The FBI is trying to dig itself out of the pit the Twitter Files has dug for them. They tried to defend their actions that led to contacts between the bureau and Twitter executives around the 2020 presidential election.
The statement comes on the heels of one disclosure showing the FBI repeatedly warning Twitter employees about foreign election interference campaigns. And then there was the bombshell story about Hunter Biden’s laptop from the New York Post that was censored by Twitter. The FBI allegedly paid $3.4 million to cover the costs of processing the agency’s requests.
“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” an FBI representative said.
The Twitter files have been released in several installments by independent journalists over the past few weeks. Part Six showed instances where FBI agents communicated with Twitter content moderators, flagging posts that allegedly violated Twitter’s policies against election misinformation.
There was also a thread by Michael Shellenberger that showed a February 2021 email to FBI general counsel-turned-top Twitter lawyer James Baker which spoke of $3.4 million paid to the platform as reimbursement for a “legal process response.”
That means, as Musk later tweeted, that the U.S. government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor information from the public.
Musk would later fire Baker after other disclosures showed Baker’s involvement in discussions about whether reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election went against Twitter’s “hacked materials” policy.
Musk Tweeted, “In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today.”
The response from the FBI fails to even come near to matching the evidence against them.
As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.
— Jake Gibson (@JakeBGibson) December 21, 2022
