True Fascism: The FBI gave Twitter millions; more FBI agents employed by Twitter
The saga continues as we go even further down the rabbit hole, with some startling revelations about just how entrenched the FBI was at Twitter.
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Michael Shellenberger’s latest contribution to the Twitter Files has not disappointed. It offers a poignant look into the unholy relationship the FBI had with Twitter’s old guard, and it shows us just how the shadowy hand of the government functioned to protect one of their own.
Let’s start with a brief summary on the laptop and the guy who turned it in to the FBI.
John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer store owner who had Hunter Biden's laptop contacted the FBI in December of 2019 to inform them of Hunter Biden's laptop after discovering possible criminal evidence against Hunter Biden on it.
By the 9th of December, the FBI had issued a subpoena for the laptop, taking it into their custody, but doing nothing with it.
With no apparent action being taken by the FBI to do anything with Hunter Biden's lap, Mac Isaac contacted Rudy Giuliani in August of 2020 and entrusted him with the Hunter Biden laptop files. The FBI, however, had Giuliani under surveillance at that time, so Giuliani sat on those files until October of 2020 before turning them over to the New York Post.
Hunter Biden's lawyer, George Mesires, contacted Mac Isaac upon learning of the New York Post story that was to come out the next day. There wasn't much in the email, just thanking Mac Isaac for corresponding with the appropriate records. However, the next email we're going to be discussing comes a little later that night. It tells us that Hunter Biden and his lawyer also got in touch with the FBI after learning of the impending news drop from the New York Post.
According to the email's timestamp, Agent Elvis Chan makes another cameo in an email to Yoel Roth on Oct. 13th 2020 at 9:22 ET to inform Roth that he had sent over 10 documents by way of Teleporter -- a communication app used by the FBI to send information to Twitter.
We don't exactly know what was in those 10 documents, but given the timing, I would bet dollars to donuts it had everything to do with Hunter Biden's laptop.
The next day, the New York Post's story drops, and news outlets as well as social media companies get to work putting the freeze on this whole thing. Within hours, the story was being heavily censored across all major platforms, and the groundwork to make sure no one in Twitter or any other big tech company took the story as anything more than Russian disinformation had been in play for a long time before that.
Keep in mind, the FBI received the laptop in December of 2019. That gave them 9 months to get their story straight on this whole thing, and Yoel Roth spoke of having regular meetings with the DHS, FBI, and even the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He also states that industry peers were in attendance, so we can assume that every major social media platform was represented.
So the official story was that the laptop was a 'hack-and-leak' operation perpetrated by Russians to smear the Biden family and influence election results to be more favorable to Trump. I don't have to rehash that story here, as I'm sure we are all well aware of just how big a lie that was. The real Big Lie™, I would say.
These concerns over said hack-and-leak operations were entirely unfounded, as Agent Chan admitted back in November tha they (the FBI) had not encountered "any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016," which is funny since he seems to still be pretending that the Russian election interference narrative was somehow legitimate and that they had encountered nothing comparable during the 2020 election. Chan’s testimony on this matter can be seen here.
There seemed to be an agenda, though, as the FBI and Twitter would go back and forth multiple times, with the FBI adamantly asking time and again for proof of any foreign influence on the platform, but there was very little evidence to support that scenario. Still, it didn't stop them from trying. And this likely tied into the FBI taking the reins on moderating Twitter to make sure no one quietly deleted proof that would vindicate the bureau's lies during that whole Russiagate fiasco. For more context, see this email which does the FBI no favors, as the accounts that Roth mentions are largely inactive and had miniscule followings to begin with. It’s not exactly easy to manipulate public opinion with zero reach. Ask me how I know.
Yoel Roth almost looks noble in the string of emails and correspondance that shows him shooting down repeated inquiries by the FBI into possible foreign influence on social media posts and news articles that turned out to be hoaxes. Humorously, they caught Ben Collins in a lie here. But then the truth isn’t something he’s known for. A keyboard and time does not a terrorist make.
A story from Washington Post (should’ve known that one was bullshit) claimed that a pro-Trump copypasta (copy and pasted story/post/etc) was somehow the result of foreign influence because the message was propagated quickly, like MAGA people don’t do that with every Pro-Trump post. Nothing to see here, Elvis.
According to another email between Yoel Roth and another staffer at Twitter named Carlos Monje Jr., FBI and other intelligence community agencies were putting a lot of pressure on Twitter to find evidence of things that were not happening. These inquiries by the FBI also extended to companies whose apps integrated with Twitter’s API. This caused those companies to point the finger back at Twitter when they got contacted by the FBI, clearly not wanting to deal with the Feds themselves if they could help it.
In July of 2020, however, Agent Chan arranged for some top level security clearance for some trusted Twitter staff that Yoel Roth himself would hand pick for the responsibility of handling classified materials. Considering all the FBI staff we’ll be talking about later, I’d say he had plenty of people ready to handle that. When James Baker was mentioned, Chan suddenly had his memory jogged, or so he claimed.
”I can’t believe I forgot about him,” said Agent Chan. Yes, very odd indeed since these two worked together. Seems like a run-of-the-mill case of habitually disavowing one of his undercover colleagues, to me.
For more on James Baker, see the article I wrote that featured him. Click here.
This next part is where you see the conditioning aspect of this whole story come into play, as Agent Chan starts planting the seeds of Russian hackers and foreign agents in Roth’s head to make sure that once something like the Hunter Biden laptop comes to his attention, he will believe wholeheartedly that he’s looking at Russian disinformation. And guess what? It worked splendidly, though I would also wager that Roth has enough confirmation bias that anything would’ve been received in this manner, unless it was positively related to Trump, then it would’ve been fair game.
Discussing this time in history on-stage with Kara Swisher of the Knight Foundation, we get an insight into how much confirmation bias Roth had built up when confronted with the Hunter Biden laptop story.
"It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leap campaign alarm bells,” Roth said. The phrasing is odd to me, like he is trying to convince himself he didn’t get duped, and subtly suggesting he still believes in the veracity of the Russian disinformation narrative.
Roth’s conditioning would continue on into September of 2020 as he would attend a chilling sort of tabletop exercise entitled “The Burisma Leak” put on by the Aspen Institute, an elitist thinktank group with clear insider info, as this exercise was put on before the Hunter Biden story ever broke.
The tabletop exercise begins by talking about documents being leaked from Burisma, Hunter Biden's previous 'employer' in Ukraine, and one of the most glaring examples of the influence peddling scheme the Bidens had running in foreign nations while Joe Biden was still Vice President.
It goes through the motions talking about how the story would have been proliferated, from Fox News to social media and the like. I find it funny that Rudy Giuliani was also included in this. Again, this was in September of 2020. The Hunter Biden laptop story was published on October 14th of that year. So yeah, we had some people on the inside who knew what was going on well before the public did, and they gamed out a scenario to prepare for the leak, like they knew it was coming. And they made sure they made the scenario play out as if the ‘leak’ was a giant hoax. That is textbook predictive programming of people who were in a position to engage that very scenario and they weren’t taught to be impartial, they were taught to assume that anything they see is fake.
That would've been a major red flag for me, if I were Roth. How would a scenario like that come down the pipe after you participated in a tabletop exercise featuring the same individuals as the actual story? That's too on-the-nose for me. But, again, I don't have his confirmation bias. I often forget I'm talking about the same political party who would sacrifice a live baby just so they didn't have to be disappointed by election results ever again.
Sacrificing babies is kind of a Democrat thing in general, really. But I digress.
The organizer was Vivian Schiller, whose stacked media resume includes being the former CEO of NPR, as well as former head of news at Twitter. She was also a former general manager of the New York Times, and former chief digital officer of NBC News.
Attendees included Meta's head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher; journalists Noah Shachtman and Janine Zacharia; policy manager for influence operations at Facebook, Olga Belogolova; and national security reporters for the New York Times and Washington Post, Andrew James Grotto and Ellen Nakashima, respectively. Also in attendance was newsroom lawyer for the New York Times, David McCraw.
Quite the who’s who of insiders who seem very willing to keep a secret for their own benefit.
Going back to Twitter specifically, Laura Dehmlow, the infamous FBI Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) Chief, makes her way on the scene in mid-September to request that she and Elvis Chan have a private briefing about classified information with their man on the inside with security clearance, James Baker. This should have been when Roth realized that the FBI was just using Twitter and its staff as a cudgel for dealing with this little matter of the laptop story for them before the election that year. But as we know with leftists like Roth, the ends justify the means, and he didn’t care how they arrived at that point, just as long as Democrats, namely Joe Biden, won out in the end.
Fast-forwarding to Oct. 14th, the day of the leak, we get this email from Yoel Roth where he describes the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post as not being in clear violation of any of their rules, including their hacked materials policy. This set James Baker into motion, lying about ‘experts’ claiming the emails were fabricated, practically insisting that the materials were fake and that Twitter should just nuke it all off the platform under their hacked materials policy. He used the passive aggressive assumption method to get his way, like a Karen.
Kind of funny, really. It’s almost like James Baker is finally admitting all his past work on the Steele Dossier and Russiagate was fake, and that he knew the Hunter Biden laptop story was fake because he had been in that business a few years prior.
Even in the face of the receipt that was signed at the computer store by Hunter Biden being authenticated, James Baker still believed the story to be a fake, maintaining the method of manipulation that the FBI has been using this whole time — to sell the lie that any materials emerging about the Bidens was fake and should be disregarded.
In fact, the FBI weren’t even the ones to prove that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden, that job was done by journalist Peter Schweizer. It’s clear that the FBI didn’t want these materials to be real, otherwise they would have done the work in an impartial manner, but 2022 has shown us, the FBI is nothing more than an activist organization with federal law enforcement powers that they abuse any time they like with no reprisal.
Yoel Roth decreed in an email around 10 am on Oct. 14th that they (Twitter) were going to proceed as if the laptop fell under their hacked materials policy. "The key factor informing our approach is consensus from experts," says Roth. From this point forward, you can really only assume that experts insisting that the laptop is fake are from the FBI, as they seem to have the greatest interest in selling that lie to the world.
“The suggestion from experts - which rings true - is there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware (and was coincidentally reviewed in a very invasive way by someone who coincidentally then handed the materials to Rudy Giuliani). Given the severe risks we saw in this space in 2016, we're recommending a warning + deamplification pending further information.”
Again, I can personally attest that Twitter was very aggressive in shutting this thing down, as I made videos to bypass the censorship barrier so that people on Twitter could see the laptop story. Those posts were very quickly nuked off the platform.
Given that Elon Musk just recently said that Twitter’s machine learning and AI utilization is ‘primitive’, then I can assume that either the FBI or Twitter staff personally ran a fine-toothed comb over all of Twitter to manually shut down posts like mine, because they have clearly never had sophisticated ML/AI purposed for scanning the contents of videos in the first place.
With the seeds of doubt sewn, the chaos ensues as the leftist media quickly adopts the narrative calling the laptop ‘Russian disinformation’ in order to establish a buzzword to make the #votebluenomatterwho crowd shut down in short order. The hill even published some garbage saying that Giuliani was the target of a Russian influence campaign.
Trump Derangement Syndrome was on display in full force with this email from CURRENT Senior Director, Global Public Policy Strategy, Development and Partnerships at Twitter, Nick Pickles, browbeating a Twitter staffer whose name was redacted.
Pickles seemed to go full authoritarian here, insisting that he was right and that they should censor anything remotely related to this leak because he wants to “protect the public conversation”. AKA, censor anything he doesn’t like so his team wins this victory over the orange man™, Donald Trump.
Now that the FBI's Big Lie™ had been formulated, they needed to sell it to more important people, or at least put their biased and erroneous conclusions out into the ether to make sure that any voters who see this information will doubt its authenticity and assume without evidence that it is Russian disinformation.
Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson received a briefing just as they were finishing up a report on Hunter Biden's financial connections to to foreign governments and questionable foreign nationals. That is information that also existed on the laptop, by the way. Naturally, the FBI and IC (intelligence community) briefing was insisting they were dealing with Russian interference.
Grassley and Johnson responded by lashing out at the FBI's efforts to discredit their investigation. They expressed their concerns directly to FBI director Christopher Wray on this matter, accusing him and the FBI under his leadership of doing the bidding of Democrats who were scared of what information Grassley and Johnson had unconvered by poisoning the well with allegations of foreign influence. We now know from the partisan persecution efforts from the DOJ and FBI to stifle conservative voices and politicians, that that is 100% true.
In December of 2020, in the wake of a tumultuous and hotly contested election, James Baker and others at Twitter were in a celebratory mood as they congratulated and thanked the FBI agents they worked with directly on their joint efforts to manipulate the results of the Presidential election to get their desired result. Here’s the email.
The ‘letter’ that was drafted in thanks to the FBI is pure drivel.
“Twitter was on the front line of protecting our users (and the public at large) from misinformation/disinformation campaigns that had the potential to negatively affect the fair election process.” said the self-aggrandizing individual, before proceeding to fellate everyone involved in the process of manipulating an election by suppressing pertinent information related to the character and honesty of Joe Biden, who has proceeded to sell the American people down the river for his own benefit ever since taking office.
I mentioned earlier that Twitter was also paid by the FBI as well, to the tune of $3.4 million dollars, for the privilege of effectively taking over the most important social media apparatus for election manipulation. That seems like a bargain, if you ask me. But we have our basis for bribery as well. They can say it was for the staff’s time if they wish, but those people are already paid to do that job, anyway. This was a bribe.
So at least it’s over, right? Not quite.
This type of work is seemingly never done, as there is evidence as recent as August 25th, 2022, where Twitter executives are preparing themselves for a meeting with the FBI who want more dirt on people via EDRs (emergency disclosure requests, AKA searching someone digitally without a wrrant, in this case. You didn’t think that type of thing stopped with Ed Snowden’s whistleblowing efforts, did you? No, that’s par for the course for the U.S. government.
It’s funny how these probing efforts never find their way to people like the Bidens, who are clearly above the law, if Hunter Biden’s antics are any indication.
I find myself asking why one family warrants this much protection. Just why is it that the Bidens seem to be nigh untouchable? My guess is that it’s because Joe Biden could probably take down a sizeable chunk of the establishment in Washington right along with him. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think all of these shady practices were conducted for the benefit of the Bidens alone, but they’ve certainly benefited the most out of anyone.
As we all know, Joe Biden has been a fixture in Washington for 50 years, since he was elected to the U.S. Senate to represent Delaware in 1972. So needless to say, he's entrenched himself deeply into the swamp.
It seems only fitting, then, that the Washington establishment would play all sorts of tricks as a favor to their boy and his family by using whatever means they have at their disposal to protect the Bidens from prosecution. This also serves to spare Joe Biden from the bad press that Hunter Biden's laptop brought to the fore. Not that there would've been any mainstream press that would have touched a negative story about Joe Biden with a 39 and 1/2 foot pole in 2020. Swamp monsters and their useful idiots look after their own.
Think about all the actual crimes that can be proven with that laptop: influence peddling, drug use, human trafficking, money laundering... quite the laundry list, pun partially intended. Not one peep of proceedings. And we won't even mention the potential pedophilia. Democrats seem to be fine with that sort of thing, though, so it's a non-issue for them.
That rap sheet should be enough for at least a modest inquiry from Congress, but instead we get the never-ending show trial for January 6th -- the kinder, gentler insurrection when compared to the 5/29/2020 insurrection at the White House -- because the left owns Washington. But it's really the only semi-tangible event that the left has to point to the existence of the white nationalist domestic terrorism they continue to try to speak into being, so they're riding that wagon until the wheels fall off.
We learned of the FBI's influence campaign earlier in these drops, and we had it on good authority that this was an industry-wide situation in big tech social media circles based on Mark Zuckerberg's admissions about being told that they should be on the lookout for 'Russian disinformation' so that they can suppress it before it does any harm. With these newest drops we see the methodology behind the FBI's efforts to subvert these platforms, as well as the practice of embedding their own agents and personnel into these platforms.
It's pretty safe to say that by 2020, the FBI was handling the lionshare of moderation duties at Twitter and paying the company for the privilege to do so. They also pushed Twitter for any evidence they could find to corroborate even the smallest proof of foreign influence that they could point to as proof to vindicate them from that whole Russiagate embarrassment they suffered. Suffice it to say, James Baker had the biggest stake in finding real proof of foreign influence on social media. But we find also that he wasn't the only person with 'FBI' on his resume at Twitter.
There were enough FBI, or 'Bu alums', coming to be employed by Twitter at this time in 2020 that they created their own slack channel to pal it up together and even created a jargon translation cheat sheet to make the transition more seamless for their arriving Fed buddies.
As I said before, I think that once you're hired as a Fed, you're a Fed for life. Moving on to work in the private sector doesn't make you a civilian, it just makes you a double agent. And Twitter had quite a few of those running around.
An interesting article from the New York Post put us onto the many others employed by Twitter that served in the FBI, the CIA, Military intelligence, etc.
It wasn’t just James Baker, who by himself already aroused enough suspicion to warrant a full probe into his activities at Twitter.
Here’s the short list:
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Mark Jaroszewski: 20 years - FBI Supervisory Special Agent, employed by Twitter August 2018
Doug Hunt: 20 years - FBI Supervisory Special Agent, employed by Twitter July 2019
Karen Walsh: 20 years - FBI Special Agent, employed by Twitter March 2020
Vincent Lucero: 20 years - FBI Supervisory Special Agent, employed by Twitter July 2019
Michael Bertrand: 23 years - Special Agent, Chief of Staff, employed by Twitter January 2022
Kevin Michelena: 12 years - FBI Intelligence Analyst, employed by Twitter July 2021
Dawn Burton: 10 years total - FBI Senior innovation advisor, DOJ Counsel and Special assistant, Office of the Deputy Attorney General
Matthew Williams: 15 years - FBI intelligence program manager and senior supervisory intelligence analyst, employed by Twitter June 2020
Jeff Carlton - 14 years total - FBI, CIA intelligence analyst, U.S. Marines intelligence officer, employed by Twitter May 2021
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I don’t know for sure if that list is longer but isn’t it bizarre that these people all found their way to the same company? Not only that, not all of these people seem to have a background in tech, though clearly that wasn’t a problem for Twitter at the time.
Side note: I would love to see the FBI rollcall at Meta, now. Maybe we can get that soon.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, this is just yet another conspiracy theory coming true. For now, I bid adieu to my own personal FBI agent for a little while, as I need to run some errands. But then, they already knew that.