The FBI investigation into the now-debunked allegations that President Trump conspired with Russia to win the 2016 election was sparked by a top Twitter lawyer who backed the censorship of the bombshell report about the incriminating contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop computer in the weeks leading up to the election.
Beginning in June 2020, James Baker worked as Twitter’s vice president and deputy general counsel after serving as the FBI’s top attorney for four years prior. He connected top FBI agents with his pal, attorney and Democratic operative Michael Sussmann, in that post from the year 2016. The Republican candidate allegedly communicated with a Russian bank, according to Mr. Sussmann. Critics assert that the inaccurate information hurt Mr. Trump politically in both cases.
According to Tom Fitton, head of the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, “Baker was the center of two scandals linked to election meddling – the FBI’s election involvement against Trump and Twitter’s election interference against Trump, again.”
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An interview request was left at Harvard Law School, where Mr. Baker is a guest professor, but he did not immediately answer. Mr. Baker is also a former CNN commentator who commented on Mr. Trump and supported the Trump-Russia inquiry.
In a shocking Twitter conversation that was facilitated by the new owner Elon Musk and reported by independent journalist Matt Taibbi last week, Mr. Baker—whose departure from Twitter was never made public—is referred to as a “former” employee of the social media juggernaut.
Internal emails that Mr. Musk gave Mr. Taibbi revealed Twitter executives contemplating whether to censor the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop on October 14, 2021. The laptop had a wealth of damaging information, according to the Post report, including allegations of a conspiracy to buy influence involving Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate for president.
The story was flagged as “unsafe” by Twitter administrators, who also forbade users from posting links to it in direct messages. In response to the newspaper’s original tweeting of the laptop story, Twitter also momentarily suspended the New York Post account, one of the most well-known news websites in the world.
Two weeks before the election, the story was taken down by Twitter executives in response to requests from the Biden campaign staff, who got in touch with them through unofficial routes.
After speaking with their legal staff, which included Mr. Baker, who joined the social media behemoth after serving as FBI general counsel from 2014 to 2018, Twitter officials took action.
Mr. Baker supported the decision to conceal the Hunter Biden laptop report in a conversation with Twitter executives in an undated email.
I concur with the judgment that additional information is required to determine if the materials were compromised, Mr. Baker wrote. But at this point, it’s safe to believe that they might have been, therefore prudence is advised.
In the email, Mr. Baker stated that further details were required before Twitter could decide whether or not to publish the story. According to several facts, the materials may have been compromised, he claimed.
Even though the FBI at the time had Hunter Biden’s laptop and had started an investigation into his alleged tax irregularities, the bombshell report was prevented from being shared on Twitter and other social media platforms, such as Facebook.
Following his pivotal facilitation of the FBI’s sharply criticized inquiry into whether Mr. Trump was cooperating with Russian officials ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Baker was involved in the filtering decision at Twitter.
After Mr. Baker established a crucial connection between FBI investigators and Mr. Sussmann, who was selling now-disproven, damning information to produce a “October surprise” against Mr. Trump on behalf of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, that inquiry accelerated in the fall of 2016.
Although Mr. Sussmann was cleared in May of charges that he misled the FBI by concealing his political motivations for giving the government access to Russian bank information, the lengthy FBI investigation hampered Mr. Trump’s entire term in office and even gave rise to allegations that he was a Russian agent.
Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent and cybersecurity expert who contributed to the debunking of the Hunter Biden laptop computer tale, is also related to Mr. Baker, at least tangentially.
According to his evidence in a lawsuit brought by Republican authorities in Louisiana and Missouri, Mr. Chan coordinated weekly meetings with Twitter and other Big Tech companies, including Facebook, a month before the 2020 election to warn them about a “hack and leak” effort.
Hunter Biden will be mentioned in the released hacked material, according to the FBI’s warnings, according to Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter’s site integrity.
According to the American Greatness website, Mr. Chan collaborated with Mr. Sussmann and other Justice Department officials four years prior to fabricate an explanation—never supported by evidence—for why critical emails from high-ranking DNC officials were leaked.
Mr. Baker’s involvement in the Trump-Russia probe and the Twitter censorship incident, according to Jake Denton, a research associate at the conservative Heritage Foundation Tech Policy Center, suggests a biased motivation.
According to Mr. Denton, “the Russiagate inquiry truly demonstrated that the FBI is a political actor.” “One of those top attorneys appears to be acting at the FBI’s direction when he travels to Silicon Valley.”
Unknown is Mr. Baker’s work situation at Twitter. He was not named when Mr. Musk fired Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde in October, and he did not acknowledge his departure on his Twitter account, despite Mr. Taibbi referring to him as a “former” deputy counsel in his thread. In a tweet from April, Mr. Musk remarked that Mr. Baker’s involvement with Mr. Sussmann and the FBI’s Russia collusion inquiry “sounds really terrible.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Musk has threatened to publish other letters from Twitter executives that discuss the removal of conservative content from the platform. Republicans in the House have promised to open a probe and are just weeks away from regaining the control.
Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee instructed Twitter to save all correspondence and documents with the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee in connection with the report about the banned laptop months ago.
