The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government plans to shine a spotlight on the FBI misconduct revealed in the “Twitter Files” at the panel’s second hearing, scheduled for next week.
On March 9, lawmakers participating in the bipartisan probe will hear from a trio of writers who were the primary journalists given access to Twitter’s internal records by the company’s new CEO Elon Musk. Substack reporters Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger will testify at the daytime hearing.
In December, Taibbi began to unravel how the company made censorship decisions based on political motivations. Part 6 of the series detailed how Twitter was used as a conduit for the FBI to influence voters ahead of the 2020 election with “constant and pervasive” contact. The FBI partnered with the Silicon Valley tech giant to suppress right-leaning content throughout the presidential election cycle. That suppression appears to be continuing.
Part 7 of the “Twitter Files,” published by Shellenberger, showcased how the FBI launched an operation to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop that implicated President Joe Biden in global influence-peddling schemes. The federal agency even arranged to provide security clearances for Twitter executives and paid $3.4 million in taxpayer dollars to the platform. Jim Baker, Twitter’s then-deputy general counsel who pushed for censorship of the laptop, was a former general counsel at the FBI who was instrumental in creating the Russia hoax.
“Put simply,” explained Federalist Senior Editor John Davidson at Hillsdale College last month, “the ‘Twitter Files’
