used the Post story, which has not been independently verified by The Associated Press, as the basis for what they claim is another example of the Biden family’s “influence peddling.”
One of Wednesday’s witnesses, Baker, has been a frequent target of Republican scrutiny.
Baker was the FBI’s general counsel during the opening of two of the bureau’s most consequential investigations in history: the Hillary Clinton investigation and a separate inquiry into potential coordination between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Republicans have long criticized the FBI’s handling of both investigations.
“Even though many disagree with how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden matter, I believe that the public record reveals that my client acted in a manner that was fully consistent with the First Amendment,” Baker said in defending his actions.
For Democrats, Navaroli countered the GOP argument by testifying about how Twitter allowed Trump’s tweets despite the misinformation they sometimes contained.
Navaroli testified to the Jan. 6 committee last year that Twitter executives often tolerated Trump’s posts despite their false statements and violations of the company’s own rules because executives knew the platform was his “favourite and most-used … and enjoyed having that sort of power.”
There has been no evidence that Twitter’s platform is biased against conservatives; studies have found the opposite when it comes to conservative media in particular. But the issue continues to preoccupy GOP members of congress.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called the hearing an “abuse of public resources.”
“We could be talking about health care. We could be talking about bringing down the cost of prescription drugs. We could be talking about abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights,” she said. “But instead we’re talking about Hunter Biden’s half-fake laptop story. I mean this is an embarrassment.”
— Associated Press writers Eric Tucker, Frank Bajak and Barbara Ortutay contributed to this report.
Ex-Twitter execs deny pressure to block Hunter Biden laptop story
Former Twitter executives conceded Wednesday they made a mistake by blocking a story about Hunter Biden from the social media platform.