FBI tries to rationalize its misconduct about Hunter's laptop
On Friday, the stunning news broke that the FBI had gone to Facebook in October of 2020 to “warn” the social media giant that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation. That revelation came via Mark Zuckerberg himself on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
The FBI’s actions helped pushed a regime of censorship just prior to the election that very well could have altered the results given the small margin in three states that decided things. It was election interference on a stunning scale, carried out in a way that can only be explained by political weaponization.
Of course, the FBI thinks that the American people are idiots, so they’ve offered a lump of weasel words in response knowing a willing press will run the headlines they want. Here’s NBC News with its report.
In a statement Friday night, the FBI said it has provided companies with “foreign threat indicators” to help protect their platforms and customers, but that it “cannot ask, or direct, companies to take action on information received.”
“The FBI routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats,” the agency said.
Did you get all that? The FBI “cannot ask, or direct companies to take action on information received.” Clearly, that means the bureau did nothing wrong here. They were just giving a warning and letting the social media companies do as they will.
Conversely, that willfully misses the point of what people are even criticizing the FBI for. As I explained in a prior article, they’ve had Hunter Biden’s laptop since 2019. What that logically means is that when FBI agents went to Facebook (and presumably, all other major social media companies) to “warn” about a “threat” that they knew was false.
There was no question at that point that the laptop was not Russian disinformation. Yet, the FBI played it up as that anyway, knowing full well that Facebook and others would run to censor the story. Why? Because those same companies had been under heavy congressional pressure to stop disinformation and misinformation. In other words, whether the FBI actually “directed” Facebook to do anything is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that they set the stage for what happened, knowing that they were misleading the social media companies in doing so. In the ironies of all ironies, the FBI used disinformation to frame something as disinformation in order to harm a political opponent.
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At best, this is a statement trying to cover incompetence. They either knew the laptop was Hunters and was real or they deliberately failed to examine it. The statements of the agents responsible for this fiasco suggest they were trying to rig the election for Biden by covering up important evidence of corruption and an influence-peddling operation.
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