Elon Musk Fires Former FBI Lawyer
Elon Musk Fires Former FBI Lawyer Behind Russiagate Hoax Following ‘Unconvincing’ Explanation For Hunter Biden Laptop Censorship
By TRISTAN JUSTICE
CORRUPTION
Jim Baker was the Clinton campaign’s ‘go-to, speed-dial contact’ to plant false claims about Trump collusion with the Kremlin.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk fired Jim Baker, the company’s deputy general counsel, on Tuesday after an “unconvincing” explanation of the terminated employee’s role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
On Sunday, independent journalist Matt Taibbi posted a link to an article from attorney Jonathan Turley published in the New York Post which connected Baker’s work at Twitter with his prior operations peddling the Russia hoax at the Department of Justice. In 2016, Baker was the Clinton campaign’s “go-to, speed-dial contact” to plant false claims about Kremlin collusion and the Trump White House effort. Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann picked Baker to give junk intelligence about a purported connection between President Donald Trump and the Russian Alfa Bank.
“He was effectively forced out due to his role and reportedly found himself under criminal investigation. He became a defender of the Russian investigations despite findings of biased and even criminal conduct,” Turley wrote. “After leaving the FBI, Twitter seemed eager to hire Baker as deputy general counsel.”
The first batch of “Twitter Files” out on Friday revealed how Baker went on to play an instrumental role in suppressing blockbuster stories from the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Biden family business ventures — stories containing emails that implicated then-candidate Joe Biden in the dealings.
“Baker soon weighed in with the same signature bias that characterized the Russian investigations,” Turley wrote. Internal documents made public last week show Baker pressed colleagues at Twitter for more information that Biden’s emails had been hacked.
“Caution is warranted,” Baker wrote, despite there never being evidence the emails were illegally hacked.
Musk responded to Taibbi’s post on Tuesday with the announcement that Baker had been fired.
“In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today,” Musk wrote.
“Was he asked to explain himself?” inquired a user.
“Yes. His explanation was …unconvincing,” Musk replied.
In a “Twitter Files Supplemental” thread, Taibbi explained that last week’s delay in publishing the first round of files was due to Baker reviewing them without new Twitter leadership knowing.
“Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of ‘Twitter Files’ — without knowledge of new management,” Taibbi wrote.
The post suggests Baker was running interference behind Musk’s back to minimize the fallout over the reveal of Twitter’s behind-the-scenes operations to elect Joe Biden in 2020.
While general counsel at the FBI, Baker was central to the agency’s deep-state operations to undermine Trump as an agent of the Russian government. According to former FBI Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson in her testimony before House lawmakers in 2018, Baker “personally reviewed and made edits to the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]” warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The ex-FBI counsel would later defend the agency’s conduct, telling Yahoo News that officials took “seriously” the uncorroborated dossier commissioned by the DNC that alleged collusion, but “we didn’t necessarily take it literally.”
The agency’s legal chief, however, took it seriously enough to sign off on warrants to spy on political opponents. At least two of the warrant applications to conduct government surveillance on Page were declared illegal by a federal judge.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist.
Why Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ Matter
Mostly because the evidence confirms all my priors.
Elon Musk’s release of emails relating to Twitter’s 2020 presidential election censorship efforts confirms that big political media, Big Tech companies, and former intelligence officials were part of a ratfucking operation in 2020. It confirms that the social media platform suppressed unfavorable stories to benefit one party, dispelling the notion that the platform acted as a neutral arbiter. It confirms that claims of “dis-” and “misinformation” are often used by censors to quash inconvenient news and debate. And the reaction from political journos to these revelations confirms there are no regrets.
We haven’t even seen all the emails. Not that we need a Ron Klain email demanding Twitter suspend the New York Post’s account to know what happened. Coordination doesn’t necessitate explicit instructions from a political Svengali. People know what to do without being told. Partisans coalesce around talking points and groupthink metastasizes. This happens all the time on both sides. It happened when journalist Matt Taibbi was reporting on the Twitter files the other night, and virtually every big left-wing account dropped nearly the same rhetoric and framing to smear him.
What we learned was that plenty of Twitter higher-ups knew the company’s rationale for killing a major news story right before an election was hopelessly rickety.
“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe,” wrote communications official Trenton Kennedy about the Hunter story. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” then-Vice President of Global Communications Brandon Borrman asked.
But then, General Counsel Jim Baker, one of the Democrats who helped run the Russia collusion swindle on Americans (who was fired Tuesday for vetting the first batch of released emails without telling management), responded that it was “reasonable for us to assume that they may have been [hacked] and that caution is warranted.”
All they needed were 51 former intelligence officials, including known perjurers like Jim Clapper and John Brennan, to claim the Hunter Biden story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” They passed this deceitful claim to the unscrupulous “journalist” Natasha Bertrand, then at Politico. From there, the story was repeated endlessly by gullible reporters and/or willful hacks. And Twitter had its justification.
They would never be able to hide the story, but they could undercut the public’s trust in the newsworthy aspects. If more voters believed that Joe had known about his son cashing in on the family name or that there was circumstantial evidence that the former vice president was a beneficiary of those shady Chicom and Ukrainian deals, it could have mattered. And, after the media had convinced themselves that the Hillary Clinton email scandal — a completely legitimate story — had handed the election to that orange fascist, they would never let journalism get in the way again.
Now, if journalists had gotten their hands on a laptop containing pictures of Don Jr. weighing out 21 grams of crack with a, um, “sex worker,” there is not a social media platform or major media outlet in the universe that would have banned the story. And if that laptop had contained circumstantial evidence linking the Republican presidential candidate to a 10 percent cut of that Burisma cash it would have dominated the news — and rightfully so.
Yet, The Washington Post’s Philip Bump and Glenn Kessler are still arguing that their newspaper couldn’t pass along the story without doing its own independent verification. When I noted that The Washington Post did not make a habit of handing over data and sources to competing newspapers, Bump responded: “You didn’t know that other outlets won’t run a report on a Post scoop without confirming it themselves? You seem surprisingly underinformed about how actual journalism works, which I suppose isn’t really a surprise.”
Am I? Because media outlets, including The Washington Post, run scoops from other organizations all the time and simply credit the competing outlet. It would have taken Bump only a few minutes to pursue his own archives to find dozens of such examples. This has not only been the norm since I started in the business more than two decades ago, but since journalism was invented.
Of course, the Hunter story — with receipts, hard evidence, and on-the-record witnesses — had far more journalistic substantiation than virtually any of the anonymous one-source Russia-collusion “scoops” that Bump and The Washington Post peddled for years. Though, to be fair, some of those stories, like Jeffrey Goldberg’s “Losers and Suckers” story or The New York Times’s Russia “bounty” story — which WaPo columnists shared as irrefutable and unimpeachable — seemingly pulled their sourcing from the ether.
That’s not to say that major outlets didn’t talk about the Hunter story. They did. Quite a bit. Rather than deploying reporters to gather evidence to either verify or debunk specifics, reporters ran process stories to discredit the reporting. The New York Times ran an anonymously sourced piece highlighting the supposedly nagging “doubts” in the New York Post’s newsroom over the veracity of the emails. NBC’s Ken Dilanian reported that the Feds were examining “whether alleged Hunter Biden emails are linked to a foreign intel operation.” (What was the outcome?) Left-wing activists Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny wrote about “How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge” and “Inside the campaign to ‘pizzagate’ Hunter Biden” — which, as with most of their writing, amplifies fringe positions to discredit genuine stories. The Washington Post’s preposterous “explainer” ignored the most revelatory aspects of the reporting and instead asked rhetorical questions like, “What does the Biden campaign say?” and “What does Hunter Biden say?” and “How do we know the email is authentic?” (Their answer: “We do not.”) The Post had never treated a scoop that confirmed their narrative from another major left-wing outlet in this way. And, of course, all the emails would be authenticated.
Others have made a big deal over the fact that Trump was president when all this happened (true) and that Twitter hadn’t engaged in any First Amendment violations (probably true). So what? Limiting speech during a presidential campaign is still an illiberal and unethical act, even if it is legal. And entrenched state interests — intelligence officials, for example — can work to undermine the political process in numerous ways. Not long ago, Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that Facebook had limited the Hunter Biden story because of warnings from the FBI about “misinformation.” In better times, the news of a giant, rent-seeking company censoring a political story at the behest of the Feds would set off blaring alarms among outlets that fashion themselves the bulwarks of democracy.
Now, I have no clue if the Hunter story would have turned the 2020 election, and neither do you, but it would be truly refreshing if those dismissing the Twitter files would simply admit that they believe Donald Trump, and Republicans in general, are existential threats to “democracy,” and so journalistic ethics and free expression ideals need to be shelved for the greater good. It’s an illiberal position, sure, but an honest one.