So who can hold the FBI accountable for their "weekly meetings" with Twitter in 2020?

Screenshots from alleged iCloud

The fallout from Elon Musk’s “Twitter files” data dump continues after the flurry of coverage it received over the weekend. Of course, the “flurry” in question was taking place almost entirely at conservative outlets. Most of the players in the MSM are still holding their hands over their ears and either not mentioning it at all or trying to spin the story to look more favorable to Joe Biden or make it seem like it’s not a big deal. Glenn Greenwald took CNN to task this morning for their dishonest effort to sweep this case of obvious censorship under the rug.

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The New York Times once again ran with the false claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell was “stolen,” so the story could not be trusted. Of course, the reality was that a laptop abandoned in a repair shop by its owner who refused to pay for repairs was not stolen. Also, at the time the story originally broke in the New York Post, the FBI had been in possession of the laptop for nearly a year.

That last fact is the one that the Post’s Miranda Devine is honing in on this morning. She’s been all over this story from the moment it began and the recent revelations that have been made suggest that, if anything, the FBI requires more scrutiny than either Hunter or Twitter.

The FBI warned Twitter during “weekly” meetings before the 2020 election to expect “hack-and-leak operations’’ by “state actors” involving Hunter Biden, and “likely” in October, according to a sworn declaration by Twitter’s former head of site integrity, Yoel Roth.

The warnings were so specific that Twitter immediately censored The Post’s scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop on Oct. 14, 2020, citing its “hacked materials” policy, a move described on Saturday as “election interference” by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk.

The extraordinary revelation for the first time lays bare how the FBI was involved in pre-bunking the story of the laptop, which had been in the bureau’s possession for almost a year.

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In previous times, we might have assumed that if the FBI was involved in a given situation, they would be investigating the possible commission of a crime. But that obviously wasn’t the case in October 2020. In the waning days of the presidential election, the FBI was having “weekly meetings” with the people at Twitter. Why would they be taking such a keen interest in the major social media platforms?

It clearly wasn’t because they suspected Twitter’s management of wrongdoing. (Though they probably should have been.) We now know that Twitter’s Yoel Roth testified that the FBI warned them to be on the lookout for “hack and leak” activity, specifically mentioning that it could involve Hunter Biden in some fashion.

But as noted above, the FBI had the laptop and they’d had it for almost a year. They knew the story wasn’t fake and it hadn’t been planted by the Russians. And yet they allowed the big social media platforms to treat the story as if it was toxic. When FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan testified under oath in a lawsuit against the Biden administration, he admitted that he organized the meetings between up to seven FBI agents and the social media platforms’ management teams. But he mysteriously “could not recall” if he had mentioned Hunter Biden by name when warning about “hack and leak” operations. That’s certainly a convenient bit of memory loss, isn’t it?

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Devine goes on to point out that the FBI shouldn’t have had any way of knowing that the Post was preparing to publish that story in October 2020, so how were they able to warn Twitter and Facebook about it in advance? Thanks to a warrant they obtained as part of an investigation into Rudy Giuliani (which was “conveniently” dropped after the election), they had access to Giuliani’s emails, including conversations with the owner of the computer store where the laptop was abandoned as well as email chains with Miranda Devine herself, discussing the upcoming story.

All of this leads to only one possible conclusion. The “dump” of supposedly “hacked and leaked” information that the FBI was warning Facebook and Twitter about was the New York Post story. They intentionally gave the social media platforms an excuse to censor the story until the election was over.

Now we’re left with the question I posed in the title of this column. Is it even possible to hold the people at the FBI accountable for interfering with the 2020 election in this fashion? We can have House Intelligence Committee hearings until the cows come home, but if nobody in Biden’s Justice Department is willing to bring charges against Elvis Chan and whoever else was involved in this scheme, nothing will come of it. And Joe Biden is unlikely to get rid of any of the bad actors in this tale because it would look like an admission of wrongdoing and might cause them to reveal even more secrets. So at least for the next two years, it’s looking more and more as if they’re going to get away with this.

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