(New York Post) The FBI warned major US tech companies ahead of The Post’s first reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020 that Russian agents were preparing a strikingly similar document dump — and once the scoop materialized, Facebook executives discussed calibrating censorship decisions to please what they assumed would be an incoming Biden-Harris administration, a congressional investigation found.
The new details — contained in an interim report by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the weaponization of government — are emerging as former President Donald Trump leads in polls ahead of the Nov. 5 election and as his allies urge a house-cleaning at the FBI and possible new regulations or antitrust actions to punish and restrain platforms like Facebook.
“FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,” an unidentified Microsoft employee wrote on Oct. 14, 2020, the day The Post published the first in a series of bombshell stories on the Biden family’s foreign dealings, according to the congressional report.
Internal Facebook communications, including a chat log, show that employees quickly discounted The Post’s reporting because it was the “[e]xact content expected for hack and leak.”
“Right on schedule,” another Facebook employee concurred.
“Obviously, our calls on this could colour [sic] the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than almost anything else…,” Facebook’s then-vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg wrote on the same day to vice president of global public policy Joel Kaplan.
The Post spent nearly a month verifying the authenticity of laptop files ahead of their publication, though it’s unclear to what extent the FBI was aware of that work as it prepared its prebuttal.
The FBI has possessed Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop since December 2019 and knew that files cited by The Post in its coverage came from a Delaware computer repairman and not the Kremlin — but, after preemptively discrediting the world exclusive to Big Tech, the FBI kept silent publicly as 51 ex-intelligence officials suggested and then-candidate Joe Biden outright alleged that the files came from Russia.
The Post’s reporting showed that Biden, while vice president, interacted with international business associates of his son Hunter and brother James — including in countries where he helped steer US policy, such as China and Ukraine.
The reports were widely, if belatedly, corroborated by other news outlets and the files were even used by federal prosecutors in court — but only after Biden defeated Trump in November 2020 by narrow swing-state margins, which some Republicans say was in part due to the cloud of suspicion over the laptop.
