While Facebook won’t say exactly what the FBI told them, it told the Post that Hunter Biden was not mentioned. But he refuses to rule out whether Joe Biden or Ukraine were brought up in the FBI’s defense Facebook update weeks before the October 14, 2020, publication of our story implicating the then-Democratic presidential candidate in his son’s lucrative Ukrainian influence schemes. . “Basically, the background here is that the FBI basically came to us, some people on our team, and they were like, ‘Hey, just so you know you need to be vigilant,’” Zuckerberg said. “We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we know that basically there’s going to be some kind of dump that’s going to be similar to that, so just be careful.” “ When Rogan asked if the FBI had told Facebook to be on the lookout specifically for our story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Zuckerberg claimed, rather unconvincingly, that he “didn’t remember . . . specifically’ but ‘basically fits the pattern’. In response to questions from The Post, Facebook last week declined to give the date of the FBI’s private briefing or details about the “pattern” it told the FBI to look out for. Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the FBI approached Facebook and warned of a Russian propaganda “dump”.PowerfulJRE /YouTube Since our story had nothing to do with Russian disinformation, what made Facebook think it was the “dump” the FBI warned it about? We asked Facebook: “Was there a mention in the FBI briefing on Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Ukraine, or a laptop?” Facebook’s response was strange. “FBI shares general warnings about foreign interference – nothing specific to Hunter Biden”. Note the omissions.
Suspicious timing
Whatever was said, the update must have been specific enough for Facebook to immediately recognize that our story was exactly what the FBI was warning about and move with record speed to take it down. At 11:10 am the morning the story went live, Democratic Rep. Andy Stone, Facebook’s director of communications, issued a statement on Twitter announcing that we were “reducing its distribution on our platform” while the story was “reviewed by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners.” . All morning the bomb story was the subject of frenzied commentary by journalists on twitter. But Stone’s announcement killed it stone cold. Twitter followed Facebook’s lead and locked The Post’s account for two weeks. Mission accomplished. Polls show that the outcome of the election might have been different if the story had not been censored. The FBI’s involvement in censorship amounted to election interference, and as we’ve since learned from allegations, the interference by a group of FBI agents to suppress disparaging information about the Biden family extends far beyond The Post’s story. While Facebook won’t say exactly what the FBI told them, it told the Post that Hunter Biden was not mentioned. So the question is, how did the FBI know about our story weeks before it was published, maybe even before we were told about the laptop by Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Bob Costello? Were they spying on John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Delaware Mac repair shop where Hunter had left his laptop in April 2019? Mac Isaac believed he was under surveillance after he first contacted the FBI on October 9, 2019, through his father, to tell them he had the laptop and was concerned about crime evidence he believed it contained. The FBI’s response was strangely hostile. That was followed by a surprise visit to his home in Delaware by FBI agents Mike DeMeo and Joshua Wilson from the FBI’s Baltimore office a month later, and again to his store on December 9, this time with a subpoena for the water-damaged Hunter’s laptop and a hard drive clone of his content that Mac Isaac had made. John Paul Mac Issac believes he was under surveillance after he first contacted the FBI in 2019 about the laptop. Robert Miller The case ID on the receipt given to him by the FBI was linked to a money laundering case from the Baltimore office. What we didn’t know until after the election was that Delaware US Attorney David Weiss had been investigating Hunter since 2018 for alleged tax evasion, money laundering and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and the Baltimore FBI. the office was supposed to conduct the relevant investigation.
The role of Rudy
We don’t know if Mac Isaac was under FBI surveillance. But we don’t have to speculate about Rudy Giuliani. We know the FBI had been spying on the former mayor’s cloud for two years starting in May 2019, a month after he began working as then-President Donald Trump’s personal attorney. A year after Giuliani’s Upper East Side apartment was raided last April, ostensibly for FARA violations, the FBI returned all his devices, without charging him, and told The New York Times it was no longer under investigation. FBI agents raid former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s Upper East Side apartment in April 2021.AP/John Bazemore So the FBI had access to all of Giuliani’s emails and iMessages for two years. Were they spying on Giuliani to spy on Trump? Unfortunately for them, Trump rarely writes emails or texts so they went out on a limb there. But it’s possible they saw the email to Giuliani from his lawyer Bob Costello at 4:28 p.m. on August 27, 2020, telling him about McIsaac’s “amazing discovery.” “I am arranging to get a full copy of the hard drive as it contains a lot of material beyond the Ukraine material according to the owner. . . The five emails he sent show that Hunter was directly involved in orchestrating his father Joe Biden’s intervention to stop the Ukrainian investigation into Burisma,” Costello wrote. “I believe we are on the verge of a game-changing production of incontrovertible evidence of the corruption we have long suspected of involving Biden and Ukraine — but there is more.” Costello then forwarded McIsaac’s original email to Giuliani, which described how Hunter entered his store disheveled and smelled of alcohol and attached a copy of the work order with Hunter’s signature, the FBI receipt and the subpoena . The FBI had access to everything. They had the laptop for nine months and knew Mac Isaac was legit. We know they looked at the laptop because Mac Isaac received a series of calls from an agent the day after it was seized, asking how to connect it. A whistleblower told Sen. Chuck Grassley that the FBI had “developed information about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity.”AP/Andrew Harnik
“same book”
As we now know from whistleblowers who came forward to Senator Chuck Grassley, the FBI obstructed its own investigation into the laptop. Timothy Thibault, the FBI’s assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, has been on leave since Grassley began raising concerns about suppressing negative information about Hunter ahead of the 2020 election. The whistleblowers also told Grassley that the FBI had “developed information about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity. . . verified and verifiable derogatory information,” but this was “falsely characterized as disinformation” by FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten in August 2020. Auten has been identified as the analyst who failed to alert his colleagues in 2016 to “inconsistencies” in the phony Steele dossier, which the Clinton campaign produced to claim that Trump was a Russian agent. The same playbook was applied to Hunter Biden’s information.
