Margot Cleveland: The FBI Offices Involved in the Hunter Biden Investigations Began Blitzing Twitter With Censorship Requests Just Before the 2020 Election

As noted dipshit 2nd-rate blogger David French would say: The FBI has a first amendment right to interfere in elections, you know.

Emails released on Saturday as part of the latest dump of the "Twitter Files" reveal that the week before the 2020 presidential election, the FBI field office investigating Hunter Biden sent multiple censorship requests to Twitter -- so many in fact, a top attorney for the tech giant found it "odd." This blockbuster detail from the weekend came mere days after the FBI issued a statement framing coverage of the "Twitter Files" as "misinformation" being peddled by "conspiracy theorists."

The FBI has "some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations," then-Twitter legal executive Stacia Cardille stressed in a Nov. 3, 2020, email to Jim Baker, the then-deputy general counsel for Twitter. "This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days," Cardille continued, before telling Baker to let her know if he had any other questions."

Less than an hour later, Baker responded to Cardille, noting it was "odd" that the FBI is "searching for violations of our policies."

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi published these emails as part of a 50-something Christmas Eve "Twitter Files" thread that he remarked showed "the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government -- from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA."

The entire thread is newsworthy, but that FBI agents in both the Baltimore field office and at FBI headquarters were running keyword searches for supposed Twitter violations proves hugely significant because both offices were involved in the Hunter Biden investigation.

While the Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office is -- and was at the time of the 2020 election -- handling the investigation into Hunter Biden, reportedly for potential money laundering and tax crimes, there is no separate Delaware FBI field office. Rather, the Baltimore FBI field office covers all of Delaware for the bureau and thus supported (and continues to support) the Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office in its investigation of Hunter Biden.

We also know from multiple FBI whistleblowers that FBI headquarters entangled itself in the Hunter Biden probe: In July 2022, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, announced that "multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions," had claimed that "in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden's activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down."

"The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny," according to Grassley.

Given the involvement of both Baltimore FBI and FBI headquarters in the investigation of Hunter Biden -- and the latter's attempt to shut down the probe -- the revelation that "some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ" were "doing keyword searches for violations," suggests the FBI undertook a full-court press to interfere in the 2020 election.

Previously released "Twitter Files" and statements from Twitter and Facebook established the FBI lied to the tech giants, representing the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation and prompting the censorship of the Biden-family scandal mere weeks before the 2020 election. Internal Twitter communications also revealed that the night before the New York Post published emails from Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop that implicated Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal, "the FBI used a private communications channel to send 10 documents to a top Twitter executive."

The "Twitter Files" also exposed "Twitter's contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary of the FBI," as Taibbi explained in an earlier thread.

She notes that most of the censorship requests came from the FBI's San Francisco office, which was the office detailed to censor public speech.

Which makes it especially strange that the FBI offices charged with the Hunter Biden crimes suddenly tasked themselves with patrolling Twitter for violations of their rules as well.

posted by Ace at 05:30 PM

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