FBI accused of avoiding legal process for gathering evidence

 Caroline Downey:

The FBI repeatedly pressured Twitter to grant agents access to user data in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, according to documents revealed as part of the seventh installment of the “Twitter Files” exposé.

In January 2020, former Twitter Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth resisted the bureau’s efforts to coerce the platform into providing data outside of the normal search-warrant process, according to an analysis of internal documents conducted by journalist Michael Shellenberger. New Twitter CEO Elon Musk enlisted Shellenberger, and independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, to dissect and report on the records.

Roth was intimately involved in the old management’s content-moderation regime, which Musk has accused of disproportionately censoring right-wing political thought. For example, Roth led the team responsible for suppressing the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop bombshell.

However, records reveal that Roth resist FBI intrusion into Twitter’s operations.

In December 2019, a supervisory special agent of the FBI’s national security cyber wing working out of the bureau’s San Francisco field office asked Roth if the company would revise its terms of service to permit a vendor contracted with the bureau to access the Twitter data feed. Agent Elvis Chan extended an invite to Roth to discuss the matter in person with his “colleagues.”

Weeks later, Roth wrote a suggested response to a colleague rejecting Chan’s offer and taking a firm stance to protect user privacy.
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“We have seen a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our API policies. They are probing & pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to congressional staff),” he wrote to Roth.

The sixth installment of the “Twitter Files,” synthesized by Taibbi, broke the news that the FBI had frequently communicated with Roth’s team before Elon Musk bought the company. Between January 2020 and November 2022, over 150 emails were exchanged between the FBI and Roth, Taibbi uncovered.

Throughout 2020, the FBI asked Twitter to search for evidence of foreign influence, specifically accounts linked to Russian entities. On September 24, 2020, Twitter updated the FBI that it had removed 345 “largely inactive” accounts “linked to previous coordinated Russian hacking attempts” that “had little reach & low follower accounts.”

Flash forward to summer 2020, the FBI was still nagging Twitter for proof of foreign meddling, such as in a tweet from Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), according to an email Shellenberger reviewed.
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This looks more like an attempt by the FBI to interfere in the 2020 election by using Russia as an excuse for their interference.  It is either that or rank incompetence in the belief that Russia was interfering.  If they had a valid reason for getting the material they could get a court order to do so.

Congress should be investigating the politicization of the FBI and taking steps to hold those who responsible for it accountable.