(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The House Judiciary Committee has released excerpts of testimony from the section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, who said that her team knew Hunter Biden’s laptop was authentic while pressuring social media companies that it could be Russian disinformation.
Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, published the testimony excerpts in a Thursday letter to FBI Director Chris Wray, three days after interviewing FITF Section Chief Laura Dehmlow.
According to Jordan’s letter, Dehmlow admitted that Hunter Biden’s laptop is real in an Oct. 7, 2020, meeting with Twitter—weeks before the 2020 elections, and days before the New York Times published its first major story on the laptop.
“Somebody from Twitter essentially asked whether the laptop was real. And one of the FBI folks who was on the call did confirm that ‘yes, it was,’ before another participant jumped in and said, ‘No further comment,’” Dehmlow told the Judiciary Committee on Monday, according to Jordan’s letter.
Dehmlow told the committee she knows the person in the FBI who told Twitter the laptop was real, but that person’s name isn’t included in Jordan’s letter.
After the October 2020 meeting between the FBI and Twitter, the FBI decided to decline commenting on the laptop’s authenticity, according to Dehmlow.
“The FBI made this decision despite being in possession of the laptop and having confirmed its authenticity,” Jordan said in his letter. “According to Dehmlow, multiple personnel on FITF knew that the laptop was real.”
Nevertheless, Twitter wound up blocking the Post’s investigation into the laptop, while Facebook deamplified the story.
“The refusal of FBI officials—the very officials who knew the laptop was real—to verify the authenticity of the laptop allowed widespread censorship about an otherwise accurate news story,” Jordan said.
In light of Dehmlow’s testimony, Jordan is seeking names of the FITF members who knew the laptop was authentic, as well as internal communications and correspondences with social media companies about the matter.
Jordan asked Wray to provide him with this info by August 3.
Commenting on the latest revelations about FBI censorship, Breitbart News editor Emma-Jo Morris—who authored the initial laptop stories while a deputy politics editor at The Post—said she wasn’t surprised.
“We know that the FBI knew the laptop was real … I think something that gets glazed over in all this reporting is that Jim Baker was the deputy counsel at Twitter. And if that name doesn’t sound familiar, I’ll remind you all he is the former deputy counsel of the FBI,” she said at Thursday’s Weaponization Subcommittee hearing into social media censorship.
“I mean, are we supposed to all sit here and pretend he didn’t know [it was real]? Let’s not insult our intelligence and the intelligence of the American people.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
