Cable news pundits insist GOP investigators pursuing ‘witch hunt’ for Hunter Biden: ‘conspiracy of dunces'
As soon as the first House committee meeting investigating Big Tech’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story occurred this week, mainstream media pundits lined up and took turns trashing it as pure fringe right-wing ranting and raving.
As soon as the first House committee hearing investigating Big Tech’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story occurred this week, mainstream media pundits lined up and took turns trashing it as pure fringe from conservatives.
Anchors from both MSNBC and CNN, as well as guest commentators, dismissed the hearing as "right-wing craziness." This despite even Hunter Biden recently acknowledging that his laptop and its contents are real, and following more than a year of many major news outlets doing the same.
Some, like CNN’s Oliver Darcy, insisted that claims made in the hearing, such as those suggesting that the government encouraged Twitter to suppress the laptop story, had "no evidence," and accused the GOP of "peddling" the falsehoods to the public.
Others, simply dismissed the investigation as "nonsense."
BIDEN CLAIMS THAT HUNTER LAPTOP WAS 'RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION' DEBUNKED BY HIS OWN SON
The New York Times and The Washington Post both eventually verified Hunter Biden's laptop after big tech dismissed the New York Post's bombshell reporting during the 2020 presidential election. (Getty images | New York Post)
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee began its investigation into Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden Laptop story on Wednesday, with committee members asking former Twitter staffers what led to their decision to prevent.
Just days before the 2020 presidential election, high level staffers made the call to block the platform’s users from sharing the bombshell New York Post report on the infamous laptop.
During the hearing, GOP committee members sought to examine – in the words of Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. – "the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process," a coordination further outlined in last year’s bombshell "Twitter Files" dump.
The "Twitter Files" – published to the platform by prominent journalists at the behest of new Twitter owner Elon Musk last year – revealed how high-level staffers moved to censor users and controversial material such as the New York Post story.
The Twitter Files uncovered how employees initially perceived that the Hunter Biden laptop story was disinformation and made the move to stop its spread on the platform.
New York Post columnist Miranda Devine reported last December how former chief legal officer of Twitter Inc. Yoel Roth told the Federal Election Commission that "the FBI warned Twitter during ‘weekly’ meetings before the 2020 election to expect ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by ‘state actors’ involving Hunter Biden."
Such reports suggest that Twitter may have been primed by the FBI to discard the New York Post story when it was published.
Despite House GOP members marking the committee hearing as the start to holding tech companies and the U.S. government accountable for this alleged collusion to censor, mainstream media pundits insisted that the entire premise of the hearing was unlikely.
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During an episode of MSNBC’s "Morning Joe," former White House press secretary and current MSNBC contributor Jen Psaki dismissed the points made by Republicans in the hearing as crazy. She specifically claimed, "This is like a word salad of right-wing craziness."
The former Biden staffer also claimed that the majority of the country has no idea what the GOP is on about in these hearings as well as in their other attacks against the Democratic Party.
She added, "And if you’re just a normal person — 80 percent of the country, by the way, that is not on Twitter — and you’re hearing things like Durham, woke mobs, … many of the sentences in Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s speech the other night, you tune in and you think ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.'"
During a "CNN This Morning" guest panel on Thursday, which featured NYU marketing Professor Scott Galloway and tech journalist Kara Swisher, anchor Kaitlin Collins trashed the hearings, saying there was "no evidence" for Republicans’ claims.
She stated, "James Comer, who’s the House Oversight Chair… was saying the other day that the FBI and Twitter were colluding on this when, you know, we said there’s no evidence of that."
"There’s no evidence that there is any directive they got on the Hunter Biden story and now we see it was actually Trump people who were also asking to remove tweets because of what it was saying about the President of the United States," she added, mentioning a point revealed in the Twitter Files that people of both political parties had could ask Twitter to regulate posts they deemed problematic.
Representative James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky and chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, speaks during a hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023. House Republicans plan to grill former Twitter executives over their alleged cooperation with the FBI to squelch the story of Hunter Biden's laptop, the opening salvo in their probe into the Biden family finances. (Photographer: Anna Rose Layden/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
It is worth noting the "Files" mentioned that, since most Twitter employees responding to requests were liberal, requests by Democrat affiliates were fielded more than those by GOP affiliates.
JOE BIDEN MET WITH AT LEAST 14 OF HUNTER BIDEN'S BUSINESS ASSOCIATES WHILE VICE PRESIDENT
Galloway responded to Collins’s claim stating, "The only conspiracy here is a conspiracy of dunces that is our government right now as reflected in this hearing."
Elsewhere, during the panel, a visibly amused Swisher chimed in, calling the hearing "nonsense" and "ridiculous."
MSNBC "Morning Joe" anchor Mika Brzezinski claimed that the hearing reflected Republicans’ obsession with Hunter for whatever they might find." Speaking to a panel on the morning talk show Friday, Brzezinski said, "I think that’s going to backfire as well. This is President Biden, who is extremely well liked, who many believe has accomplished something in his first two years of office, and they’re going after him with such vigor."
She added, "I’m not sure that’s a good look for them, while their former president, they literally close their eyes, put blinders on to an insurrection. I just don’t know how that will translate."
The anchor insisted that Americans are paying more attention to the wrongdoings of the former president than those of a president they "like." She said, "I think we learned in the midterms that the American people are clued into Democracy matters. They don’t like insurrections where people get tortured and killed and they kinda like Joe Biden."
James Baker, former deputy general counsel at Twitter Inc., from left, Vijaya Gadde, former chief legal officer of Twitter Inc., Yoel Roth, former global head of trust and safety at Twitter Inc., and Anika Collier Navaroli, former employee at Twitter Inc., are sworn in during a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2023. House Republicans plan to grill former Twitter executives over their alleged cooperation with the FBI to squelch the story of Hunter Biden's laptop, the opening salvo in their probe into the Biden family finances. (Anna Rose Layden/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
She also absolved the current president from anything his son has done, stating "the Hunter thing" is "not President Biden."
FORMER TWITTER EXECS WHO CENSORED HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY FACE QUESTIONING FROM HOUSE GOP
And "The Megyn Kelly Show" executive producer Steve Krakauer pointed out how Wednesday’s CNN "Reliable Sources" newsletter claimed that the hearing pushed a "factually unsupported narrative" about government/Twitter collusion to censor the New York Post story.
Krakauer tweeted out a screenshot of the newsletter’s entry on the subject. It stated, "Republicans are living in a reality distortion field. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from Wednesday’s hearing on Capitol Hill where GOP lawmakers continued to push a factually unsupported narrative about the federal government secretly colluding with Twitter to censor the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020."
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It continued, stating, "Despite no real evidence to support this weighty and consequential claim, Republicans were unrelenting in peddling it to the American public."
The newsletter also accused the GOP of showing "no regard for misinforming those who turn to them for accurate information or the fact that they were smearing a private business and its former executives in the process."
