On Thursday, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) demanded that Big Tech companies Facebook and Twitter preserve all internal documents related to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Issa’s office sent letters to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, Facebook communications director Andy Stone, and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The letters all ordered the companies to “immediately initiate document preservation for all materials relating to questions, inquiry, conversation, strategy, and response to the media reporting of the Hunter Biden laptop and/or its contents that first appeared in the New York Post on October 14, 2020.” The companies were additionally instructed to notify employees, consultants, and subcontractors who may have access to the relevant information.
Issa’s requests are in reference to an apparently coordinated campaign by Big Tech companies and the mainstream media to suppress the bombshell story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. First reported on by the New York Post, the story broke less than one month before the 2020 election in which Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, was running against incumbent President Donald Trump. The laptop in question, retrieved from a repair shop in Delaware, contained numerous damning documents, photos, and videos depicting Hunter’s foreign business dealings through his father’s political connections, as well as Hunter’s personal habits involving drugs, alcohol, and prostitution.
Despite the story being verified as authentic by the Post, numerous other outlets falsely labeled the story as “Russian disinformation” and refused to share it. On Twitter, attempts to post the URL link to the original story would result in the attempted posts being automatically blocked, thus suppressing efforts to spread the news of the Biden scandal.
Facebook announced at the time that it would be deliberately “reducing [the story’s] distribution on our platform,” and thus changed the algorithm specifically to make sure that any posts about the story were reduced in their visibility on news feeds.
“This is the scandal that Big Tech and the Democrat industrial complex wish would go away,” said Congressman Issa. “They know what they did, and of course they think they’ve gotten away with it. That’s why it’s critical that we not squander the opportunity for accountability.”
Issa also sent similar letters to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Chief of Staff Ron Klain, both of whom served on the Biden campaign, as well as to a group of over 50 former U.S. intelligence community officials who signed an open letter in 2020 supporting Biden and falsely denouncing the laptop story as disinformation.