Ex-Twitter Execs Tell Lawmakers Suppressing Hunter Biden Laptop Story Was Mistake, But Not FBI Order

House Republicans held a hearing on Wednesday triggered by the release late last year of what became known as The Twitter Files, a series of internal documents exposing the social media site’s content pruning efforts.

Of particular interest to Republicans was an October 2020 decision to suppress a New York Post article about the contents of a laptop abandoned at a Delaware repair shop by Hunter Biden, the son of then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Sharing of the document was at different times blocked on Twitter or given a warning tag that its contents included hacked materials.

According to the internal Twitter communications shown to journalists in November and December 2022 by Elon Musk after he bought Twitter, the FBI influenced the company to believe the NYP story was the result of a “hack-and-dump” action sponsored by the Russian government.

The Republicans have long promised to probe the Biden family’s business dealings, especially Hunter Biden, and in the newly inaugurated Congress finally have the majority to do so. At the Wednesday hearing, lawmakers summoned several Twitter executives who were either fired or quit when Musk bought the tech firm in October.

“America witnessed a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence communities to suppress and de-legitimized the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents,” House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY), said at the hearing, which he had called. He added that Twitter “worked hand-in-hand with the FBI to monitor the protected speech of Americans, receiving millions of dollars to do so.”

One figure, a former top-DOJ attorney who later served as Twitter’s chief counsel, Jim Baker, told the panel of lawmakers he was “aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation.”

“Even though many disagree with how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden matter, I believe that the public record reveals that my client acted in a manner that was fully consistent with the First Amendment,” he said.

Yoel Roth, who was Twitter’s security chief at the time, said he disagreed with the decision to suppress the story, but that it was understandable at the time, citing false claims of Russian online disinformation operations associated with the 2016 and 2020 US elections.

“It isn’t obvious what the right response is to a suspected but not confirmed cyberattack by another government on a presidential election,” Roth said. “I believe Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the Twitter executives they had been duped by the DOJ’s claims that the material on the laptop was likely fake and a plot by Russian intelligence.

“The information operation was run on you guys,” Jordan said, adding they had been “played by the FBI.”

However, it wasn’t just Republicans calling witnesses at the hearing: the Democrats called Anika Collier Navaroli, a former Twitter employee who previously testified before the January 6 committee last year about the company’s long tolerance of former US President Donald Trump’s rule-breaking behavior before the Capitol insurrection.

Navaroli largely recounted her July criticisms of Twitter, but also noted that she had heard rumors in 2019 that the Trump White House had sent the company a request to take down a tweet as well. According to US media reports, the tweet in question was by Chrissy Teigen and came after Trump took a public swipe at her, calling her John Legend’s “filthy-mouthed wife.” Twitter did not remove the expletive-laden post.

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) also used the hearing to criticize Musk’s leadership of Twitter, including what she characterized as its conservative bias, with numerous right-wing accounts being unbanned while hate speech against minority groups such as Jews and LGBTQ people has reportedly proliferated.