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Home » Twitter files #7: the FBI sets up the scam

Twitter files #7: the FBI sets up the scam

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This post is based on Twitter files #7, which can be found at this link. I suggest you read it, as well as this, which discusses the fact that Twitter was paid by the FBI for its services.]

First, some personal notes.

When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke shortly before the 2020 election, I initially experienced a brief sense of relief. It had been a tense year, to be sure: COVID, then the Floyd riots, and with the election looming I had a gut feeling that the cognitively challenged, mendacious, corrupt, newly-minted leftist Joe Biden was going to win. Now, with this laptop story, maybe enough people were going to learn about more of the family corruption, and perhaps it would change the outcome.

As I said, that was a brief respite. I’m not even sure it lasted more than a day before it become clear how the press, the Democrats, social media, and the Bidens were going to deal with it. They were going to say it was bogus and shouldn’t be paid any attention to, and social media even blacked out the paths to talk about it on their sites. Those famous 50+ ex-intelligence agents put out a statement saying it was fake – or had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information [in other words, disinformation] operation” when they hadn’t even examined it. Calling on echoes of their own disinformation operation – Russiagate – they cleverly skirted the facts that proved the obvious authenticity of the laptop and what it contained.

Biden was elected, by hook or by crook or by both, and then attention turned to the challenges to the authenticity of the votes, and of course January 6th. And there everything would have stayed, if it hadn’t been for Elon Musk buying Twitter and giving us the Twitter files.

Shortly after the laptop story broke, I had recognized that the multimedia suppression of the laptop was clearly coordinated. But I thought it was done through communication rather like the JournoList group of long ago – in other words, reporters in the MSM talking and writing to each other about how they should all handle it, and social media officials doing the same and talking to reporters as well about the best approach, and all of them also taking their leads from candidates and officialslike Biden and Democrat members of Congress, as well as leftist pundits and old pols like Hillary Clinton. They were all on the same page because they formulated their talking points with each other in various combinations and groups, and word got out quickly on what the best approaches would be. Social media was a very important part of the strategy, of course, because control through that avenue made it more and more difficult to amplify (to use a social media term) the news of what the laptop really was and why it might be important and also authentic.

What did I imagine the role of FBI had been in all of this? I knew early on that they’d had possession of the laptop since December of 2019; this is what I wrote about that on October 29, 2020:

Well, we already knew the FBI was given the Hunter laptop in December of 2019, didn’t we? That was the word from the computer repairman in Delaware.

And now the following has been reported by James Rosen:

“A Justice Department official confirmed to journalist James Rosen of Sinclair Broadcasting Group that in 2019 the FBI “opened up a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden and his associates that is focused on allegations of money laundering and remains open and active today.”…

So, what was the FBI doing with the laptop in the meantime? Perhaps Toobining themselves?

Whatever they were doing, they kept mighty mum about it, as President Trump was impeached by the Democrats for daring to suggest that the Ukrainians look into the Biden corruption allegations, and Joe Biden became the Democratic presidential nominee.

Perhaps the laptop was being saved as an insurance policy for Kamala.

So yes, I was very suspicious of the fact that the FBI had possession of the laptop for something like ten or eleven months prior to the story breaking, and hadn’t said a word about it. But no, I don’t recall thinking that the FBI was actually heavily involved in coordinating the social media response.

However, through Twitter files disclosures, we now learn that the FBI had been priming Twitter for this for a long time, setting the censors up to expect some sort of Russian (or other) disinformation operation very much like the Hunter laptop story, and to feel it was Twitter’s responsibility to block it. In this, the FBI was capitalizing on its own Russiagate disinformation scam, which had planted the idea that Hillary Clinton had lost the 2016 election to the nefarious Donald Trump because of some sort of Russian disinformation shenanigans. The FBI was now stirring up and capitalizing on the fear that it might happen again, and that “Russian interference and disinformation” could cause Trump to defeat Joe Biden this time. The people at Twitter certainly wouldn’t want that to happen because of their own failure to block the story whenever it did emerge.

But still, the files indicate that some of the Twitter people offered a surprising (surprising at least to me) amount of sales resistance to the FBI about that issue. I already discussed some of it in this recent post. Here are a few more examples:

In August of 2020, the FBI made the Twitter folks feel special – and as though they were getting top secret information – by getting temporary security clearances for some of them. Exciting cloak-and-dagger stuff:

It worked pretty well; Roth got the picture:

And then in September of 2020, Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer received the laptop hard drive. Because the FBI was spying on Giuliani, we can assume the agents got word and became even more alarmed that the Hunter laptop story was going to break prior to the election. Interestingly enough, it was also in September of 2020 that the FBI staged a remarkable simulation to plant seeds ever more firmly in the minds of the Twitter censors about what to expect, how to evaluate it, and what they would need to do when the supposedly fake story dropped.

Please take a careful look at the specificity of what they did, and note that – according to tweet #31, “Attendees included Meta/FB’s [Facebook’s] head of security policy and the top nat. sec. reporters for @nytimes @wapo and others.” This wasn’t just for Twitter; it involved other social media outlets plus the major players of the MSM. This was obviously a very important meeting, and the roleplay production involved none other than hypothetical information dropping that would be about Hunter Biden. What a coincidence – not:

(You can also find some descriptions and discussions of the whole thing here.)

And yet when the laptop story finally broke in October, the FBI still had to scramble and hammer home to Twitter censors what they needed to do. James Baker and others were involved, and it is described in tweets that are in the latter part of file #7. I suggest you read them yourself, lest this post become even more unwieldy. Suffice to say it was a full court press effort, and it succeeded.

The people in the FBI are not dumb, and they’re acutely aware of psychology and how to influence perceptions. And I repeat that we would know nothing of all this had Elon Musk not decided to buy Twitter. No wonder he perceives himself to be in danger – because it makes perfect sense that he would be.

Why did the FBI and all the rest of the intelligence agencies want to make sure Trump didn’t win in 2020? The answer seems obvious: he wasn’t on their side and he represented a threat to them and the rest of the “swamp.” But I think there’s even more than that. It has to do with the drive toward power for power’s sake. The whole story made me think of the character O’Brien in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. No, unlike O’Brien, the FBI didn’t torture anyone involved; at least, I don’t think so. I’m speaking of the fact that O’Brien isn’t just a straightforward true believer in the government he’s working for; he’s a cynic who is a brilliant manipulator of poor Winston Smith, who sometimes even finds him friendly and kind and somewhat avuncular. O’Brien doesn’t bother to mess around and tell Winston about some sort of idealism. He speaks only of power:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.

Do I think the FBI agents spoke to Yoel Roth and the others this way? Of course not. Do they allow themselves to think that way? I doubt it. But I believe that somewhere inside, that impulse to sheer power is part of their motivation for what they do.

Comments

Twitter files #7: the FBI sets up the scam — 31 Comments

  1. Indeed, too paraphrase Hamlet (or Foucault, for that matter), “Power, power, power”….

    No doubt, many of you have seen this latest in “Biden”-esque topsy-turvy-tude (AKA “Lying”…some might add, “and X-TREME Chutzpah”):
    Blaming the GOP for the border crisis! (I kid you NOT…)
    “Im-Politic: It’s Not Just the Twitter files.”—
    https://alantonelson.wordpress.com/2022/12/20/im-politic-its-not-just-the-twitter-files/
    H/T Lee Smith Twitter feed.
    Key grafs:
    ‘…In late October, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who’s been under fire throughout the Biden years for insisting in the face of overwhelming evidence that the United States’ border with Mexico is secure, tried to turn the tables on his assailants.
    ‘ In an interview with the Dallas [Texas] Morning News, Mayrokas charged that “the political cry that the border is open is music to the smugglers’ ears, because they take that political rhetoric and they market it” to desperate migrants.
    ‘ In other words, those calling attention to a problem…deserve the blame for the problem’s continuation and even worsening.
    ‘ What could be more transparently and self-servingly ludicrous? Well according to Martha Raddatz, ABC News correspondent…plenty…. Raddatz chided Texas Republican Governor Gregg Abott, a leading critic of Biden border policy with this claim:
    ‘ “You talk about the border wall, you talk about open borders, I don’t think I’ve ever heard President Biden say, we have an open border, come on over. But people I have heard say it are you, are former president Trump, Ron DeSantis, that message reverberates in Mexico and beyond. So they do get the message that it’s an open border and smugglers use all those kind of statements.”
    ‘ Actually, candidate Biden said exactly this during his victorious presidential campaign: “All those people who are seeking asylum, they deserve to be heard. That’s who we are. We’re a nation who says, if you want to flee, and you’re freeing oppression, you should come.”….’ [All emphasis, mine; Barry M.]

    They just gotta lie about it.
    (They know IT DOESN’T MATTER….)

  2. Barry Meislin,
    Jonathan Turley has a problem with Raddatz’s claims as well.

    “Raddatz’s interview is reminiscent of the interview by Leslie Stahl on CBS with former President Donald Trump where she shutdown Trump referring to the spying on this campaign by declaring that there is no evidence of such spying. There was already ample evidence of such spying, but Stahl simply told viewers that it was untrue.

    The Raddatz interview raises again the danger of a de facto state media where media echoes the position of the government by choice rather than coercion. Her objection was that Abbott and others keep referring to a crisis when the Administration and mainstream media do not use such terms. As a journalist, she is objecting to a public official in a border state calling out a crisis as thousands pour over his border on a daily basis.

    Raddatz’s objection was notably virtually identical to the talking point put out by the White House….”

    https://jonathanturley.org/2022/12/20/abcs-martha-raddatz-under-fire-over-abbott-interview/#more-198181

  3. I think it’s referred to as a “talking point avalanche”.
    The administration and its media lackeys will bombard us with it so as to make it…”TRUE”!

    (Once again with feeling: “Palestinian Rules…all the way down…”)

  4. “…whimsical…” (continued):
    “BREAKING: Elon Musk hints that yesterday’s poll about him stepping down as Twitter CEO was a trick to catch bots.”—
    https://twitter.com/CollinRugg/status/1604990858042159104

    Well, who really knows…

    In any event, as has been mentioned in previous posts, “whimsical” doesn’t generally cut it with Totalitarian, Inc.

    (E.g., a superb sense of humor wasn’t able to save JFK… Nor was Gerald Ford’s “stylish” slapstick enough to win in 1976. OTOH, Ronald Reagan was funny, but he may be the exception that proves the rule…)

  6. And the avalanche continues (talk about “going viral”!)…
    Here’s VPOTUS Word Salad right on cue…
    “Harris blames Republicans for border crisis: ‘Unwillingness to engage in any meaningful reform’;
    “Harris was tapped by President Biden to address the root causes of the border crisis in 2021”—
    https://www.foxnews.com/media/harris-blames-republicans-border-crisis-unwillingness-engage-any-meaningful-reform

    Guess she FINALLY found her “root causes” (Beets? Carrots? Rutabagas?) for the border crisis. Sure took her long enough….

    (Somewhere…Goebbels nods knowingly….)

  8. Power and money, these government bureaucrats are not among the average citizens. Many have government accounts, good salaries, nothing to worry losing their positions except if the Deep State is forced from power.

  9. These are nasty, vile people. Every damn one of them.

    Someday there will be justice done. If not, someone may well feel the need to take the law into his or her own hands — just like these crooks did. I wonder if the crooked Democrat/FBI folks will see the parallel.

    You can’t wreck the lives of millions and kill thousands without consequence. As Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, has noted before — the justice system exists to protect the crooks from the people. If the system refuses to work, the people will. Accountability is necessary or chaos will result.

    I’m curious how these corrupt people see this ending. Do they see the people just rolling over and ignoring all this? Do they think they will be brought to justice eventually? Or do they think the people will get violent and they have a plan to repress the people?

    They have to have a plan. They know how outrageous they are. Not all of us are as stupid and corrupt as Democrat voters. How violent do they plan to be?

  10. Is there any reason to trust anything any FBI agent tells you about anything, even if in pursuit of some vile crime having nothing to do with national anything? Like trafficking, or their involvement in the U of Idaho murders.
    Is there going to be a Richard Jewell character here? Is the Jewell case taught in the academy as something you shouldn’t do? Or how to do it better so you don’t get caught? Give me some odds.

  11. Unfortunately, the MSM will never acknowledge what happened and, as a result, the vast majority of the American public will be blissfully ignorant of it. I sincerely wish I could see changes to that calculus, but I don’t.

  12. APT 28 was anothef one of those squirrels to hide hillarys dirty laundry

    Conjured up by fire eye another dubious ex ? Intel contractor then vouched for by crowdstrike

  13. I remember Trump’s saying, late in the 2020 campaign, “I have the chance to take down the deep state.” They could not permit that. This is about power.

  14. Ah obrien who headed the brotherhood which was the putative opposition to big brother sound familiar all examples drawn from history

  15. Back on August 9th, in a comment added to one of Neo’s posts on the Mar-a-Lago raid (https://tinyurl.com/km7uyhmh), I wrote that I thought that the FBI and IRS should both be abolished.

    The newly released Twitter files confirm my opinion. Abolish both the FBI and the IRS. Both are now part of a deep state working against the country’s own citizens. It’s not an exaggeration to say that they’ve become the enemy.

    Reconstitute the FBI as something analogous to Interpol. Its primary mission would be to supply effective interstate communication of crime data. This change should be accompanied by the repeal of many federal criminal statutes. (See the paper “Ham Sandwich Nation” by Glenn Reynolds.)

    The abolition of the IRS would be accompanied by the repeal of the income tax, and its replacement by a national sales tax or VAT (value added tax). This would require a much smaller enforcement agency, and the IRS could thus be reconstituted with much reduced size, scope, and power.

    Why not make this part of the GOP election platform? Wouldn’t its popularity be guaranteed? At this point, who supports the FBI and IRS?

  17. Thousands upon thousands of Americans in the federal gov. and media belong in prison for serious crimes and every damn one of them voted for the traitorous criminal Joe Biden.

  18. The abolition of the IRS would be accompanied by the repeal of the income tax, and its replacement by a national sales tax or VAT (value added tax). This would require a much smaller enforcement agency, and the IRS could thus be reconstituted with much reduced size, scope, and power.

    IMO, you’ve packed several bad ideas in one paragraph. The IRS can be troublesome because tax law is rococo, generating unnecessary avenues to harass people. The answer isn’t to abolish the IRS, but to parcel certain functions out to other agencies and eliminate the complications in the tax code.

    A VAT isn’t a bad idea, but you still have the danger that crudniks like Mitch McConnell will put complications in it in their continual favor trading with various industrial sectors. Even a straightforward VAT will complicate the accounting of any business and require a company’s general ledger be open to tax inspectors. Since it is entirely novel, you might found a new agency to administer it. I don’t think the costs of enforcement will go down with a VAT, but we could consult the experience of other countries. Ideally, state and local governments would replace their sales taxes with a VAT making use of federal definitions of liability.

  19. Neo, President Trump was certainly naive about DC Republicans sharing any common goals with him, but he did make strides in reducing the government workforce in some agencies.

    His second term fix was the executive order “Schedule F” employees.

    WASHINGTON — President Trump signed an executive order this week that could substantially expand his ability to hire and fire tens of thousands of federal workers during a second term, potentially allowing him to weed out what he sees as a “deep state” bureaucracy working to undermine him.

    The executive order, issued late Wednesday and described by one prominent federal union leader as “the most profound undermining of the Civil Service in our lifetimes,” would allow federal agencies to go through their employee rosters and reclassify certain workers in a way that would strip them of job protections that now cover most federal employees.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/trump-executive-order-federal-workers.html

    He had made some headway in reducing government bureaucracy in many agencies.

    All agencies with the exception of DHS, VA, DOD were reduced in size.

    At the department level, the Biden team will have the steepest hole to climb out of at Education, which has seen a 15% decline in employees since late 2016. That is up from 11% about halfway through Trump’s term. Both State and Labor employ about 12% fewer workers than they did prior to Trump’s presidency. State kept a hiring freeze in place for 16 months until Secretary Mike Pompeo ended it in 2018.

    https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2020/11/trump-has-slashed-jobs-nearly-every-federal-agency-biden-promises-reversal/170203/

  20. So…given what we knew already, & given what we’re learning with each new Twitter files dump…
    Can anyone say with a straight face that the 2020 Presidential election was truly on the level…and be taken seriously in intelligent company?

  21. There is a serious issue I would like to point out: civil service, civil service regulations and public employee unions.

    When we took our civics courses in 8th grade we were taught what a wonderful thing the elimination of the “spoils system” was. Right now, the best thing America could do would be to bring it back!

    The advantage of the spoils system is accountability.

    We also need to disperse the federal government. With the exceptions of Defense, whatever comes after we rid ourselves of the CIA, and Treasury, everything else should be gone.

    Agriculture? Wichita
    Labor? St. Louis
    Patent & Trademark? Austin
    Transportation? Chicago

    You get the idea from the above examples. Cabinet secretaries get to fly First Class but they must go through security like everyone else. The quality of advice they would give to the President at the monthly cabinet meetings would be vastly improved with an “outside the Beltway” perspective.

    While the current civil service corps would hate all of the above, for the rest of us: What’s not to like?

  22. Sigh, so true. The road not taken. And unfortunately we are enduring the consequences.

    >neo on December 20, 2022 at 8:50 pm >said:
    >Kate:
    >Trump was certainly naive on that score.

  23. NEO to Kate:
    “Trump was certainly naive on that score.”

    QUESTION: before the end of 2020, post-election, do you know anyone who wasn’t?

  24. Nice gig if you can get it!
    “Musk says Twitter will ‘absolutely’ refuse payments to censor after platform took $3.4m from FBI;
    “The FBI gave Twitter more than $3.4 million for processing requests, an email shows.”—
    https://justthenews.com/nation/technology/musk-says-twitter-will-absolutely-refuse-payments-censor-after-platform-took-34m

    Only 3.4 mil?
    (Sounds like a steal!!)

    + Bonus (Interesting development—what are the odds the Media will ignore it?):
    ‘ Former acting Attorney General sours on Christopher Wray, says FBI needs new leadership;
    ‘ “You need somebody that can go in there and actually reform the institution,” said Matt Whitaker. “I don’t think Chris is the person to do it.” ‘—
    https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/wedformer-acting-us-attorney-general-says-fbi-needs-new-leadership

  25. He tried thats why mueller the two impeachments the deplatforming over a delta house stunt

  28. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.

    What more needs be said?

  29. A CBS news site is calling [my words- the Jan. 6 riot], “the worst attack on The Federal Government / Washington D.C. in 200 years!”

    No.

    (One of) THE WORST ATTACKS on the Federal Government was-

    was in [The war of 1812], [when the British Army] attacked + overran parts of Washington D.C., and STORMED The White House, causing the President, + all the people in the White House, to run for their lives…while enemy soldiers were hunting these people.

    [I’ve heard that once the White House was empty, some British soldiers had a picnic lunch in the white house, as a way to insult the USA, + to show the British army took over the White House.]

    Luckily, a storm hit the capital city, + drove the enemy army OUT of the US capital city, or The US could have been destroyed + taken over.

    THAT is a worse attack on the USA’s, Federal Government, in the past 200 years.

  30. Pingback:Twitter files #7: the FBI sets up the scam - Rifnote Wire

  31. I called a delta house operation except neidermeyer the trigger happy shooter was black

    Is everyone having flashback from that second to last season of 24 which was terrible, and white house down (no one saw that one)

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