Our James Lynch has a thorough report on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s concession that Biden administration officials pressured Facebook into censoring Covid-related content and that his platform was wrong to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 election.
Suppression of Covid-Related Content
The first admission is relevant to our consideration of the Supreme Court’s late-term ruling in Murthy v. Missouri. In an opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a 6–3 majority rejected the claims of two states and five individual social-media users that the government was responsible for the tech companies’ censorship of their Covid-related posts.
Importantly, the Court did not conclude that the government had clean hands. Acknowledging evidence of heavy-handed tactics by Biden-Harris White House officials and other government agents, Justice Barrett nevertheless reasoned that the plaintiffs lacked standing because they had not convincingly demonstrated that the government — as opposed to the social-media companies themselves — had caused the speech suppression. (It violates the Constitution for the government to cause a third party to suppress speech that the government itself would be barred by the First Amendment from suppressing; but to make the case, a claimant has to prove that the government truly was the culprit.)
It may be, as Justice Samuel Alito argued in dissent (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch) that Justice Barrett’s opinion is unduly exacting in what it required for a demonstration of standing by at least one of the claimants. Still, Barrett’s scrutiny of the record leaves no doubt that the plaintiffs pled their case poorly, and that the lower courts relied on findings that the record did not bear out.
Undeniably, Murthy sets a high bar to clear for suing the government based on the actions of a third party, but it is not impossible. The Murthy plaintiffs relied on inferences to be drawn from communications between Biden administration officials and tech companies, often loosely tied to the timing of posts that were suppressed. It might have been a different case if a tech-company executive testified that the government threatened — implicitly or explicitly — to make life difficult for platforms that refused to erase content when nudged to do so. (In his dissent, Justice Alito cites to Zuckerberg’s testimony before a House Committee, but there is no indication in the opinion, or in any reporting I’ve seen, that Meta’s CEO was called as a witness in the litigation.)
Suppression of the Laptop and Biden Family Influence-Peddling
I want to focus more on Zuckerberg’s admission that the Hunter Biden laptop reporting — the story was broken by the New York Post — should not have been suppressed in the weeks just before the 2020 election. Let’s place that in context.
The FBI did not find out about the laptop close to the election. To the contrary, it was in December 2019, nearly a year before Election Day 2020, that the bureau took possession of the laptop abandoned by the president’s son at a Delaware computer-repair shop. The investigators had known about the laptop for at least two months before they reluctantly took possession, pursuant to a federal-grand-jury subpoena issued in Wilmington by the office of U.S. attorney David Weiss.
As we learned during the criminal trial earlier this year, at which Hunter was convicted of firearms felonies, the bureau perused the laptop data and knew it was authentic. No surprise about that. As I pointed out after the Post broke the story months later, the photographs and videos were patently Hunter’s, and the emails, which appeared authentic on their face, could easily be matched up to events and transactions that were known to have occurred. We could all see that in October 2020 by reading the Post’s reporting. But the FBI knew months earlier, based on a rigorous forensic examination by its trained experts.
Nevertheless, as the election neared, senior agents at the bureau laid the groundwork that would convince the tech companies, once the laptop story broke, that the relevant reporting had been generated by an influence operation conducted by Russia’s intelligence services.
What led them to do that? Collusion with influential congressional Democrats, that’s what.
Like the 51 former national-security officials who signed their demagogic letter in the campaign stretch-run, these Democrats were in cahoots with the Biden-Harris campaign. In mid 2020, they exploited the fact that two Republican senators — Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — were poring over financial records of Biden family influence-peddling in order to construct a story that the emerging derogatory information about the Democrats’ presidential nominee must be Russian disinformation — a story that they recruited a couple of senior FBI officials to certify. When the laptop reporting emerged in October 2020, it was simply folded into the story — notwithstanding that the FBI well knew the laptop was the real deal.
Grassley’s recent letter relates that, as he and Johnson collected damaging Biden information, four senior congressional Democrats — then-Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as Senator Mark Warner and Congressman Adam Schiff, top Dems on the intelligence committees — dashed off a letter to the FBI on July 13, 2020. In it, they fretted that Congress could be the subject of a foreign-disinformation campaign and sought a “defensive briefing.”
Three days later, this request was elaborated on by Democratic senators Ron Wyden and Gary Peters. They were the ranking members of the committees then headed by Grassley and Johnson, respectively, and thus privy to the Biden information then being amassed. The two Democrats requested a briefing from the FBI about potential foreign disinformation tied specifically to the Grassley–Johnson investigation.
Grassley maintains that there was no need for such a briefing because the information he and Johnson were gathering was substantially verifiable and, ergo, not disinformation. I would further observe, as I’ve detailed on other occasions, that even when the source of information is known or truly suspected to be a foreign intelligence service (which the Biden information substantially was not), this does not perforce mean the information is false. Sometimes, Russia floats information that is true — and quite intentionally so because it is embarrassing to American officials. So even if one believes in good faith that Russia or China, say, are putting out Biden data, that would not by itself make that data disinformation. Yet, that’s what Democrats and their confederates would have you believe — if the information is derogatory, it must be both sourced to a foreign intelligence service and untrue.
According to Grassley, the FBI was happy to help the Democrats in that enterprise. After the bureau received the letters from the top Democrats, [an analyst named Brian] Auten worked up an intelligence “assessment,” concluding that the derogatory Biden evidence was disinformation. Grassley says unidentified FBI whistleblowers have recounted that agents working the Biden investigation were interviewed in connection with Auten’s assessment and pushed back against their headquarters’ claims of disinformation risk, arguing that their reporting either had been verified or could be verified using ordinary investigative techniques (e.g., search warrants). Nevertheless, FBI headquarters purported to conclude that this derogatory Biden data was disinformation. To cover their tracks, Grassley says that in September 2020, FBI headquarters officials “placed their findings with respect to whether reporting was disinformation in a restricted access sub-file reviewable only by particular agents.”
As I recounted elsewhere in the column, Brian Auten was an FBI supervisory analyst who was already under internal investigation for his role in the disinformation that the bureau, courtesy of the Clinton campaign, had provided under oath to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, alleging that Donald Trump appeared to be a clandestine agent of the Kremlin. Auten was assigned to do the assessment of the Biden evidence by Timothy Thibault, then the assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) of the FBI’s Washington field office. Thibault was eventually pushed into early retirement when posts from his private social-media account came to light — posts in which he gleefully bashed the Trump administration, Republicans, the Catholic Church, and the American South.
My July 2022 column elaborated on how the Democrat/FBI gaslighting proceeded through the summer leading up to the 2020 election:
In August 2020, the FBI invited members of Congress to be briefed on possible foreign interference in the election campaign. Grassley says the briefing he and Johnson received, which was “unsolicited and unnecessary,” related to the Biden investigation that the Auten assessment sought to discredit, over the dissent of case investigators. Parts of the Biden investigation, Grassley explains, were leaked to the media in order to paint the evidence gathered “in a false light.” On August 13, 2020, for example, the Associated Press published a report suggesting that a government “intelligence assessment” had raised the question of whether Senator Johnson’s effort to investigate Biden family dealings with Ukraine, among other foreign governments, was “mimicking” Russian efforts to spread disinformation and “amplifying its propaganda.”
Grassley goes on to note that “in October 2020, an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed at the direction of ASAC Thibault.” Moreover, not content with merely closing this part of the case “without providing a valid reason as required by FBI guidelines,” Thibault also “attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” according to the senator.
Grassley does not further describe this “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting.” We do know, however, that October 2020 — the dwindling weeks right before Election Day — is when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. And how’s this for a coincidence: At the same time that Thibault was shutting down part of the Biden investigation, an array of 51 former U.S. national-security officials released their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails.” It’s a remarkably deceptive piece of, well, disinformation, strongly suggesting that the Hunter laptop contents were Russian disinformation — but, when read closely, the officials admit that they are merely “suspicious” and actually have no basis in solid fact to conclude that the contents were disinformation. Naturally, the 2020 Biden campaign happily peddled this government-approved Russian disinformation storyline — just as the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign had happily peddled the bureau-promoted narrative that Trump had established a communications back channel with the Kremlin.
I’ll close by adding (not for the first time) that we’ve since learned that the infamous letter from the 51 national-security officials was the brainchild of Antony Blinken, then a top Biden campaign official and now secretary of state. He put the bug in the ear of Michael Morell, formerly acting CIA director in the Obama-Biden administration, who drafted the letter with a little help from James Clapper, former director of national intelligence in the same administration. It was Clapper who suggested that the letter should describe the laptop reporting as having “all the classic earmarks of a Soviet/Russian information operation” (House Judiciary Committee Report, pp. 21–22).
As the letter was being crafted, another of the most notable signatories, John Brennan, the former Obama-Biden CIA director, observed that the point was to “give the [Biden] campaign, particularly during the [presidential candidates’] debate on Thursday, a talking point to push back on [then-president] Trump on this issue” (House Judiciary Committee Report, p. 11 & n.48). Sure enough, the letter was publicized prior to the debate, in time for Joe Biden to claim, again and again, that according to top intelligence officials of impeccable credibility, Russian intelligence had manufactured the reporting about his son’s laptop, foreign business ties, and unsavory personal life.
It’s all well and good that Mark Zuckerberg has confessed error. This, however, was an insidious conspiracy by government insiders to sell the country on a lie by exploiting the credibility of top government intelligence officials and the intimidating muscle of the government’s premier law-enforcement agency.