Thomas Lifson and other observes have noticed the strange kid-glove treatment that accused crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried has been getting since his arrest in the Bahamas after reportedly misappropriating and losing billions in customer funds.
It was natural to note the huge campaign funding Bankman-Fried delivered, particularly to Democrats, at least $40 million, making him their second-largest donor.
But now another shoe seems to be dropping …
Former New York Post editor Emma-Jo Morris describes how Twitter suppressed her story
Two of the week’s biggest news stories are unfolding in hermetically sealed chambers.
The left half of the country, and the international press, is aghast at the criminal referrals from the January 6 Committee, while the right ignores the panel’s findings as a foregone conclusion, part of a witch hunt against Donald Trump.
1. TWITTER FILES: PART 7
The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop
How the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022
A team is preparing to defend Hunter Biden against an expected onslaught of investigations by House Republicans.
Allies of the president’s son gathered for a private strategy session last September in California where they discussed going after Hunter’s accusers and critics with defamation lawsuits, according the Washington Post.
Hunter’s attorney and friend Kevin Morris suggested at the meeting the suits be filed against Fox News, Eric Trump and Rudy Giuliani, along with a probe into the repairman who handed over his laptop.
“Conspiracy theorist” is one of the great insults of our day. It was thrown at me onstage the other night by the popular pseudo-guru and full-time intellectual fraud Malcolm Gladwell.
Debating in front of 3,000 people about the trustworthiness (or otherwise) of the mainstream media I brought up the Hunter Biden laptop story as an example of how much of the media cannot be trusted. “Oh my God,” wailed Gladwell, like an Upper East Side teenager, flailing his arms around in horror. His colleague — New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg — almost fell off her chair. Both rocked back and forth with laughter and forced histrionics. Fancy my bringing up such a nothing-burger of a story as that, they hooted. What a lot of “conspiracy theory” I appeared to have fallen into.
In December 2020, Yoel Roth (who was Twitter’s Head of Trust & Safety until he resigned last month) told the Federal Election Commission in a sworn affidavit that the FBI specifically warned that Russia would likely release Hunter Biden’s emails before the 2020 election and that those warnings prompted Twitter to censor the New York Post article.
The former intelligence officials who put out a misleading letter suggesting that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation rate the most blame in this episode.
The “Twitter Files” released by Elon Musk give us a more fine-grained understanding of how and why the social-media company decided to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.
This was a woefully stupid decision. The New York Post’s account was suspended for two weeks for the offense of coming up with a scoop that we are still talking about and that will surely play a large role in upcoming GOP investigations into Biden-family corruption.
The former head of trust and safety at Twitter admitted that the company made a mistake when censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Yoel Roth, who resigned earlier in November following Musk’s $44 billion takeover, said the authenticity of the New York Post’s laptop story was difficult for the social media company to verify, and it was quickly censored in October 2020.
Twitter deliberately prevented users from sharing links to a front-page newspaper article about Hunter Biden’s private life and his controversial business ties to Ukraine in the run-up to the 2020 election between Biden’s father and Donald Trump.
On Monday morning, CBS News became the first of the Big Three networks to announce that their “independent forensic review” found Hunter Biden’s laptop is full of authentic contents. They didn’t dwell on how CBS mocked this laptop as Fake News before Biden was elected in 2020. Then CBS did not air a story on Monday evening, or on Tuesday, or on Wednesday. It looks like a one-and-done.
As a tactical concern, the House GOP’s decision to open an investigation into Biden family corruption is questionable. It promises limited political return. It would serve Republicans, and the country, far better if the House focused on a hyper-politicized Justice Department that targets the political opposition, labels concerned parents “domestic terrorists” and ignores violence aimed at pregnancy centers, for starters.
I hope Musk follows through … ‘Restore public trust’: Musk says Twitter must explain Hunter Biden laptop censorship
Elon Musk has insisted that full disclosure on Twitter’s decision to censor The Post’s exclusive story about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop is “necessary” in order to restore public trust in the social media giant.
The world’s richest man, who purchased the platform last month, made his position clear late Wednesday when he responded to a Twitter user who asked whether the internal communications that led to the censorship decision should be released.
I love it.
CBS has finally admitted Hunter Biden’s laptop is real – 20 months after DailyMail.com authenticated its contents with top experts.
When files from the laptop were published before the 2020 presidential election, 60 Minutes host Lesley Stahl insisted in an interview with Donald Trump that the contents couldn’t be verified.
The network was among a wide range of left-leaning outlets such as the New York Times and MSNBC who doubted the authenticity as the Biden administration insisted it was Russian disinformation.
I was expecting to hear more about Hunter Biden’s laptop after the midterm elections. But I wasn’t expecting it quite this fast. On Thursday, a day after the Republican Party scraped a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, the Republican congressman James Comer said he would lead an investigation into the overseas business activities of President Biden’s son. But he made clear the real target of his inquiry.
House Republicans announced Thursday that they are launching an investigation that will focus on President Biden himself and any illicit or unethical financial ties he had to his son Hunter’s overseas dealings.
Now Joe Biden and his family are facing an onslaught of subpoenas from the House majority members, who say they know where the proverbial bodies are buried.
James Comer, the GOP ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, will have the power to issue legally-backed demands for documents, information and testimony once the 188th Congress begins on January 3.
Republicans are claiming that President Joe Biden was involved in his son Hunter’s controversial foreign business deals, which allegedly spans 50 different countries, lawmakers said in a press conference on Thursday.
It comes one day after the GOP clinched 218 seats in the House of Representatives, cementing their majority – and investigative powers – in the next Congress.
The president has long denied involvement in and knowledge of his son’s foreign dealings – some of which are being investigated by federal authorities.
