(Headline USA) Former Twitter employees are expected to testify next week before the House Oversight Committee about the social media platform’s handling of reporting on President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
The scheduled testimony, confirmed by the committee Monday, will be the first time the three former executives will appear before Congress to discuss the company’s decision to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the weeks before the 2020 election.
Republicans’ longstanding concerns that the story was suppressed for political reasons appeared to be validated by the recent release of the Twitter files, which showed far-left social-media officials colluding with members of the intelligence community to bury that and other headlines they deemed objectionable.
The witnesses for the Feb. 8 hearing are expected to be Vijaya Gadde, former chief legal officer; James Baker, former deputy general counsel; and Yoel Roth, former head of safety and integrity.
The hearing is among the first of many in a GOP-controlled House to be focused on Biden family corruption as Republicans use their narrow House majority to hold accountable a Democrat-dominated administration that has acted with impunity over ethical and legal concerns.
The New York Post first reported in October 2020 that it had received from former President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of a hard drive of a laptop that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved.
Twitter initially blocked people from sharing links to the story for several days and later used shadow-banning and bogus “contextualization” to suppress its spread.
Months later, Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey called the company’s communications around the Post article “not great.” He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” around why it was blocked was “unacceptable.”
As part of the partisan cover-up effort, more than 50 former members of the intelligence community falsely claimed that the laptop might be Russian disinformation. At least one has since acknowledged that he knowingly lied about it, even though there was no intelligence to support the claim.
“This is why we’re investigating the Biden family for influence peddling,” Rep. James Comer, chairman of the Oversight committee, said at a press event Monday morning. “We want to make sure that our national security is not compromised.”
GOP staff has spent the past year analyzing messages and financial transactions found on the laptop that belonged to the president’s younger son. Comer has previously said the evidence they have compiled is “overwhelming.”
Much of that which already has leaked from the now-verified laptops has pointed to a range of crimes, from drug use and prostitution to money-laundering and espionage.
The concerns about the laptop have been further amplified by reports that Hunter Biden may have had access to classified information that was stored in the garage of the family home in Wilmington, Del.
Comer has pledged there won’t be hearings regarding the Biden family until the committee has the evidence to back up any claims of alleged wrongdoing. He also acknowledged that the stakes are high whenever an investigation centers on the leader of a political party.
On Monday, the Kentucky Republican, speaking at a National Press Club event, said that he could not guarantee a subpoena of Hunter Biden during his term. “We’re going to go where the investigation leads us. Maybe there’s nothing there.”
He added, “We’ll see.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
