The agency’s field office responsible for Delaware reportedly sent censorship suggestions to Twitter
Former US President Donald Trump has accused the FBI office involved in investigating Hunter Biden of actively covering up for him and his father, Joe Biden, during the 2020 presidential election.
Trump made the allegation on Wednesday in a statement published on his Truth Social platform. He called the behavior “an outrageous disgrace” and part of a campaign against him.
The businessman turned politician didn’t explain the basis of his claim, but it appears to originate from an article published Tuesday on The Federalist, a conservative website. The outlet noted that in his latest ‘Twitter Files’ publication, journalist Matt Taibbi revealed an important communication from November 2020, in which top Twitter officials discussed contacts with the FBI.
“Some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ…are just doing keyword searches for violations,” then-Twitter legal executive Stacia Cardille remarked, noting the large volume of requests coming from those sections of the bureau. Jim Baker, a former FBI legal counsel who joined Twitter’s executive team, agreed that it looked “odd.”
The Baltimore field office would have responsibility for any federal investigation in Delaware, including the one looking into Hunter Biden’s possible tax violations and other crimes, The Federalist said. The FBI headquarters “entangled itself” with the Hunter probe, according to multiple whistleblowers, the outlet added. The exchange revealed by Taibbi “suggests the FBI undertook a full-court press to interfere in the 2020 election,” it asserted.
The Twitter Files are a series of reports based on internal Twitter documents, which were released by Elon Musk after his acquisition of the platform. Among other things, they revealed that the FBI “primed” the previous leadership of the company to interpret a legitimate story about Hunter Biden’s forgotten laptop as a “hack and dump” operation by a foreign government.
The agency has also been closely involved in content moderation on Twitter, bombarding the platform with suggestions about which accounts and tweets should be suspended, according to the reports. The FBI claimed the correspondence represented “nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements.” Some critics believe the US government engaged in online censorship by proxy.
