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A new congressional report revealed how Facebook executives’ response to the Hunter Biden laptop story was related to how “an incoming Biden administration” would view them after FBI warnings.

Since the 2020 presidential election, the decision to suppress reporting about the infamous “laptop from hell” ahead of Election Day has had global ramifications as many have contended the story would have altered their vote.

Now, with days remaining in the 2024 race for the White House, the New York Post detailed how an interim report from the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government showed communications between Big Tech employees as the newspaper’s coverage of Biden family foreign business deals was being suppressed.

“FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,” the report quoted a Microsoft employee on Oct. 14, 2020, when the Post’s coverage began.

Along the same line, Facebook communications showed how the report was treated by employees because it was the “[e]xact content expected for hack and leak.”

One employee even agreed, “Right on schedule.”

The Post reminded that the FBI had been in possession of the infamous laptop for nearly a year at that point and were well aware that the files in question were not Russian disinformation, but posed legitimate concerns about then-former Vice President Joe Biden and his family’s connections abroad. The newspaper further noted, “The Post spent nearly a month verifying the authenticity of laptop files ahead of their publication, though it’s unclear to what extent the FBI was aware of that work as it prepared its prebuttal.”

Adding to the controversy, the report shared how Nick Clegg, then-vice president of global affairs at Facebook wrote to Joel Kaplan, the vice president of global public policy, showing concern about how the longtime Democratic politician would react to how they treated the content on the social media platform.

“Obviously, our call on this could colour the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than almost anything else…” wrote Clegg.

On July 15 of that year, a Facebook employee stated in a message, “[W]hen we get hauled up to [Capitol] [H]ill to testify on why we influenced the 2020 elections we can say we have been meeting for YEARS with [the U.S. government] to plan for it.”

Based on the communications and the ongoing investigation, the congressional report stated, “[I]f the FBI’s intent was truly to help social media companies combat actual foreign influence operations, the FBI should have shared the single most important fact: the influence-peddling allegations in the Post story were based of real, credible information, including information in the FBI’s possession.”

“The FBI failed to do so. While the FBI eventually conceded that it had no indication that the allegations in the Post story were Russian disinformation — only after an FBI agent mistakenly revealed to Twitter that the laptop was ‘real’ — the FBI still withheld the fact that it had seized and authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop months prior,” continued the report. “As a result, Twitter and Facebook continued to censor the most significant news story of the election cycle, limiting the reach of allegations of Biden family corruption and ultimately benefitting the Biden-Harris campaign.”

The latest from the Post came as investigative reporter Catherine Herridge confirmed with whistleblowers that the FBI verified the legitimacy of the laptop “immediately.”

Kevin Haggerty
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