December 5 – Things have been changing rather rapidly at Twitter since Elon Musk bought the company a few weeks ago.
One of the biggest issues coming to light is that Musk has been teasing that he intends to open up all the documents passed back and forth within Twitter as it relates to the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Attorney Clint Barkdoll said, “There is something in this story for everyone it seems. I agree with the likes of the Wall Street Journal and other media over the weekend saying let’s just get all the information out. There’s been some criticism that Musk, he’s going to send this out in drips and drabs. He’s saying now there’s going to be now maybe two or three more data dumps this week.”
Some of the media outlets are basically saying just put it all out at one time so it can be reviewed.
Matt Tiabbi is the reporter that Musk is leaking this to – he’s the former editor of Rolling Stone.
Barkdoll said, “On one hand, I don’t think the stuff that came out had the revelatory, smoking gun, per se that showed there was any direct government involvement. That’s one of Tiabbi’s takeaways – that he found no evidence of direct government involvement in the laptop story. But on the other hand, I think the data clearly confirms that what I’ll call big media, in this case Twitter, was in bed with the Biden campaign, with the Democratic Party.”
Part of the reporting is that former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey knew nothing about this – it was largely high level staff people that were internally doing what they could to make sure no adverse information about the Hunter Biden laptop story could be shared in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election.
Barkdoll said, “I think that confirms what a lot of us have suspected the whole time, but again, bigger picture, if Tiabbi is saying there’s no evidence of direct government involvement, but at the same time it’s internal Twitter people doing this, I’m not sure that it changes the needle much, but I think we all still need to keep an open mind because apparently there is more information coming out this week.”
Some people are wondering how do we know we’re getting all the information? What if Musk is cherry picking what he wants to release?
Michele Jansen of NewsTalk 103.7FM said, “When you say there’s no direct involvement of the government revealed, however, there is the FBI meeting, meeting with people in the FBI supposedly, where they kept talking about the coming Russian disinformation. How is that not government involvement? I mean maybe you don’t have the Biden administration directly making a phone call, but if the FBI is suggesting a perfect fit profile story that Russian disinformation is coming, look out for it, don’t trust it. Plus, what about all those ex-high level officials from different security agencies coming out with their very strong worded letter about how this has all the earmarks of Russian disinformation? This suggests some level of coordination.”
There were 51 former intelligence officials that signed a letter that said there was Russian disinformation going on.
Barkdoll said, “There’s where I think there’s some gray in this story because there is hard evidence that the FBI was sending out what I would call generic, general memos, not specifically about Hunter Biden, but general memos to Facebook and Twitter and other social media warning them that there was all of this disinformation coming and that they needed to be careful what they were posting. There is no doubt that those kind of warnings – which turned out to be fake or at least false – there’s no doubt that that influenced what these internal Twitter employees were doing. Again, there’s been no direct tie that Biden himself was asking or directing this and remember at the time, he was a private citizen. He was not part of the government, he was a candidate for president.”
That might be an interesting thread to keep pulling. What if there’s evidence that Twitter employees were having direct meetings with current or incumbent FBI or intelligence officials that were encouraging them to keep this quiet?
Barkdoll said, “If that becomes the evidence, then you really could have a First Amendment, legal issue going on here, but again, for now, it doesn’t look like they’re quite to that line.”
Civil lawsuits are also being discussed.
Pat Ryan of NewsTalk 103.7FM wondered, “Do some of these people that think they’ve been wronged go after these employees that squashed their voice on a civil matter?”
“They might,” Barkdoll said. “There’s where it becomes very key again if they can prove direct government involvement. Remember if there’s no direct government involvement, there’s no First Amendment issue here. This was a private company. On the other hand, if there was direct government involvement that was squashing some of these accounts and some of these stories, then you very well could have First Amendment and civil lawsuit issues.”
It looks like Musk might reinstate some of the bots that were canceled because apparently some of them were actually real.
Barkdoll said, “He hasn’t given a number, but remember there were millions of those that got canceled over the last few weeks and I don’t know if some of that might also play into this civil lawsuit or some of these people saying hey I had a real account or my two million followers, that was real, they were not all of these bots. So there’s an awful lot going on here around this story.”
