Burying Truth under Bulls**t
Election Integrity should not be a partisan issue, but in a political landscape as polarised as the United States everything seems partisan and the truth gets buried underneath a zero-sum game of tribal politics. Ever since the October 2020 NY Post article on Hunter Biden’s laptop, House and Senate Republicans, in addition to right wing media talking heads at Fox and elsewhere, have used the laptop along with the Twitter and Facebook Files to smear the Biden family and call for impeachment. They have alleged corruption on an unimaginable scale, accusing Joe Biden of being compromised by Ukrainian or Chinese interests, ironically similar to how Democrats alleged Trump was a Russian asset.
On the other side of the aisle, House and Senate Democrats have spent the last three years framing any of the substantiated information on the laptop as inconsequential, and during the last year have tried to ignore the Twitter Files leaks and delegitimise them as an overblown right-wing conspiracy, most obviously during the House Committee hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Even more suspicious, the journalists working on the Twitter Files and exposing the Security State’s overreach have received threats from government agencies, such as lead investigator Matt Taibbi having the IRS appear at his door the morning of his testimony before Congress. As Taibbi put it, when the government begins investigating journalists in such a way, its usually “a canary in the coal mine”.
We do know that Hunter Biden and James Biden, the President’s brother, through Ukrainian energy company Burisma and Chinese company CEFC respectively, have made millions of dollars through ‘no-work’ business deals. One has to assume that the president either organised or was at least conscious of these deals. Obviously, this is reprehensible on a number of levels, but politicians and their families using power and influence to cut sweetheart deals and enrich themselves is only a surprise if you live under a rock.
In fact, the former president’s children did the same. Look no further than Ivanka Trump’s rapid approval of trademarks from Chinese companies after her father became president, or her husband Jared Kushner’s securing of a $2 billion dollar investment granted by the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. These are similarly blatant abuses of power in which the first family used their influence to orchestrate financial gains.
Both sides ignore the hypocrisy of criticising the other for corruption or nepotism. It’s almost as if instead of arguing over which policies will benefit the general populous, our civil servants solely focus on smearing the other side, all in the pursuit of winning elections and retaining their positions on Capitol Hill, and therefore retaining their ability to receive lobbyist cheques and insider trading opportunities....After all, there is no shortage of studies investigating how political intelligence is used for profit in Washington (Jerke, 2010; Bainbridge, 2010; Jagolinzer et al. 2020).
Until these financial opportunities and incentives are outlawed or regulated you can’t expect politicians to pursue truth or enact policy that betters the lives of their constituents, they simply have too many conflicts of interest to conduct themselves as civil servants instead of entrepreneurs. Fomenting the culture wars on Capitol Hill, social media, or cable news benefits their grift as it exacerbates tribalism and implores citizens to protest less consequential issues like the “Don’t Say Gay Bill” or “Critical Race Theory” while distracting from the key issues like endless military spending, imperialist foreign policy, or the fact that federal lobbying spending reached 4.1$ billion in 2022 alone.
Nobody expects politics to be 100% clean, but at the moment it’s riddled. How is anyone supposed to pass a bill that helps ordinary Americans if $4.1 billion worth of corporate money is dictating the provisions of those bills? The tribal culture wars are the proverbial rug under which the Security State sweeps these glaring issues. Business Insider’s ‘Conflicted Congress’ series does excellent work on tracking the unpunished violations and inconspicuous financial dealings of Congress members, it’s worth a look.
All of this futile tribalism and political theatre, as it so often does, obfuscates the real story at hand. The Twitter files unveiled what seemed to be an aggressive push by the intelligence community to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story for being Russian disinformation, even though the FBI was aware that the laptop’s contents were authentic as they had possession of it back in 2019. This is where election interference stops being a theory of deranged Trump supporters and starts being an immediate and legitimate concern that we should all share.
The losing side will always find a way to claim voter fraud or quibble over mail in ballots, and these complaints rarely amount to anything as was the case in 2020. The difference this time is that the Intelligence community seem to be culpable, highlighting the futility of a left-right dispute. This means that even if partisan Republicans like Jim Jordan are beating the ‘Biden censorship regime’ drum, one must engage with the evidence at hand from the Twitter Files. Ignoring information because it doesn’t benefit your side or because partisan actors on the other side will use it disingenuously, defeats the purpose of political discourse and truth-seeking. Therefore, we will now take a look at the key discoveries from the Twitter Files about the Hunter Biden story and election integrity.
Election Integrity:
The Twitter Files leaks over the past year have strongly suggested that the U.S. Intelligence apparatus willfully lied to the public in the runup to the 2020 Presidential election and conducted widescale social media censorship of those that challenged the election results. They censored and labelled as Russian propaganda, information which they knew was factually true, thereby seemingly running a disinformation campaign against the U.S. populous in order to affect the outcome of an election. Unlike the WMDs disinformation campaign of the early 2000s which was used to justify war, this happened to interfere with a domestic election, highlighting how unabashed and unconstrained the current iteration of the U.S. Security State has become.
Journalist Lee Fang formerly of the Intercept made an appearance on political commentator Coleman Hughes’ show recently to discuss this government censorship operation. He too worked on the Twitter Files and was privy to the leaks. In fact, Fang’s work on Twitter Files No. 8 unveiled the Pentagon’s work with Twitter between 2017-2020 to promote or “whitelist” 52 Arab language accounts which they “use to amplify certain messages”. Essentially these were used as propaganda accounts, to sow discord and conduct online PSYOPs (psychological operation), “including promoting anti-Iran messages, promotion of the Saudi Arabia-U.S. backed war in Yemen, and “accurate” U.S. drone strikes that claimed to only hit terrorists.”
Regarding the censorship of those who challenged the validity of the 2020 Presidential election, Fang made an interesting comment. With every election we often see “hyperbolic claims from the losing side” says Fang, and “you did see a lot of that, a lot of untrue claims, but is that a case for mass censorship…and by a government agency nudging it along, I don’t think so”.
He prefaced this statement by alluding to a similar storyline covered in the 2004 election. In this instance, Democrats claimed that Ohio’s ballot results were rigged because the state had used voting machines owned by a Bush donor. This allegation accompanied the customary accusations of mishandled absentee and provisional ballots. It is still speculated that the machines were hacked and that Michael Pollen, Bush’s “IT guru” that created the controversial vote transferring system, was involved. Naturally this caused a fervour. The point is, claims of voter fraud, election rigging, and unfair play while untrue in 2020, were not an exception, they are the norm.
Fang goes on to point out that the DHS didn’t run an operation to silence and deplatform the people making these claims in 2004, unlike today. In fact, the government response in 2004 to allow the free flow of information around such a hot button issue led to the truth prevailing. In contrast the government’s response in 2020 was one of aggressive censorship, removing dissenting voices from the social discourse, leading to a more unstable situation. Information and opinions were blatantly suppressed and truth about election interference seemed unobtainable.
This only fueled the fire of diehard Trumpers that believed the election was rigged. It begs the question that if this mass censorship apparatus had not been in place, even with the influence of a powerful populist candidate like Trump, would the truth have been easier to acquire in an unfettered marketplace of ideas? Would the dissociative panic and paranoia evident in many of those that marched on the Capitol on January 6th have manifested if they weren’t manipulated so aggressively, not by Trump’s populism and demeanour (which was nothing new), but by their own government.
Aspen Institute
The role of the Censorship Industrial Complex in the 2020 election is made particularly clear by Michael Shellenberger’s reporting on the Aspen Institute Conference. During 2020, various social media executives including Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth, along with journalists from the NY Times, Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets, participated in an Aspen Institute workshop “aimed at convincing journalists that they shouldn’t focus on leaked materials and instead focus on the person who leaked them” writes Shellenberger. According to the Twitter Files leaks of the conference, journalists were encouraged to “break the Pentagon Papers principle”.
This principle was established through the 1971 decision by the NY Times and Washington Post to publish leaked Pentagon Papers detailing the U.S. failures in the Vietnam War, failures that Lyndon B. Johnon’s administration had kept secret. It stood for nearly fifty years as the gold standard of journalism, setting the precedent for future landmark reports such as the Watergate Scandal and Eric Snowden’s NSA leaks. Now journalists were being implored by government funded NGOs to abandon it.
The workshops were organised and run by the Aspen Institute and Stanford’s Cyber Policy Centre in August and September 2020. Aspen Institute is a top U.S. think tank that receives millions of dollars of funding from the State Department, and hosts an annual Aspen Security Forum featuring intelligence officials from the DHS, CIA and FBI as guests. These events are run in partnership with elite liberal media conglomerates such as CNN in 2015. Although they claim to be a “non-partisan” entity these ties to the Intelligence community and liberal media organisations are hard to ignore if one intends to conduct an objective analysis of where their allegiances lie.
These workshops were either an unfathomable coincidence, or evidence of an influence operation where these organisations were “running sessions to brainwash journalists” per Shellenberger. The sessions included a “Hack & Leak” Tabletop in which a hypothetical story involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s illegal business dealings with Ukrainian energy company Burisma would be leaked in the runup to the election (remember this was a month before any of this information had been revealed at all). The minutes from the Aspen Institute tabletop exercise can be viewed here, and they eerily match up with the exact chronology of events that transpired one month later.
At the conference, journalists were told to be wary of a leak of this kind involving Hunter Biden as it would most likely be Russian propaganda. However, as we now know from Twitter Files No.7, the FBI had possession of Hunter Biden’s Laptop in December 2019, almost a full year before this Aspen Institute Workshop. The FBI’s possession of the laptop was also over a year before the October 14th, 2020, NY Post article broke the story to the public.
There doesn’t need to be some formal grand conspiracy to believe here, a government funded NGO that runs annual Security conferences with intelligence officials and journalists, receiving direction from the Intelligence community on what to discuss at a forum is completely normal. It is only when the direction they receive is intentionally misleading that it becomes abnormal.
It is certain that at least some members of the Intelligence community were aware that the reporting on the laptop was factual, yet they responded by labelling the story as Russian disinformation in the media, and by pressuring Facebook and Twitter to censor the article accordingly. Their goal from the workshops was to “shape how the media covered it-and how social media picked it up”.
Meanwhile, contemporaneous to the FBI’s manipulation of Twitter staff and journalists to pre-bunk the Hunter Biden story, the Censorship Industrial Complex was at work. Government agencies from the FBI, DHS, to their subsidiary organisations such as Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, just to name a few, were censoring citizens indirectly through Twitter and other social media platforms. The methods included shadow banning which they call “visibility filtering”, in addition to blacklisting and removing accounts at the behest of these government agencies. They even requested the removal of satirical posts they deemed as misinformation, and although most censorship occurred of red-leaning posts, they also demoted satirical blue-leaning posts, proving how gung-ho they were about violating the First Amendment. Taibbi reported in Twitter Files No.6 that “the company one day received so many moderation requests from the FBI, an executive congratulated staffers at the end for completing the “monumental undertaking.” In other words, Twitter was functioning as an FBI subsidiary, allowing them and related organisations to routinely send lists of accounts or posts to remove or demote. These posts were often benign too with low levels of engagement, containing humour, or simply imploring people to vote.
Of course, private companies such as Twitter have the right to censor in whatever way they see fit. The issue is when government agencies pressure or demand that these companies censor accounts and speech, as this violates the First Amendment. Perhaps some degree of misinformation regulation is necessary in order to prevent the public from following objectively false narratives, but this should be up to the platform and should be transparent. As Twitter and Facebook simply remove or flag posts as misinformation without explaining why, and often do so because the government requests it, you end up with an information landscape that is far too influenced by the government and their desired policy objectives.
This censorship only fuels anti-establishment conspiracy theories which ironically lead to more misinformation. The theory of free speech is that the best ideas rise through the marketplace of ideas, but this can only happen if wrong speech is allowed. We can’t throw away hundreds of years of Enlightenment principles surrounding tolerance and freedom of expression because people are making the argument that free speech propagates hate speech or free speech breeds disinformation. This debate has already been settled centuries ago, free expression is the only thing keeping any semblance of transparency and culpability between a government and its citizens. While I am by no means a free speech absolutist as that position is untenable to me for reasons I will discuss another time, it does seem that the principles of free speech upon which the United States was founded are fundamentally antithetical to the government censorship apparatus that permeates the zeitgeist today.
Twitter Files No.7
Just to recount, the circumstantial evidence that an influence campaign or disinformation campaign was conducted by the intelligence community against social media executives, high-ranking journalists, and the U.S. populous, in order to pre bunk the Hunter Biden laptop story is alarming. Here are the essential events from Twitter Files No.7 as laid out by Shellenberger.
-Throughout 2020 Twitter received pressure from the Intelligence community to share user data, classified information and to change their API.
-The FBI continues to probe Twitter requesting evidence of foreign influence on the platform which Twitter does not see. Yoel Roth responds saying “[W]e haven’t yet identified activity that we’d typically refer to you (or even flag as interesting in the foreign influence context).”- Read the full email here.
-FBI agent Elvis Chan grants Yoel Roth and some colleagues of his choice temporary top secret security clearance about 30 days before the 2020 election.
-Chan then shares information with Roth regarding Russian intelligence hacking group APT28, putting him on high alert for Russian disinformation. Roth later describes how this information critically effected his view of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
- The priming of Roth’s response to a Hunter Biden based story as Russian disinformation is again unambiguous as seen in his sworn declaration on the matter in December 2022 (below)
-Former General Counsel of the FBI Jim Baker and former chief of staff to FBI head James Comey begin working at Twitter in the summer of 2020. These were two key figures (Baker especially) in the push for investigation into ties between Donald Trump and Russia also known as Russiagate. Safe to say they were not Trump fans.
-During this time, so many former FBI agents began working at Twitter that “they had created their own private Slack channel and crib sheet to onboard new arrivals” Shellenberger writes.
-Yoel Roth, former Facebook head of security policy, and top journalists attend the Aspen Institute conference in September 2020 where the covert influencing of their attitudes towards a leak continues.
-Mid September 2020, Elvis Chan and Yoel Roth set up an encrypted messaging system specifically for FBI employees to communicate with Twitter.
-September 15th Jim Baker has a private meeting with Elvis Chan and Laura Dehmlow (head of the Foreign Influence Task Force) where no Twitter employees are present, not even Yoel Roth.
-October 14th NY Post article is released. Yoel Roth does not see the story as clearly violative of their Hacked Materials Policy. Immediately, Jim Baker begins insisting that the Hunter Biden materials were leaked or hacked and that they could be a “complete fabrication”.
-As Shellenberger writes it is “inconceivable that Baker believed the Hunter Biden emails were faked or hacked” as the NY Post article included a receipt signed by Hunter Biden along with the FBI subpoena in December 2019 proving they had possession of the Laptop before.
- By 10am Twitter execs believed that the laptop materials were hacked and unreliable. The FBI had succeeded with no evidence to convince the platform to censor the article.
What Next?
Although it inevitably has been, this information need not be politicised. Whether these leaks benefit Republicans or Democrats or whether they suit your own ideological viewpoint is irrelevant. This is not a partisan talking point, it’s a bipartisan issue that transcends any feudal tribal politics like Republican vs Democrat or Left vs Right.
This information should concern citizens given that the lawsuits surrounding this censorship, such as the September 8th, 2023, ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals against the White House, the Surgeon General, the CDC and the FBI for First Amendment violations, will have enormous implications for Constitutional Law in the United States. It seems that the unravelling of this ‘agency capture’ in U.S. politics, which has gone unchecked for far too many decades, will be the defining story of the first half of the 21st century.