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 Friday, claiming that it had warned Facebook of “potential threat information.” Notably, the FBI did not dispute Zuckerberg’s account.
Any kind of collusion or cooperation between government actors and private companies to censor American 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 Hunter 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 on multiple occasions met Hunter Biden’s business associates 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 Company Limited 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 Zuckerberg’s 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 do not 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’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 is possible that this investigation led to the FBI finding out that Giuliani had a copy of Hunter’s laptop.
It is also possible that Giuliani made inquiries with his law enforcement contacts, which may have alerted the FBI to Giuliani’s having the laptop. It is widely believed that it was through law enforcement contacts that Giuliani found out about former New York Democratic representative and convicted sex offender Anthony Weiner’s laptop during the 2016 election.
The FBI might also have 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 is also the infamous letter signed by five former CIA directors along with 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 did not have specific foreknowledge, they knew that Mac Isaac had talked to members of Congress and it was therefore likely the story would come out. Mac Isaac now claims that the FBI threatened him to keep quiet about the laptop.
Irrespective 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 is simply not the FBI’s job to warn private companies about what information should or not 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 Zuckerberg is not averse to censorship, having also coordinated with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director 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.”
Zuckerberg 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.
Zuckerberg essentially mounted a private takeover of government election offices, affecting races in key swing states such as Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Zuckerberg clearly was not duped by the FBI into suppressing the Hunter 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 would not 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