Twitter Censorship Hearings Backfire on House Republicans
A second investigation by Republicans finds Trump guilty
It happened again. And it probably won’t be the last time efforts to smear Democrats end up pointing to unethical or illegal behavior by Republicans.
The first time wasn’t made public until about a week ago when we learned that the Durham investigation, designed to prove Democrats used the Mueller investigation to conduct a witch hunt against Trump, ended up unearthing evidence of nothing except potential criminal activity by Trump.
Nothing came of it, though — Durham and Barr lost track of that one.
Now, it feels like déjà vu all over again.
The claims made by Republicans against Biden and Twitter
Republicans enthusiastically attacked Twitter execs on Wednesday (2/8/23) during the first meeting of the House Oversight Committee.
In their overzealousness to prove that Twitter, on orders from the Biden campaign, had quashed a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, they brought in one witness who insisted that the so-called “Twitter files” prove that Biden interfered with what should be protected free speech under the First Amendment.
This is critically important, Republicans say, because for the two days in October (14th and 15th), even though the full story of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop appeared on the front page of The New York Post, Twitter delayed posting a link to said story on their site. So for two days in mid-October, the public could not find this story on Twitter, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what cost Donald J. Trump the 2020 presidential election.
There are so many things wrong with this claim it’s hard to know where to begin.
This is not a free speech issue
First, this is not a free speech issue — at least not one protected by the Constitution. That’s because Twitter is a corporation; it is not part of the government. Therefore, Twitter, like any other media company, can decide what to post on its site.
Second, did they forget that Donald Trump regularly paid David Pecker to “catch and kill” stories he didn’t like? How would it be different if candidate Joe Biden asked Twitter to kill a story he didn’t like? It wouldn’t.
Given this reality, Republicans decided to add a little twist to their claims: It was the FBI working on behalf of the Biden campaign that tried to influence Twitter to pull the Hunter Biden laptop story. That’s government interference right there!
Voila! Now they can quote the First Amendment.
Where do Republicans get the idea that the FBI was working for Biden?
Biden wasn’t even president yet. Trump was the president. We also know from the Jan. 6 Committee that if anything, the Secret Service and the attorney general appeared to be doing Trump’s bidding in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election—so it would make no sense at all to assume FBI operatives were harassing Twitter on behalf of Joe Biden.
Yet, according to Republicans, the FBI did this because the FBI was afraid that Biden would lose to Trump.
What witnesses for Twitter said
Speaking on behalf of Twitter, two witnesses firmly denied having seen any evidence of FBI pressure on Twitter to remove the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” James Baker, Twitter’s former deputy counsel, told the committee while under oath. — CNN Business
Another witness, Matt Taibbi, the same journalist Musk hired last year to review internal Twitter communications for evidence of free speech violations at Twitter, confirmed Baker’s testimony: “. . . there is no evidence — that I’ve seen — of any government involvement in the laptop story.” — CNN Business
The evidence presented by Republicans
Republicans had prepared for this hearing. They had a printout of messages that they claimed showed the FBI interfering in the laptop investigation. The problem was they offered a printout of a conversation about the naked photos of Hunter Biden — not the article about his laptop.
The “error” was discovered when the witness they were attempting to skewer called them out on the misleading documents by insisting he could tell from the metadata on the printout that it did not refer to the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. He knew this because he was familiar with the story and had seen the metadata on the naked photos so many times he could recognize it by sight.
The only way there is even an issue here is if Republicans believe the public has a constitutional right to see photos of Hunter Biden’s genitals. Surely that is not what they meant to say.
The committee’s star witness
In furtherance of their apparent goal of embarrassing themselves on multiple levels, their Twitter “expert” was a FOX regular with a law degree but no inside knowledge of Twitter and no history of working at or closely with anyone at Twitter.
In fact, he has no knowledge. He’s repeating claims made in the “Twitter Files,” the mostly inconsequential, misleading, and deceptively incomplete social media rants from Elon Musk’s hand-picked journalists who were given access to cherry-picked data. There might well have been shady stuff going on at legacy Twitter, but what the Twitter Files decidedly do not reveal is a “breathtaking” “censorship system.”
In his testimony, Turley uncritically regurgitates these threads and passes it off as “expert analysis.” But it’s not. — Above the Law
The upshot of it all
In the end, the only thing the evidence proved was that then-President Donald Trump had directly ordered Twitter to take down a post by Chrissy Teigen in which she referred to him as “a pussy-assed bitch.” Her remark was in response to Trump trolling her and her husband, musician John Legend. It was not an unprovoked comment on her part. Trump started the confrontation by insulting Ms. Tiegen first. And when she responded in kind, the White House contacted Twitter to ask them to take it down. That’s right, the White House during Trump’s presidency contacted Twitter directly to ask them to delete a tweet Mr. Trump didn’t like.
How Republicans reacted to the disintegration of their case against Biden and Twitter
Perhaps the best summary of the day’s events was provided by Congressman Gerry Connelly, who appeared in the last few minutes of a segment of The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday:
“It was such a train wreck that Republicans threatened to arrest their witnesses for not telling them what they wanted to hear.”
In other words, it went from bad to worse. I can’t wait to see what House Republicans come up with next.