The Patriot Post® · Musk 'Exits' Swamp Rat Baker

The Twitter hits, they keep a-coming.

Elon Musk did a great service to the causes of free speech and transparency last week when he exposed the internal deliberations of certain Twitter staff as they sought to suppress a news story that would likely have changed the 2020 presidential election. In doing so, Musk revealed the smoking gun of Big Tech corruption.

But those internal Twitter communications only revealed part of the corruption — the Twitter-specific part. Whistleblowers have told congressional Republicans that the FBI was deeply involved in the effort to suppress the New York Post’s bombshell story, but the communications Musk released seemed to pay little attention to the FBI’s role.

Now we know why: James Baker.

If you were tasked to name a single person who embodies all that’s wrong and rotten with Washington, DC, you could do a lot worse than calling out this Swamp rat. As constitutional law professor and blogger Jonathan Turley quipped, “James Baker is fast becoming the Kevin Bacon of the Russian collusion scandals.” Except we don’t need anywhere near six degrees of separation to get from Baker to Hillary Clinton’s dirty Russia-collusion trick on Donald Trump, the approval of the fraudulent FISA warrants for spying on Trump associate Carter Page, and the dissemination of the hoax about a secret backchannel between Trump and the Russian Alfa Bank. Baker was intimately involved in all of it.

Ultimately, the heat from the House Republicans’ investigation of the investigators forced Baker out of his high-powered role as FBI general counsel. Where did he land? Yep, Twitter, which hired him as its deputy general counsel. Turley continues:

As thousands of Twitter documents are released on the company’s infamous censorship program, much has been confirmed about the use of back channels by Biden and Democratic officials to silence critics on the social media platform. However, one familiar name immediately popped out in the first batch of documents released through journalist Matt Taibbi: James Baker.

As the New York Post reports, “Baker, a former top FBI lawyer, was discovered to be secretly vetting the internal Twitter documents before they could be reviewed by journalists, leading to a delay in the release of more material related to the company’s censorship scandal.”

Frankly, we’re surprised it took Elon Musk as long as it did to fire Baker, but fire him he did on Tuesday: “In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue,” tweeted Musk, “he was exited from Twitter today.”

Ah, “exited.” It’s not nearly as evocative as “defenestrated,” but it’ll do.

Looking back on the whole laptop story, we’re struck by one fact that now makes a lot more sense: Hunter Biden has never once denied that the computer he abandoned at the Mac Shop in Wilmington, Delaware, in April 2019 was authentic. Not once. Nor did Joe Biden. Normally, the lack of such a denial would be powerful proof of its authenticity — and of the reliability of the New York Post’s reporting. But not in this case. No, Twitter was being told otherwise by the FBI.

As former Twitter “head of site integrity” Yoel Roth told the Federal Election Commission in late December of 2020: “During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack and leak’ operations by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October.”

Lo and behold, just such a hack-and-leak story showed up from the New York Post in mid-October, less than two weeks before the election.

Let all this sink in. Twitter and Facebook and our federal law enforcement and intelligence services took the extraordinary step of claiming [read: lying] that Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro was likely a product of Russian disinformation. And they thus colluded to censor the Post’s airtight and thoroughly sourced reporting — in clear violation of our Constitution’s First Amendment.

As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy put it: “I can appreciate clever. It’s when people — especially government officials — insult my intelligence that I get angry. And we should all be angry over the United States government’s interference in the 2020 presidential election, hot on the heels of its self-abasement during and in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.”

As for that interference, just consider how things would’ve turned out had the party roles been reversed.

Never mind. Political analyst David Harsanyi has saved us the trouble: “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.”

When we consider the smoothness, swiftness, and coordination with which this story was censored, it almost seems as if they were expecting it. And it turns out they were. Get a load of what the Post’s Miranda Devine wrote on Sunday:

It looks very much as if the FBI pre-bunked a story it knew was coming about Hunter Biden. But how would it know The Post was going to publish the story in October 2020? Well, the FBI was spying on Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s online cloud, under the pretext of an investigation into alleged foreign agent registration violations, a probe which conveniently was dropped this year. The covert surveillance warrant on Giuliani gave the FBI access to emails in August 2020 from Delaware computer repair store owner John Paul Mac Isaac disclosing information damaging to Joe Biden from the laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at his store in April 2019. The FBI also had access to my messages with Giuliani in October discussing when The Post would publish the story.

It’s not a stretch, then, to say that the course of history was altered on October 14, 2020. That’s the date when the Post published its original laptop story, and Twitter and Facebook, upon the FBI’s direction, moved to censor it.

In doing so, this cabal of Big Tech and deep state operators likely denied Donald Trump a second term in office. We know this because polling done shortly after the election showed that a whopping 17% of Biden voters would’ve changed their vote if only they’d known about his corruption and his family’s international influence-peddling operation.

As for the other 83% of Biden voters, well, bless their hearts.