House Republicans plan to grill former Twitter Inc. executives over their alleged cooperation with the FBI to squelch the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the opening salvo in their probe into the Biden family finances.
(Bloomberg) — House Republicans plan to grill former Twitter Inc. executives over their alleged cooperation with the FBI to squelch the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the opening salvo in their probe into the Biden family finances.
At a hearing Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee will focus on the platform’s decision to limit distribution of the unflattering piece by the New York Post that Republicans say show the younger Biden traded on his family name, published just weeks before the 2020 election that then-President Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden.
The hearing will begin just hours after Biden’s State of the Union address to Congress.
In his prepared opening remarks, House Oversight Chair James Comer asserts that the FBI advised senior Twitter executives to question the validity of any Hunter Biden story. He also alleges that the federal government used a private company “to accomplish what it constitutionally cannot: limit the free exercise of speech.”
“We owe it to the American people to provide answers about this collusion to censor information about Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s business schemes,” Comer says in the remarks.
GOP Payback: House Will Investigate Biden, Family and Policies
Democrats have criticized the GOP-led investigations, saying they are purely political and will only take time away from more pressing issues, such as the debt ceiling and inflation.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, will call the hearing “tragic” in his own opening remarks, pointing to the proliferation of right wing messaging on social media that ultimately led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.
“If our colleagues wanted to examine a serious problem involving American democracy and social media, it is staring us in the face right now,” Raskin says in the statement. “Twitter and other social media companies acted as central organizing and staging grounds for the Jan. 6 violent insurrection against Congress and the Vice President.”
The former Twitter executives include Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, Deputy General Counsel James Baker, Global Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth and employee Anika Collier Navaroli.
The hearing marks the latest attempt to delve into actions by Twitter, now owned by billionaire Elon Musk. In December, Musk had heralded the release of the so-called Twitter Files, internal emails about the New York Post article that were obtained and then tweeted by writer Matt Taibbi, but they failed to produce definitive conclusions on the matter.
The tabloid had claimed that information from Hunter Biden’s laptop showed he introduced a top executive from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, to his father while he was vice president and overseeing the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. Hunter Biden also served on Burisma’s board.
Twitter limited distribution of the story, blocking users from sharing links and pictures. A spokesperson for Twitter at the time said it was in line with its policy on hacked materials.
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