We should not allow the growing disdain for Donald Trump’s decision to host open antisemites – followed by an extraordinary call for a temporary suspension of the Constitution – to distract from the most enduring takeaway from last week’s Twitter document dump, ordered by new owner Elon Musk: The documents graphically demonstrate the key role the FBI played in keeping a devastating New York Post report on alleged corruption on the part of Biden and his family from reaching the public during the run up to the 2020 presidential contest. The Post’s report centered, of course, on the contents of a now-infamous laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.
To be sure, while there are still more Twitter document dumps to come, as of this writing there is no “smoking gun” evidence of an actual conspiracy to suppress the Post story in order to benefit Biden at Trump’s expense. It was still perplexing to learn, however, that the FBI spurred Twitter to suppress the Post story by suggesting on several occasions that the story bore all of the hallmarks of classic Russian disinformation. It is perplexing, you see, when contrasted with the Trump-Russian collusion debacle.
The whole idea that there was anything like collusion happening was later shown to be based on the now-discredited Steele Dossier. Yet, despite the trove of evidence of anti-Trump bias on the part of senior FBI officials, and a scathing report by the Department of Justice Inspector General, no one was really held to account. No one said, “Wait, wait – don’t share this information with the public because it might be misinformation,” and the damage was done.
The leadership of the new GOP House majority has indicated that its investigative committees will look into all of this and will try to find out what really happened. We believe that they should not stop there, but should also explore possible guidelines that will deter governmental officials from engaging in partisan activity under the guise of discharging their duties. They should also try to explore ways to temper the outsize power of today’s social media in molding public opinion. The First Amendment rightly makes this tricky, but the problem will not go away on its own.
