The FBI appears to be attempting to cover its tracks, so to speak, following a bombshell admission from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week.
During an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the founder of one of the world’s biggest social media platforms admitted that Facebook downgraded posts about Hunter Biden’s now-infamous laptop prior to the 2020 election because the FBI contacted the company and suggested — falsely — that it was “Russian disinformation.”
That revelation, coupled with claims from whistleblowers that FBI brass told field agents not to look into the laptop, has raised righteous suspicions that the bureau has become overtly politicized against Donald Trump and conservatives.
The FBI has now responded with what appears to be a ‘CYA’ statement.
“The FBI routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats,” the bureau said in a statement Friday night, adding that it “cannot ask, or direct, companies to take action on information received.”
According to The Hill, the FBI also said that it has “provided companies with foreign threat indicators to help them protect their platforms and customers from abuse by foreign malign influence actors.”
The bureau claimed it routinely works with “federal, state, local and private sector partners to keep the public informed of potential threats, but it cannot request or order companies to take any action based on the information it provides,” per The Hill.
The fact that the bureau works with “private sector partners” along with “federal, state [and] local” authorities is not in dispute; the real issue is that what the bureau told Facebook and ‘partners’ was a blatant lie. So the FBI’s statement is moot; it does not address the fact that the bureau provided false information to Zuckerberg’s platform in the first place — after having taken possession of the laptop nearly a year earlier.
That point was not lost on House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who tweeted, “The same FBI who lied about Russian ‘collusion’ and raided President Trump’s home asked Facebook to manipulate its feed to bury the Hunter Biden story.”
The same FBI who lied about Russian “collusion” and raided President Trump’s home asked Facebook to manipulate its feed to bury the Hunter Biden story.
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) August 26, 2022
The Daily Wire reported:
Photos, videos, emails, and text messages on the abandoned laptop, which were also ignored by legacy news outlets, paint the president’s son as a drug-addled, venal degenerate and raise troubling questions about President Joe Biden’s own role in his son’s corrupt dealings. A recent poll by TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics suggested that 79% of Americans believe President Trump likely would have won re-election if voters had known about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and that it was authentic.
Long after the election, media outlets like CNN and the Washington Post, which had dismissed the laptop as Russian disinformation, acknowledged it was authentic.
“FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers earlier this month that he could not comment on what, if anything, the bureau is doing regarding the laptop. But he said he found reports that the bureau refused to pursue a laptop investigation ahead of the election ‘deeply troubling,'” the outlet added.
What’s ‘deeply troubling’ is that we seem to have an FBI director who either demonstrated his incompetence by not knowing his agency had obtained a device with incriminating evidence about the relative of a presidential candidate, or he did know, and he’s lying to Congress.
It can’t be both.
