News Analysis
Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
admitted on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast that Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop story because of warnings it had received from the FBI.
In response to Zuckerberg’s statement, the FBI issued a vague statement late on Aug. 26, claiming that it had warned Facebook of “
potential threat information.” Notably, the FBI didn’t dispute Zuckerberg’s account.
Any kind of collusion or cooperation between government actors and private companies to censor U.S. citizens is a direct infringement of the First Amendment. But what the FBI did may be much worse than that as it now appears that the bureau actively interfered in the 2020 election to gift Joe Biden the presidency.
The FBI first
found out about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop in the summer of 2019, when they were notified by the repair shop where he had left it. At first, the FBI appears to have shown no interest. But then, in December 2019, the FBI
seized the laptop from the repair shop.
The FBI would have quickly realized that the information contained on the laptop was extremely damaging to Hunter Biden’s father, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, as it proved that the older Biden had met Hunter Biden’s business associates on multiple
occasions when he was vice president. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden repeatedly
claimed that he knew nothing about his son’s business dealings.
The laptop also contained
incriminating information about Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ye Jianming, the Chinese Communist Party-affiliated owner of CEFC China Energy Co. who mysteriously disappeared in 2018, shortly after another Hunter Biden associate, CEFC official Patrick Ho, was
arrested by U.S. authorities on corruption charges.
Despite knowing that the laptop and its contents were real, FBI agent Brian Auten
shut down the laptop investigation in August 2020, falsely claiming that derogatory evidence against the Biden family was Russian disinformation.
At the same time, the FBI gave Russian
disinformation briefings to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who were about to release their
own report on Biden family corruption. The fact that those briefings had taken place was then leaked to the media. According to
Johnson, the FBI set up the senators with the aim of tainting their report before it was published.
Then, on Sept. 17, 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray himself
interfered in the 2020 campaign when he stated that Russia was working to meddle in the 2020 election by maligning Joe Biden.
It was during this timeframe that Facebook, as well as other social media companies, were warned about the release of Russian disinformation in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
We don’t know with certainty whether the FBI had advance knowledge that the laptop story was going to be made public, but there are a number of plausible pathways for the FBI to have found out.
We know from a
lawsuit brought by the laptop repair man, John Paul Mac Isaac, that after the FBI and Congress ignored his efforts to investigate the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Mac Isaac contacted then-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani through Giuliani’s lawyer in August 2020.
At the time, the FBI had an open counterintelligence investigation
into Giuliani and a number of his associates. It’s possible that this investigation led to the FBI finding out that he had a copy of the laptop.
It’s also possible that Giuliani made inquiries with his law enforcement contacts, which may have alerted the FBI to Giuliani’s having the laptop. It’s widely believed that it was through law enforcement contacts that
he found out about former New York Democratic representative and convicted sex offender Anthony Weiner’s laptop during the 2016 election.
The FBI might have also learned that the story was going to be made public when the New York Post—the newspaper that broke the story—tried to authenticate the laptop.
There’s also the infamous letter signed by five former
CIA directors and more than 50 other intelligence officials that falsely claimed that the laptop was a Russian plot. This too might suggest that there was intelligence community coordination and foreknowledge.
But even if the FBI didn’t have specific foreknowledge, they knew that Mac Isaac had talked to members of
Congress and that it was therefore likely that the story would come out. Mac Isaac now claims that the FBI
threatened him to keep quiet about the laptop.
Regardless of whether the FBI’s actions were based on a general belief that the laptop might emerge or on specific foreknowledge, the FBI’s response was to preemptively shut off any discussion about whatever information might be released by claiming that it was Russian disinformation.
By doing so, the FBI infringed on the First Amendment rights of all Americans. It simply isn’t the FBI’s job to warn private companies about what information should or shouldn’t be shared among members of the public.
As for Zuckerberg, despite his attempt to shift the blame to the FBI, his hands are far from clean.
We know he isn’t averse to censorship, having also
coordinated with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci in March 2020 to suppress information that ran counter to Fauci’s narrative on COVID-19 and its origin.
In May 2020, Zuckerberg admitted that
Facebook worked “very hard to make sure we have good collaboration with the intelligence community.”
He later
spearheaded the drive to elect Joe Biden with the so-called election fortification efforts. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, personally donated more than $400 million to take over government election offices—
almost as much money as the entire federal government spent on the 2020 election.
Zuckerberg’s payments were supposedly made to fill so-called funding gaps from the federal government, but the reality is that the payments were distributed on a
highly partisan basis with the aim of electing Biden and other Democrats.
He essentially mounted a private takeover of government election offices, affecting races in key swing states such as
Georgia,
Michigan, and
Wisconsin.
Zuckerberg clearly wasn’t duped by the FBI into suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. But the FBI gave him a convenient excuse to do so, as well as a heads-up that ensured that there would be no delay in censoring the laptop story.
The implications of the FBI’s actions are profound. A post-election poll found that
16 percent of Biden voters wouldn’t have voted for him had they known about the laptop. Additionally, a new poll has found that
79 percent of all Americans think that Trump would have won if voters had known the truth about the laptop.
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