The FBI’s efforts to suppress The Post’s scoop on Hunter Biden’s laptop resemble an overseas “psychological operation” run by the CIA, said one of the reporters working on Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” reveals.
Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger said his latest reporting revealed a “disturbing pattern” of “relentless pressure by external FBI agents on Twitter to basically adapt its content moderation, also to share information.”
And he said it all begs for a probe by a special counsel.
“Then you had these forces inside Twitter — former FBI officials, particularly Jim Baker — who very strenuously argued for the censorship of the New York Post reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop and the emails that showed these very questionable business dealings with China and other countries,” he said Monday on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
“So Tucker, more investigative work needs to be done, but this looks like a kind of psychological operation that you would see the CIA conducting in foreign countries, not something that you would see intelligence agents in the United States perpetrating against both news organizations, but also social media platforms, namely Twitter and Facebook.”
Shellenberger — one of three journalists hired by new Twitter owner Musk to search company records for evidence of previous “free speech suppression” on the social media site — added: “This is not a partisan issue. You do not want your most important police organization, the FBI, to politicize and engage in dirty campaign tricks.
“People need to know that the FBI had this laptop belonging to Hunter Biden in December of 2019. You then had the FBI for all of 2020 running an operation to convince news organizations and social media platforms that there would be some sort of a leak of Hunter Biden information right before the elections of 2020,” he said.
“You also had [former Mayor Rudy] Giuliani who was under FBI surveillance give…the laptop to the New York Post and then you see a very interesting exchange of information between the FBI and Twitter around that period — and back and forth.”
Shellenberger said those facts showed “a lot of smoke.”
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“I think the bottom line is we need a serious congressional investigation and we very well may need an independent prosecutor to weed out these politicized elements of the FBI,” he said.
In a statement, US Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) — incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee — said Shellenberger’s reporting “confirms the swamp’s strong-arming of and premeditated collusion with Big Tech to censor and suppress explosive reporting about the Biden family’s business schemes.”
“Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have called on several former Twitter executives to testify at a public hearing next congress about this coordinated effort to hide information from the American people,” he said. “With the power of the gavel, we will deliver the answers, transparency, and accountability that the American people deserve.”
US Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), an Oversight Committee member, also tweeted Tuesday: “REMINDER: The FBI knew the Hunter Biden laptop story was true. They also knew when the story was coming. So they colluded with Big Tech to censor the truth in order to help Joe Biden and stop President Trump. This is government-by-proxy censorship and election interference.”
Another committee member also took note of a tweet in which US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said, “At least 80 FBI agents collaborated with Twitter to help monitor the social media site. How many more were working with other Big Tech companies?”
“Come hell or high water, we’re going to find out,” US Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) replied.
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According to Shellenberg’s reporting on Monday, Feb. 10, 2021, an email showed that Twitter had been paid more than $3.4 million in taxpayer funds for “reimbursement for the time spent processing requests from the FBI” since October 2019.
Before that, “Twitter chose not to collect on this statutory right,” according to a member of Twitter’s Safety, Content & Law Enforcement team whose name was blacked out.
The unidentified worker also wrote in the subject line of the email, “Run the business — we made money!”
The FBI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
