Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, are asking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg some tough questions regarding his communications with the Department of Justice and the FBI.
Remember back in November 2020 when the New York Post published a salacious story about Hunter Biden and a laptop he abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware (click here to read more)? Facebook and other social media outlets suppressed the story, claiming to believe it was Russian disinformation. Twitter even went so far as to lock users out of their accounts for sharing the story before it was censored.
Zuckerberg later admitted that his companies (now operating under the blanket entity Meta) suppressed the Hunter Biden story after the FBI warned there was “about to be” a “Russian propaganda” effort including a document dump. Zuckerberg himself said that “it sucks” the story turned out to be authentic.
In other words, America’s most popular social media platforms suppressed a story that could have directly influenced the 2020 presidential election due to a warning from the FBI.
“The American people deserve to know whether the FBI used Facebook as part of their alleged plan to discredit information about Hunter Biden,” reads the letter from Grassley and Johnson. “If so, Congress and the American people require clarity with respect to the extent the FBI communicated with Facebook during the 2020 election about Hunter Biden-related information.”
It is more than ironic that FBI agents accused Russia of meddling in the election and then blamed Russia for their own attempts to influence the election. The FBI had Hunter Biden’s laptop in its possession at the time and should have been able to verify its authenticity. Recently, a number of whistleblowers informed Johnson that FBI employees were told not to inspect the laptop immediately after it was obtained. Johnson was also told about a scheme within the FBI to downplay any negative information about Hunter Biden in August 2020 in order to shut down an investigation related to his overseas business dealings.
Around that time, the FBI delivered an “unnecessary and unsolicited briefing” to lawmakers that was used by Democrats to paint Republican lawmakers’ investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings as Russian disinformation. “The FBI’s ill-conceived actions not only interfered in our congressional investigation by frustrating and obstructing our ability to advance the matters under review, it also interfered in the 2020 election,” notes the letter.
Grassley and Johnson have also asked the FBI to disclose the names of the agents that spoke with Facebook (this is something my colleague Joe Gilberston also wants to know and you can read his rant on the topic here).
As Gilbertson writes in his article: “These individuals…abused their position. They used fraudulent information to influence an election. Can you think of any crime worse than interfering with the rightful election of the leader of the free world?”
If it can be proven that individuals within the FBI gave Facebook false information so that the Hunter Biden story would reach fewer Americans directly before the election, those individuals need to be held accountable for treason.
“The actions of the agents who spoke to Facebook were blatantly political, something the FBI should shun with a passion,” continues Gilbertson. “This is a corruption of the highest law enforcement body in the land…If I were an FBI agent, I would be screaming to boot out the people who did this, the people who damaged the FBI’s reputation.”
Sources:
Senators Demand Transparency From Facebook on Hunter Biden Story
GOP senators demand Facebook hand over FBI communication on Hunter Biden