Turns out Baker advised ‘caution’ because, after all, Twitter couldn’t be sure the laptop information wasn’t hacked, and Twitter decided that suppression was warranted.
It’s been a long travel day so just weighing in on this now.
News broke Tuesday night that Twitter boss Elon Musk had fired the company’s deputy general counsel Jim Baker, who had been the FBI’s general counsel during the Russiagate scandal in connection with the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath. Baker was hired by Twitter in mid 2020, just in time to play a key role in the social-media platform’s suppression of the Biden corruption scandal reporting by the New York Post in the weeks before Election Day.
According to reporting on Twitter by journalist Matt Taibbi, Baker was terminated because he was found to be “vetting,” without Musk’s knowledge, internal company files that Musk had decided to disclose publicly, through Taibbi and another independent journalist, Bari Weiss. The Twitter files in question relate to its deliberations over suppressing the Post’s October 2020 Biden reporting.
Earlier on Tuesday, we published my lengthy column outlining publicly known evidence of the FBI’s collaboration with congressional Democrats and social-media platforms in burying the Biden corruption information, as well as the manner in which the bureau/Democrat storyline was echoed by Democrat-friendly media, then-candidate Biden, and the cabal of former national-security officials who politicized their credentials, on the eve of the election, to try to discredit the Post’s reporting. In my column, written and published before we knew about Baker’s ouster from Twitter, I expressed surprise at Taibbi’s assertion that there appeared to be little evidence of government complicity in Twitter’s suppression of the Post’s reporting — although he did report the involvement of Baker, who (to repeat) was on Twitter’s payroll by then. The column addressed Baker’s curious intersections with the FBI’s machinations in Russiagate and, relatedly, the 2020 election:
By 2020, [Twitter] had hired former FBI general counsel James Baker as one of its top lawyers. He was smack in the middle of the deliberations over suppressing the Biden laptop reporting.
How surprised should we be by that? Baker was the FBI general counsel in 2016–17. He was a top adviser to then-director Jim Comey during the time when Comey assured then-president Trump that Trump himself was not a suspect in the Russiagate probe, even though, throughout that time, the bureau was telling the FISA court under oath — in applications reviewed by Baker and approved by Comey — that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Kremlin. Baker was in the prep session for then-director Comey’s January 6, 2017, briefing of Trump on the Steele dossier — the briefing in which Comey told Trump that the bureau had gotten this questionable reporting about Trump’s being compromised by the Russians, yet conveniently neglected to mention that the bureau had been relying on Steele’s reporting, under oath, in the FISA court. Baker was among Comey’s top advisers when Comey told Trump it would be improper for him to publicly announce that Trump was not a suspect, and then when Comey gave House testimony in which he announced to the world that the FBI was conducting a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia — an investigation, the director gratuitously added, that could result in criminal charges. (At the time, the FBI did not have a shred of evidence that the Trump campaign had conspired with Russia. In fact, weeks earlier, Igor Danchenko, the principal source for the Steele-dossier information, had told Auten and other investigators that the dossier was rife with fabrications and exaggerations — a fact the FBI withheld from the FISA court, as it continued relying on the Steele dossier in FISA-surveillance applications.) And Baker was the FBI lawyer who agreed to take a meeting with his old friend, Clinton campaign and DNC lawyer Michael Sussmann, so that Sussmann could provide the bureau with data supposedly showing that Trump had a communications back-channel to Vladimir Putin. That is, Baker accepted partisan opposition research from a campaign operative, yet agreed to treat the data as evidence to be prioritized for investigation on the laughable pretense that Sussmann was not coming to the FBI in his partisan capacity, but as a patriotic private citizen and former government lawyer who was deeply concerned about national security. The FBI’s headquarters then concealed from its own field investigators that Sussmann was the source of the data, and the documentation pursuant to which the investigation proceeded falsely stated that the data had come from the Justice Department, of all places.
These guys are old pros when it comes to, shall we say, massaging information to get what they want. The FBI can always say, “Hey, we never told the FISA court that Trump might personally be a Russian agent, only that the campaign Trump was running might be a Russian agent.” The FBI can always say, “We truthfully told the FISA court that we’d found Danchenko credible when we interviewed him . . . we just didn’t mention that what we found him credible about was his assertion that the dossier we were relying on was bogus.” In the same spirit, the FBI may well be able to say, “We never said the name ‘Hunter Biden’ when we briefed the social-media companies.” But the point is that the message the FBI willfully conveyed to Twitter was: If you suddenly see a story unfavorable to the Bidens that comes from a computer, assume that the underlying information has been hacked, and the Russians are probably at it again, just like in 2016. And in this instance, the bureau could be confident that Twitter was being advised by Baker, a man steeped in FBI practice and dizzying bureau-speak. Baker, in his inimitably Bakery way, would surely advise Twitter to exercise caution because it couldn’t be sure the laptop information wasn’t hacked, and Twitter would get the message that suppression was warranted.
And, well, whaddya know? Turns out Baker advised “caution” because, after all, Twitter couldn’t be sure the laptop information wasn’t hacked, and Twitter decided that suppression was warranted.