Elon Musk, Twitter's new CEO, announced that he decided to fire the social network's top lawyer, Jim Baker, after learning about how he played a part in the censorship of Hunter Biden's laptop.
"In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today," he revealed via the social network.
In journalist Matt Taibbi’s post, internal e-mails from the company reveal that Jim Baker was aware of and even participated in the discussions about whether the article published by the New York Post which revealed that the Hunter Biden's laptop story could be banned based on the platform's "pirated materials" policy.
The conversation was reportedly between Baker and former vice president of global communications Brandon Borrman.
"Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?" asked Borrman regarding banning the story, to which Baker responded that "caution is warranted," which could indicate that he was in favor of keeping the entire case of the president's son under wraps.
As if that wasn't enough, Taibbi revealed that before he knew the role Baker played, he had been commissioned by him to release another installment of the Twitter Files and that he had been delaying in publishing it.
Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @BariWeiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.”
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 6, 2022
Baker, a controversial figure
In the thread of tweets posted by the journalist, he recalled that Baker has been involved in controversies before, as he was a key player in the investigation that there was about the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, when he worked as general counsel for the FBI.
The Twitter lawyer was also part of the warrant application under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to monitor Donald Trump's presidential campaign through Carter Page, who worked as a political advisor to the former president.
