FBI Official Disputes Twitter's Justification for Censoring the Hunter Biden Laptop Story

In December 2020, Yoel Roth (who was Twitter’s Head of Trust & Safety until he resigned last month) told the Federal Election Commission in a sworn affidavit that the FBI specifically warned that Russia would likely release Hunter Biden’s emails before the 2020 election and that those warnings prompted Twitter to censor the New York Post article.

“I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter,” Roth said in the affidavit. “I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”

But in testimony given last week, Elvis Chan, a supervisory special agent with the FBI, disputed that story.

“I do not remember us specifically saying ‘Hunter Biden’ in any meeting,” Chan said in a December 3 deposition. “So this would have been something that [Roth] would have just thought of as a hot-button issue on his own that happened in October.”

According to Chan, the FBI had not seen any evidence of an active hacking operation prior to the 2020 election, but the agency was worried about the “potential” for such an operation. Roth is likely going to be called back in to testify before Congress to explain the contradiction.

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While the FBI may not have specifically warned about Hunter Biden’s emails, their warnings to social media platforms still likely contributed to the decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. This summer, we learned that the FBI decided to quash the investigation of the laptop until after the election. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also revealed that the FBI warned Facebook there was going to be  Russian disinformation right before the laptop story broke, which Zuckerberg claimed was the reason Facebook decided to bury the laptop story.