Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee issued a letter today, announcing they want to investigate Twitter and Facebook for allegedly suppressing a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
In two letters released today on Twitter, Judiciary Committee Republicans claimed Twitter and Facebook both interfered with the 2020 election and violated the First Amendment. The group is claiming that the suppression of the Post’s story was done “to the benefit of President Biden and the detriment of President Trump.”
The story in question, published in October 2020, reported on a copy of a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden, which included emails, family photos, and sexually explicit content.
The New York Times and the Washington Post essentially confirmed the laptop was legitimate earlier this month. The Times published a story reviewing independently verified emails that appeared on the hard drive. They say the emails appear to have come from the laptop of Hunter Biden, which was left at a Delaware computer shop.
The most damning emails had correspondence with a board member of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden was also a board member. The emails mention that Hunter met with his father and Vadym Pozharskyi, a board advisor, in 2015, despite now-President Joe Biden claiming that he had “never spoken to [Hunter] about his overseas business dealings,” according to an interview on Fox News in 2019.
The Post reported that the hard drive came from a laptop dropped off at a Delaware repair shop in 2019 by a customer who never paid for repair services and never retrieved the laptop. The FBI later seized the computer after the repair shop owner contacted the authorities. A copy of the hard drive was passed on to former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who gave a copy to the Post. After the October article was released, conservative media rallied behind the Post’s reporting, while Democrats cried foul and argued the material could have been faked or stolen.
Mainstream media treated the story with caution, and Twitter and Facebook chose to block or restrict links to the Post’s original report. The letters released today claim that suppression qualifies as election interference.
However, House Republicans do not hold the majority on the Judiciary Committee, meaning they cannot issue formal subpoenas to Facebook and Twitter. Republicans could take control of the House after the 2022 elections this fall. At that point, the committee could issue formal subpoenas and proceed with a formal investigation.
Judiciary Committee Republicans regardless face somewhat of an uphill battle. In September, the Federal Election Commission decided in a 6-0 that Twitter did not violate election law by suppressing the story. The ruling will undoubtedly serve as a precedent in any investigation by the committee into alleged election interference from Facebook and Twitter.
House Republicans seem undeterred. The letter asks for, among other things, all communication between the social media companies and members of the Biden campaign between Oct. 1, 2020, and present-day and all documents pertaining to the companies’ decisions to suppress the story.
“This irresponsible conduct demands a thorough investigation so that we may understand how Big Tech wields its enormous power over the free flow of information to the detriment of free and fair elections,” the letter states.
