Prepared Senate Floor Statement by U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)
Twitter and 2020 Election Interference
Wednesday, December 7, 2022
Last Friday, Elon Musk released documents and information relating to Twitter’s interference in the 2020 presidential election by censoring the New York Post’s Hunter Biden reporting.
And yesterday, Musk reportedly fired Twitter’s General Counsel, Jim Baker, for his involvement in the censorship scandal.  Baker was General Counsel at the FBI and was involved in Crossfire Hurricane.  You can’t make this up.
Musk also released information that showed the Biden campaign was involved in censorship efforts. The information shows that Twitter employees knew they had no legitimate basis to censor the Hunter Biden reporting but proceeded anyway.
Twitter also removed links and blocked the reporting from being shared by direct messaging on its platform. Folks that fought the good fight against Twitter’s extraordinary censorship were locked out of their accounts.
The documents make clear that Twitter was effectively an arm of the Democratic Party and the Biden campaign. Twitter essentially gave the Biden campaign a massive in-kind campaign contribution.
What Twitter and other Big Tech companies did in 2020 with respect to censorship was as much an outrage then as it is today.
Simply put, what they did is expected of communist China not the United States of America.
Reports also indicate that the FBI warned Twitter during weekly meetings before the 2020 election that hack and leak operations involving Hunter Biden material were likely in October of 2020. Well, the FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop since December 2019. Information on it has been verified by liberal news outlets.
Didn’t the FBI do the same or did they fail to do their due diligence? I find the FBI’s actions in advance of the 2020 election to be more than suspicious.
When Senator Johnson and I released our first report on the Biden family’s connections to communist China on September 23, 2020, it was swept up into the Hunter Biden censorship fiasco not long after. So, too, was our second report which we released on November 18, 2020.
But, we were more than just censored. Before we even made the first report public, the liberal media and some of our Democratic colleagues tried to smear us with false claims that our work was connected to Russian disinformation.
They went into full Joe Biden protection mode.
So, here we have four elements to this fact pattern that ought to shake every member of the Senate to their core.
First, the FBI got their hands on Twitter via these weekly briefings and planted the seeds regarding future hacked material relating to Hunter Biden.
Second, the FBI improperly labeled information it possessed on Hunter Biden as disinformation.
Third, the FBI provided an unnecessary August 2020 briefing to me and Senator Johnson that was used by some Democrats and the liberal media to try and undermine our Biden investigation.
Fourth, the liberal media repeatedly and falsely labeled my and Senator Johnson’s investigation as Russian disinformation.
All of that happened in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.
 
In the long run these false allegations and bad faith efforts against me and Senator Johnson didn’t work.
For example, this Congress, Senator Johnson and I gave floor speeches on March 28, 2022, March 29, 2022 and April 5, 2022, that introduced bank records connecting Hunter and James Biden to the communist Chinese regime.
And we sent hundreds of pages of bank records to U.S. Attorney Weiss on October 26, 2022 showing the same connections – the same connections we made in our 2020 reports. These are authentic bank records.  They aren’t Russian disinformation.
President Biden still owes the American people answers about his connections to Hunter and James Biden’s business deals and arrangements. He owes the American people an explanation as to how much he knew about their business and personal relationships with communist China.
On October 13 of this year, I wrote to the FBI telling them that I know it possesses documents that indicate Joe Biden was aware of Hunter Biden’s business arrangements and may have been involved in some.
In conclusion, since Senator Johnson and I began our Biden investigation in August 2019, our work has been substantiated.  Big Tech censorship may have succeeded in the short term; however, the truth eventually sees the light of day.
I thank the new Twitter owner for his transparency. Accountability should follow.
Comment:  If the U.S. were not so hopelessly corrupt this alone would be reason to try Twitter’s CEO & Even Workers with Sedition/Treason for Overthrowing an Election and Biden would step down in a healthy country.

 

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