Rep. Jim Jordan realizes that his Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government isn’t off to a good start. The panel’s first big hearing was an embarrassing display, and it was soon followed by revelations that the FBI “whistleblowers” the Ohio Republican has been touting for months aren’t actually whistleblowers, and their recent behind-the-scenes testimony was literally unbelievable.
The far-right chairman is confronting complaints from disappointed conservatives and headlines about his GOP-led crusade being “a dud.” Jordan has tried to defend the endeavor with excuses that don’t make a lot of sense.
“Clearly there is room to grow and improve before [more] public hearings,” a Republican insider recently told Rolling Stone.
It was against this backdrop that Jordan did, in fact, arrange the weaponization committee’s second hearing, which set out to shine a light on internal Twitter communications that ostensibly showed heavy-handed government agents trying to suppress conservatives. In fact, as the chairman began yesterday’s proceedings, in the first minute he claimed government officials contacted Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, to warn the platform about “a hack-and-leak operation” related to Hunter Biden.
To hear Jordan tell it, this was powerful evidence. As a Washington Post analysis noted, it was also evidence that Jordan should’ve recognized as untrue.
Roth testified last month to the House Oversight Committee that it wasn’t the government that suggested such a hack-and-leak operation might involve Hunter Biden; he believed that information actually had come from another company. … Jordan’s summary is also contradicted by a November deposition from the former FBI agent whom Roth cited as warning of the hack-and-leak operations, Elvis Chan.
The Post’s analysis added that Jordan personally asked Roth about this last month, “and Roth again said he had been referring to someone…
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