Former Twitter head of Trust and Safety officer Yoel Roth revealed in an interview that the pressure exerted by the FBI based on an alleged "foreign disinformation campaign" was one of the reasons why the platform decided to censor a story about Hunter Biden's laptop a little over two years ago, and stated that he now considers it a was a "mistake.”
Roth resigned from Twitter following Elon Musk’s buyout and this was his first public appearance since leaving the company on November 10.
Contribution to "Biden for President"
In October 2020, less than a month before the election, The New York Post posted a story containing compromising emails recovered from a computer belonging to President Joe Biden's son. Twitter censored the spread of the story, blocking access to the links, and claimed it could be the result of a foreign disinformation campaign.
This led the Republican National Committee (RNC) to file a lawsuit arguing that the platform made an impermissible in-kind corporate contribution to Biden
'Biden for President,’ Biden's main campaign committee.
Twitter/ 2020 by Verónica Silveri on Scribd
FBI warns of "misinformation"
Roth at the time, filed a disclosure with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) saying that the FBI had warned him about an upcoming "Russian misinformation dump," and alleged that at the company they assumed it was the Post report.
The document signed by the former security chief also revealed that Twitter had weekly meetings with federal agents, and that it was there that the social network's executives were told to beware of Russian misinformation:
Since 2018, I have had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and industry colleagues regarding election security (...) During these weekly meetings, federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected that state actors might conduct 'hack and leak operations' in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October.
🚨🚨🚨
BREAKING: Last year Twitter disclosed to the FEC they were warned of 'a hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden' by federal law enforcement that led them to censor the NY Post story
The disclosure was signed by Yoel Roth https://t.co/ibKYrCdCu7 pic.twitter.com/obQoVwA1JQ
- Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) December 3, 2022
"I was told at this meeting 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 on social networking platforms, including Twitter. These expectations of hacking and leaking operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned at these meetings that there were rumors that a hack and leak operation would involve Hunter Biden."
Roth recently said, "we didn't know what to believe" in an attempt to justify Twitter's censorship of the story.
"Rumors from intelligence officials"
An FBI agent was charged with suppressing an investigation into the laptop after it was seized from a repair shop where Hunter had left it.
The owner of the shop, John Mac Isaac, said he contacted the FBI about the computer and they met with him in late 2019. Federal agents, with a warrant, seized the computer and an external hard drive. Isaac, I had already made a copy, that's where part of the Post's reports come from.
Agent Tim Thibault was accused in Congress for being a"politically biased official in the Washington field office." Senator Chuck Grassley (R) said:
Mr. Thibault's blatant partisanship undermined the FBI's work and reputation. This type of bias in high-profile investigations overshadows all of the agency's work he was involved in, ranging from opening an investigation into Trump based on news articles to shutting down investigative activity on Hunter Biden that was based on verified information.
In 2021, The Washington Free Beacon reported that the company's decision to block Hunter's reports was partly the fault of intelligence officials. Since the censorship was justified by the information received by the platform.
