OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Two GOP senators who have been investigating alleged Biden family corruption for years have stepped up their efforts.
Following revelations last week by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg during an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan that the platform partially censored explosive revelations about Hunter Biden gleaned from an abandoned laptop ahead of the 2020 election. Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin want more answers.
Rogan and Zuckerberg were talking about how and why Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden story and the Facebook CEO said that the FBI warned him, not in relation particularly to the laptop story but in general, that foreign actors would be attempting to influence the decision and to be wary of such possible stories.
“Basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us- some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert… We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump of that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant,’” the Facebook CEO said on Thursday.
“We just kind of thought, hey look, if the FBI, which I still view is a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement- they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something then I want to take that seriously,” he said.
Zuckerberg explained that the FBI did not expressly tell Facebook to censor or limit distribution of the Hunter Bidens tory, but the company thought it “fit the pattern” of potential propaganda to limit its distribution for 5 – 7 days but it was still allowed to be shared.
Twitter, meanwhile, censored the story completely and locked the New York Post — which broke the revelations — out of its account for weeks.
Now, Grassley and Johnson have sent a letter to Zuckerberg noting that in October 2020, “when the New York Post published articles based on evidence from Hunter Biden’s laptop, many news and social media organizations inappropriately rushed to censor and discredit the initial reporting and falsely labeled it as ‘disinformation.’”
Earlier this year, mainstream media outlets reported that the information gleaned from the laptop was not Russian disinformation but was in fact real.
“You recently appeared to indicate that the reason why Facebook made the unwise decision to censor articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop was based off an alert from the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the senators wrote, in reference to the Rogan interview, The Epoch Times reported.
“Whistleblowers have also alleged to Senator Johnson that local FBI leadership instructed its employees not to look at the Hunter Biden laptop immediately after the FBI had obtained it,” the senators noted further, going on to say that Americans “deserve to know whether the FBI used Facebook as part of their alleged plan to discredit information about Hunter Biden.”
“Congress and the American people require clarity with respect to the extent the FBI communicated with Facebook during the 2020 election about Hunter Biden-related information,” they added.
Liberal HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher ripped the media for ignoring or suppressing the Hunter Biden revelations.
“Now look, let’s not pussyfoot around this; he was selling the influence of his father, Joe Biden. I mean, most political sons do, but let’s not pretend at least that was going on… so Hunter Biden’s laptop was buried by the press. Even the head of Twitter Jack Dorsey said that was a mistake,” the host said to his guests, far-left actor and producer Rob Reiner and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).
“It’s a little bit of a thorny question because once you go down this road- this is sort of where we are in this country, the other side is so evil, anything is justified in preventing them from taking office. Is it?” he said.
