Republicans and their allies had looked forward to Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing for quite a while. At long last, GOP lawmakers would pull back the curtain on rascally Democrats conspiring with equally rascally Twitter employees to suppress stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, squelch conservative criticisms, and silence voices on the right.
It was, Republicans assumed, going to be awesome.
Even before the hearing began, the Biden White House marveled, not only at the odd timing of the Oversight Committee’s gathering — the day after the State of the Union, GOP lawmakers probably should’ve at least pretended to take an interest in actual governing — but also at the subject matter. White House spokesperson Ian Sams said the hearing would inevitably be “a bizarre political stunt.”
If anything, he understated matters. NBC News reported Wednesday on key elements of the hearing actually backfiring on the Republicans who organized it.
The House Republicans’ hearing on Twitter’s “role in suppressing the Biden laptop story” took some unexpected twists Wednesday — including one witness testifying that the White House had requested the platform remove a Chrissy Teigen tweet insulting then-President Donald Trump.
Remember, the whole point of the hearing was to explore the extent to which Democrats pressured Twitter to suppress content from conservatives. It was against this backdrop on Wednesday that Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia asked Anika Collier Navaroli, a former member of Twitter’s content moderation team, about this September 2019 tweet from Teigen, a prominent model and television host, criticizing Donald Trump.
“The White House almost immediately thereafter contacted Twitter to demand the tweet be taken down. Is that accurate?” Connolly asked.
“I do remember hearing we’d received a request from the White House to make sure we evaluated this tweet, and they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory…
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