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The new 7th release of Twitter documents, today :


FBI pressured Twitter, sent trove of docs hours before Post broke Hunter laptop story


Quote
The FBI sprang into action within hours of the New York Post reaching out to Hunter Biden for comment about his scandalous laptop in October 2020, falsely warning Twitter and Facebook executives that the computer’s discovery was part of a Russian “hack and leak” operation.

That’s a key finding in the latest installment of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” revealed Monday by independent journalist Michael Shellenberger, who reports that then-Twitter Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth was prepped on censoring The Post’s exposé weeks earlier at a “tabletop exercise” on hacked materials that was organized and attended by media elites.

The trove of new records also show more evidence that former top FBI lawyer James Baker had an outsize role in quashing The Post’s reporting in his role as Twitter’s deputy general counsel.

The internal messages show that on the night of Oct. 13, 2020, FBI San Francisco Special Agent Elvis Chan sent 10 documents to Roth and at least one other person via a special one-way communications channel, according to Shellenberger. Chan asked Roth and his colleagues to confirm they had received the documents.

[documents, social media posts displayed]

Approximately two-and-a-half hours earlier, Hunter Biden attorney George Mesires had called and emailed Delaware computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac after learning from The Post that the first article based on files recovered from the abandoned laptop would be published the next day.

“I am a lawyer for Hunter Biden and I appreciate you reviewing your records on this matter,” Mesires wrote to Mac Isaac.

At 5 a.m. on Oct. 14, The Post published the first of many scoops exposing questionable overseas business dealings conducted by Hunter Biden — details of which were hidden in plain sight on the hard drive of his laptop.

Mac Isaac had tipped off the FBI about criminal evidence on the laptop, and the feds confiscated the computer back in December 2019. Nine months later, having heard nothing from investigators, Mac Issac gave a copy of the laptop to Trump lawyer Rudy Guiliani.

Giuliani, in turn, supplied The Post with the trove of damning content.

But The Post’s story was suppressed by Facebook and Twitter, which temporarily banned the outlet in the wake of its publication. It was also ignored or discredited by mainstream outlets, many of whom quietly substantiated the report months later.

It is not clear what was in the documents Chan emailed to Roth, but the timing is uncanny and, as Shellenberger reported, Chan’s action was in keeping with a larger effort by the FBI to squelch speech on the platform in the name of guarding against “foreign interference in elections.”

In July 2020, three months before The Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, Chan emailed Roth suggested that beginning 30 days before Election Day, Twitter executives would be granted temporary security clearances to discuss purported threats with FBI officials.

“You get to pick who they would be,” Chan wrote.

Roth later said in a sworn declaration that the feds had primed him to dismiss reports of the soon-to-be first son’s laptop as a “Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation,” but Chan later admitted under oath that the warnings were overblown, Shellenberger reported.

[ plenty more at link ]