So yes, I was very suspicious of the fact that the FBI had possession of the laptop for something like ten or eleven months prior to the story breaking, and hadn’t said a word about it. But no, I don’t recall thinking that the FBI was actually heavily involved in coordinating the social media response.

However, through Twitter files disclosures, we now learn that the FBI had been priming Twitter for this for a long time, setting the censors up to expect some sort of Russian (or other) disinformation operation very much like the Hunter laptop story, and to feel it was Twitter’s responsibility to block it. In this, the FBI was capitalizing on its own Russiagate disinformation scam, which had planted the idea that Hillary Clinton had lost the 2016 election to the nefarious Donald Trump because of some sort of Russian disinformation shenanigans. The FBI was now stirring up and capitalizing on the fear that it might happen again, and that “Russian interference and disinformation” could cause Trump to defeat Joe Biden this time. The people at Twitter certainly wouldn’t want that to happen because of their own failure to block the story whenever it did emerge. …

Why did the FBI and all the rest of the intelligence agencies want to make sure Trump didn’t win in 2020? The answer seems obvious: he wasn’t on their side and he represented a threat to them and the rest of the “swamp.” But I think there’s even more than that. It has to do with the drive toward power for power’s sake. The whole story made me think of the character O’Brien in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. No, unlike O’Brien, the FBI didn’t torture anyone involved; at least, I don’t think so. I’m speaking of the fact that O’Brien isn’t just a straightforward true believer in the government he’s working for; he’s a cynic who is a brilliant manipulator of poor Winston Smith, who sometimes even finds him friendly and kind and somewhat avuncular. O’Brien doesn’t bother to mess around and tell Winston about some sort of idealism. He speaks only of power[.]