Elon Musk releases information on Twitter’s suppression of Hunter Biden laptop story

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Elon Musk released internal communications purporting to show that Twitter suppressed a New York Post story on scandalous material found on a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, preventing it from being shared shortly before the 2020 presidential election. 

Key Players

Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, was a board member for Burisma, a prominent Ukrainian energy company that came under investigation by the United Kingdom in 2014  for accusations of money laundering. Hunter Biden was also a founding board member of a Chinese private equity firm. In 2018, the FBI began an investigation into whether the future president’s son and his associates had violated tax and money laundering laws in foreign business dealings, CNN reported. 

Elon Musk, a South African-American entrepreneur and investor, is the CEO and owner of Twitter, an acquisition he completed in October 2022. He is also the founder and CEO of SpaceX, a spacecraft manufacturer, and Tesla, an electric vehicle company. 

Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist and former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, reported on Twitter’s internal communications, which he termed the “Twitter Files.”

John Paul Mac Issac, a computer repairman, fixed Biden’s laptop and then reported the contents to the FBI.  

Further Details

In April 2019, Hunter Biden dropped off his laptop with Mac Issac, but failed to retrieve it after 90 days, thereby transferring its ownership to Mac Issac, the Intelligencer reported. Mac Issac, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, found emails suggesting that Biden had arranged a 2015 meeting between his father and a Burisma board member. 

In September 2019, Mac Issac gave the laptop to the FBI, believing it could be used as evidence to support then-President Trump, who had been accused of corruption for stopping military aid to Ukraine. Trump sought intel from the country regarding Hunter Biden’s business dealings, thinking it might help his 2020 re-election campaign, NPR reported. 

The FBI took the laptop as part of its tax fraud investigation of Biden, but it was never mentioned at Trump’s impeachment hearings, CNN reported. 

Frustrated by what he thought was a lack of action, in August 2020, Mac Issac sent a copy of the laptop’s hard drive to an associate of Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who had served as Trump’s personal lawyer. Giuliani then gave the hard drive to the New York Post, a daily tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, Vox reported. 

On Oct. 14, the Post began publishing information about the laptop, claiming it was a “smoking gun” for evidence of corruption involving Hunter Biden and his father. The “evidence” in question launched a discredited theory that Ukrainian officials took advantage of Biden during his time at Burisma to get special treatment from his father, who was vice president under then-President Barack Obama. 

News outlets were skeptical, as no one had verified whether the contents of the hard drive were authentic, Vox reported. Concerns arose that the story could have been an attempted disinformation campaign sponsored by a foreign government. 

Twitter wanted to prevent a repeat of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The platform prevented users from sharing the story publicly, or privately via direct message, and even suspended accounts that shared the story, including the official Post account, claiming it had violated Twitter’s “hacked material” policy. 

Twitter’s move angered many conservatives, who felt it had censored the story because of a liberal bias or direct intervention from the Biden campaign. In March 2022, anger intensified after The New York Times verified the authenticity of some of the emails on the laptop, Vox reported.

In October 2022, after Musk acquired Twitter, he promised to investigate why the platform chose to block the story, particularly if the Biden campaign had a hand in it, Gizmodo reported. 

Outcome 

Investigation reveals confusion, but no outside influence

On Dec. 2, 2022, in a series of tweets dubbed the “Twitter Files,” Taibbi explained that politicians on both sides of the aisle had often contacted Twitter to have certain tweets or accounts removed. For instance, the platform removed specific tweets during the 2020 campaign at the behest of both the Trump administration and the Biden campaign.

However, Taibbi found no evidence that the Biden campaign had contacted Twitter about the Hunter Biden story. Rather, the decision to censor the story was apparently made by high-level executives on the company’s trust and safety council. 

“As discussed, this is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear,” Yoel Roth, the team’s chief, wrote in a staff email. “Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016, we’re erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified.”

Taibbi noted that in October 2020, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) contacted a Twitter lawyer to express concern about the story’s suppression.

“I say this as a total Biden partisan and convinced he didn’t do anything wrong,” Khanna reportedly wrote in an email. “But the story now has become more about censorship than relatively innocuous emails and it’s become a bigger deal than it would have been.”

In retrospect, Khanna told Insider, “I felt Twitter’s actions were a violation of First Amendment principles so I raised those concerns. Our democracy can only thrive if we are open to a marketplace of ideas and engaging with people with whom we disagree.”

Musk fires Twitter lawyer who allegedly interfered with Taibbi

On Dec. 6, Taibbi tweeted that he had been blocked from accessing more documents by Twitter deputy general counsel James Baker, who was documented as a major supporter of restricting the story. 

That same day, Musk fired Baker and gave Taibbi access to the documents, Insider reported. Taibbi then tweeted that more information about Twitter’s content moderation policies would be released.  

As of Dec. 16, there were no further developments.