FBI agent lied about knowledge of Hunter Biden laptop, talks with Facebook

A San Francisco-based FBI special agent lied under oath about discussions he had with big tech companies that suppressed The Post’s reporting on the contents of first son Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive before the 2020 election, according to an internal Facebook document.

Elvis Chan made false statements about his communications with Facebook over the bombshell October 2020 reports that revealed Hunter involved his dad Joe in business deals with foreign nationals, internal communications obtained by the House Judiciary Committee show.

A Facebook employee said in an Oct. 15, 2020, message that he had spoken with Chan, with the agent said he was “up to speed” on the FBI’s probe of Hunter’s laptop and “that there was no current evidence to suggest any foreign connection or direction of the leak.”

Chan had shared the information during a “follow up” phone call with the employee following a conversation the day before between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and Facebook officials, during which the bureau declined to comment on whether the laptop was “real.”

But in sworn testimony on Nov. 29, 2022, Chan said he had “no internal knowledge of that investigation” and twice-claimed he never communicated with Facebook beyond the one conference call with the FBI task force. That deposition was part of a lawsuit filed against the Biden administration by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, which charged the White House colluded with tech giants to unlawfully suppress free speech.

The task force’s section chief, Laura Dehmlow, told the House Judiciary Committee in July that on an earlier phone call with Twitter officials on Oct. 14, 2022, an FBI agent confirmed the laptop was authentic “before another participant jumped in and said no further comment.”

Chan also denied having discussed the laptop with any Twitter officials.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) called Chan’s testimony “COMPLETELY FALSE” and said the agent had served as “the main conduit between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and Big Tech.”

“Of course, there was ‘no evidence’ of ‘any foreign connection.’ The laptop was real, and the FBI knew it,” Jordan said. “Is there any wonder why the Biden DOJ has so far stonewalled the Committee’s efforts to interview Agent Chan?”

The bureau had verified the authenticity of the materials on Hunter’s abandoned laptop nearly a year earlier, in November 2019, an IRS investigator tasked with the case testified in May to the House Ways and Means Committee.

Facebook reduced the reach of The Post’s laptop reporting at the time, citing its misinformation policy. Twitter blocked attempts to share the story under the site’s rules governing “hacked materials.”

Five days later, 51 former intelligence officials circulated a letter to discredit the reporting — at the prompting of then-Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken — saying the leaked emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

While Chan appears to have committed perjury in the civil case, such offenses are rarely prosecuted unless they are deemed to be part of an attempt to corrupt the judicial system.

The FBI special agent’s testimony was also undercut last year by the so-called “Twitter Files,” a series of reports on internal records from the social media company that revealed a pattern of coordinated suppression of The Post.

Chan sent 10 documents — the contents of which are still unknown — to former Twitter head of trust and safety Yoel Roth the night before the first laptop story was published.

He also arranged “temporary Top Secret security clearances” for Roth and other Twitter executives for briefs on foreign threats to the 2020 election — despite admitting in his deposition that the FBI was not aware of any meddling.

“Through our investigations, we did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016,” Chan said, apparently referencing Russian state actors’ hack of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee before the election.

Twitter deputy general counsel James Baker, who formerly served as FBI general counsel from 2014 to 2017, also pushed Roth to block access to The Post’s reports, claiming “the materials may have been hacked.”