Republican House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer was correct when he declared, during Wednesday’s hearing aimed at looking into information surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop, that “it’s wrong for the government to call Twitter and say, ‘Take down a tweet.’” But the evidence revealed at the hearing did not support the GOP’s thesis: that the FBI had ordered Twitter to remove a news story about Hunter Biden’s laptop shortly before the 2020 election.
What we did learn was that in 2019, the Trump White House contacted Twitter to demand a tweet by supermodel Chrissy Teigen mocking then-President Donald Trump be removed.
What happened during this hearing was actually worse for the GOP than simply not proving a point.
Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., responded to this news with a taunting, “My, my, my…. What happens when you hold a hearing and you can’t prove your point?”
Indeed. But what happened during this hearing was actually worse for the GOP than simply not proving a point.
The hearing revealed that Twitter had bent its rules to accommodate Trump’s racist attacks on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and other Democratic women of color in “The Squad.” Witness testimony also divulged that Twitter’s management had refused to remove Trump tweets flagged by the company’s moderation unit in the run-up to the Jan. 6 attack, which members of the unit warned could lead to violence.
These are not the key takeaways Republicans presumably hoped for. Comer had hyped up the event beforehand, claiming it would expose a “coordinated campaign by social media companies … and the intelligence community to suppress and delegitimize the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop.” The crux of these allegations was that the FBI had directed Twitter to ban sharing of a then-“unsubstantiated” New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s activities.
Alas for Comer and his GOP buddies, there was no evidence to support that. James Baker, Twitter’s former…
Read the full article here
