Twitter execs who censored Hunter Biden laptop to appear at Capitol

WASHINGTON — House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is vowing to get to the bottom of the “collusion” to censor The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop scoops when former Twitter executives face questioning Wednesday morning.

Comer (R-Ky.) will lead the grilling of ex-Twitter employees Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth and James Baker in one of his first acts as committee chairman — as Republicans attempt to determine the backstory behind the platform’s actions.

“Tomorrow’s hearing is the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s first step in examining the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process,” Comer said in a statement provided to The Post.

“Twitter, under previous leadership, was a private company the federal government used to accomplish what it constitutionally cannot: limit the free exercise of speech.”

The social media giant barred distribution of The Post’s articles that linked then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to his son Hunter and brother James Biden’s foreign business deal weeks ahead of the 2020 election — claiming without evidence that the reporting violated a “hacked materials” policy.

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said at a 2021 congressional hearing that it was a “total mistake” to censor The Post, but refused to detail who was responsible.

Billionaire Elon Musk, who took over the company in October, immediately fired Gadde, the social network’s former policy director who received a $12.5 million severance package.

Roth, the former director of trust and safety, resigned in November and Musk fired Baker, a top attorney at Twitter who formerly worked as the FBI’s general counsel, in December for allegedly undermining his attempts to expose historical censorship communications.

Musk’s recent “Twitter Files” disclosures revealed close cooperation between the FBI and Twitter in the 2020 election — even though the First Amendment prohibits the government from policing lawful domestic speech.

The FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million from October 2019 to February 2021 to process its moderation requests, according to a document released by Musk, but it remains unclear to what extent officials weighed in specifically on the laptop, which was provided to The Post by Delaware computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac — who showed paperwork indicating that Hunter Biden legally abandoned the device.

Mac Isaac says he gave the original laptop to the FBI in December 2019. He later provided a copy of its files to Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who alerted The Post.

Musk revealed tantalizing avenues of inquiry for congressional investigators, including a secret communication on the eve of The Post’s first laptop bombshell.

San Francisco-based FBI agent Elvis Chan used a special transmission platform called Teleporter to send Roth and at least one other person 10 documents on the night of Oct. 13, 2020, just hours before The Post’s initial laptop story was published, according to Musk-released evidence.

In July 2020 — three months before The Post broke the laptop story — Chan emailed Roth suggesting that beginning 30 days before Election Day, Twitter executives would be granted temporary security clearances to discuss threats with FBI officials, according to Musk’s disclosures.

“In the months leading up to the New York Post’s report on the Biden family’s business schemes based on contents from Hunter Biden’s laptop, the FBI advised senior Twitter executives to question the validity of any Hunter Biden story,” Comer said in his statement ahead of the hearing.

“Immediately following the publication of the New York Post’s article, America witnessed a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news, and the intelligence community to suppress and delegitimize the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents.”

Comer added: “We owe it to the American people to provide answers about this collusion to censor information about Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s business schemes and prevent this type of censorship from happening again.” 

The Oversight Committee hearing is likely to be the first of many investigating the saga. On Monday, the Republican-led House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees demanded interviews from 12 of the 51 former intelligence officials who implied five days after The Post’s initial reports that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

The Post’s first laptop bombshell revealed that Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, emailed Hunter in 2015 to thank him for the “opportunity to meet your father” — directly contradicting Biden’s September 2019 claim that he’d “never spoken” with his son about “his overseas business dealings” and his August 2019 claim that “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses. Period.”

The laptop revelations attracted questions about possible corruption and conflicts of interest in foreign affairs.

The Biden campaign vaguely denied the initial laptop article. But further reporting revealed that Joe Biden attended a 2015 DC dinner one day before the Burisma exec’s email with a group of his son’s associates, including Pozharskyi and a Kazakhstani trio that posed for a photo with the Bidens.

Hunter even invited Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, ex-Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, to the dinner — though it’s unclear if either attended. A 2020 report from a Republican-led Senate committee alleges that Baturina in 2014 paid $3.5 million to a firm associated with Hunter Biden. Baturina is one of a dwindling number of Russian oligarchs yet to face Biden administration sanctions over Russia’s more than 11-month-old invasion of Ukraine.

Hunter earned up to $1 million per year to serve on the Burisma board from 2014 to 2019, beginning when his father was put in charge of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. Official visitor logs show Joe Biden met with his son’s since-jailed business partner Devon Archer in 2014 around the time both Hunter Biden and Archer joined the Burisma board.

A second October 2020 bombshell from The Post described Joe Biden’s alleged role in Hunter Biden and Jim Biden’s business venture with the company CEFC China Energy, which was reputed to be a key cog in Beijing’s “Belt and Road” foreign influence campaign.

A May 13, 2017 email recovered from the laptop said the “big guy” would get 10% of the deal. Former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski alleges that he discussed the CEFC deal with Joe Biden in May 2017 and both Bobulinski and another former Hunter Biden partner, James Gilliar, identified Joe Biden as the “big guy.”

Hunter and James Biden earned $4.8 million from CEFC China Energy in 2017 and 2018, according to a Washington Post review of Hunter Biden laptop documents. An October 2017 email identifies Joe Biden as a participant in a call about CEFC’s attempt to purchase US natural gas.

Other laptop records have linked Joe Biden to his other business pursuits by his relatives — notably in Mexico, where he flew with an associate of his son and brother aboard Air Force Two after hosting a group of their associates at the vice presidential residence in Washington.

In a different Chinese venture, business records indicate the first son still owns a 10% stake in Chinese state-backed BHR Partners, which says it manages $2.1 billion in assets, despite his father’s insistence there would be no family-business-related conflicts of interest during his presidency.

Hunter co-founded BHR Partners in 2013 within weeks of joining then-Vice President Biden aboard Air Force Two on an official trip to Beijing, according to the Wall Street Journal. Hunter introduced his dad to BHR CEO Jonathan Li and Joe Biden later wrote college recommendation letters for Li’s children.

Democrats have brushed off the Hunter Biden laptop probes as frivolous, with White House spokesman Ian Sams slamming the hearing as a “political stunt” last week.

Former House Intelligence Committee member Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) seemed to accept the authenticity of the laptop in a recent prebuttal of Comer’s investigations, but argued, “If you’re so interested in what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop, you should do that in your private time, not on the taxpayer’s dime.”