If there’s one thing to be said for congressional Democrats, it is that they never miss an opportunity to turn a hearing into a circus. They did it once again – mainly in the person of one Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) – on Feb. 8. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability had invited three former top executives of the social media company, Twitter, to testify on the platform’s censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story before, and until some time after, the 2020 election. The influence peddling in which Joe Biden’s son engaged cannot be reburied, but Democrats are still trying because they know how much it would have damaged Mr. Biden as he ran for the presidency. They also know how much it could damage him if he runs for a second term.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) set the stage at the hearing by declaring that Big Tech was “under the control of people who are hostile to the fundamental American principles of free speech.” Most conservatives have known or at least suspected this to be the case for quite some time. It was the emergence of news about the junior Biden’s laptop, however, that sparked interest among Washington, DC, Republicans. The device in question contained evidence that suggested the Biden family had used Joe’s former position as vice president of the United States as leverage to score some lucrative deals. “We owe it to the American people to provide answers about this collusion to censor information about Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s business schemes,” said Comer, before alleging “coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process.”
The Reckoning Begins for Twitter
The release of the so-called Twitter Files exposed a concerted and ongoing effort on the part of various federal government agencies and departments to suppress or even remove articles and opinions posted to the platform. In each case, the posted materials contradicted the official narrative on such topics as COVID-19, the efficacy of masks and vaccines, and so on.
One specific article, however, that Twitter throttled before the presidential election of 2020, would almost certainly have affected the result. A significant percentage of voters surveyed later claimed that knowledge of the laptop story would have changed their voting intentions.
(Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Appearing on Capitol Hill for the hearing were James Baker, Twitter’s former deputy general counsel, Vijaya Gadde, former chief legal officer, and Yoel Roth, former head of safety and integrity. Baker is also a former FBI official and played a central role in the Bureau’s investigation of the now debunked conspiracy theory that Donald Trump worked with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election.
The former Twitter employees were predictably elusive, though Roth did admit that Twitter’s restriction of the Hunter Biden laptop story – first published by the New York Post – was a “mistake.” Roth Claims he was opposed to censoring the Post’s report. “I’ll be the first to admit that we didn’t always get it right,” he told the committee. “Individual content moderation decisions will always be contentious, and reasonable minds can differ about whether a specific choice was right or wrong.”
Roth hasn’t been the only one to offer a mea culpa since various left-leaning media outlets finally – and reluctantly – admitted the laptop story was legitimate. It’s easy to say one is sorry, though, after the damage has been done. How anyone at Twitter could have been oblivious to the implications of such news emerging just weeks before a presidential election is mystifying. They could not possibly have thought that censoring this particular story was of no consequence. They had no proof the Hunter Biden report was disinformation or fake news and so, in a society that values free speech above all else, erring on the side of disclosure would have been the right decision.
Yet these Twitter executives acted on the suggestion of government officials – and the campaign of the presidential candidate who would have been damaged by the story – to deprive the public of news that might well have made them think again about how they would cast their ballots.
Faking Outrage
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez, the verbose former bartender from New York, decided to put on one of her well-rehearsed displays of phony outrage. She described the hearing as “an embarrassment” and a waste of time. “We could be talking about the cost of prescription drugs, abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights,” she ranted, “but instead we’re talking about Hunter Biden’s half fake laptop story.”
Perhaps the New York socialist should have been challenged to explain which half of the story was fake. Even Hunter Biden has now publicly admitted that the laptop, recovered by the FBI from a computer repair shop in Delaware, belongs to him. Further, Joe Biden’s son has not claimed that any of the incriminating emails and other files recovered from the device were somehow planted by a third party seeking to discredit him. In short, there is no evidence that anything reported by the New York Post – or any other media revelations about the content of the laptop – are “fake.”
As for the other issues the disgruntled Democrat thought were more important, none of them fall within the purview of the Oversight Committee. When Trump was president, the Democrats constantly argued that the committee had a solemn duty to investigate matters that raised questions about the conduct of federal government officials. That is precisely what it is now doing. Ultimately, Twitter is not on trial, here. The matter of concern is that this private company was, in effect, pressured or coerced – first by members of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and then by federal officials – to keep certain information from the American people. As the nation begins to look forward (not necessarily in a hopeful manner) to the next election, this whole saga is only going to become a bigger headache for the Biden administration and the Democratic Party.
