Karine Jean-Pierre: I won’t comment on if Biden campaign spoke with Twitter

Joe Biden’s top spokesman will not comment on whether the president’s 2020 campaign reached out to Twitter after it was revealed there was at least some correspondence with the social media giant.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre continues to deflect questions related to the ‘Twitter Files’ bombshell after calling it ‘old news’ during her briefing on Tuesday.

He declined to comment Wednesday when asked if Biden’s team ever formally or informally communicated to the Twitter team that Hunter Biden’s laptop was hacked.

‘I cannot speak about the decisions made by the campaign from here. It was a political campaign, so I can’t talk about it from here, I’m covered by the Hatch Act,” Jean-Pierre said, invoking an often-used excuse for not answering journalists’ questions.

“So I’m just not going to comment on the question you’re asking me,” added the press secretary.

However, he defended Twitter’s previous management for its right to make company policy related to content moderation on its platform.

The ‘Twitter Files’ revealed that the social media company, in October 2020, used its ‘hacked materials’ policy to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story by claiming, without evidence, that his hard drive was infiltrated by foreign agents.

Internal communication on Twitter, revealed as part of a series called the ‘Twitter Files’, shows that at least one government official, Biden’s surrogates and the FBI were at least somewhat involved in or aware of the suppression of the story.

Congressman Jim Jordan went a step further, asserting Wednesday that government officials had at least an “indirect” role in the suppression of the Hunter laptop story, vowing to get to the bottom of the FBI’s involvement in the cover-up of the story.

Twitter Files author Matt Taibbi insisted in his initial thread that the government was not involved in the crackdown.

‘[T]there is no evidence, that I have seen, of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that could have been the problem…’ Taibbi wrote in his lengthy thread that kicked off the Twitter archives on Friday.

In the new Congress, Rep. Jordan will serve as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, a role he said he will use to open a series of investigations, including into the president’s son, Hunter.

As part of a supplemental release of the Twitter files released Tuesday, Taibbi revealed that Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker, who previously worked as FBI legal counsel, was “scrutinizing” the files without the knowledge of new Twitter leadership. Twitter.

Taibbi detailed that he and fellow Twitter Files author Bari Weiss were running into “roadblocks” to further searches, which they soon discovered was because Baker was “the person in charge of posting the files.”

Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, fired Baker on Tuesday.

“Even last weekend, I guess, he’s still looking at the emails that are going to Taibbi and going to the public,” Rep. Jordan told Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning. ‘So you’re talking about the fox guarding the chicken coop here. Well then.’

Baker was at the center of the FBI scandal in 2016 and 2017, when he was serving as the office’s general counsel at a time when Republicans accused the police arm of spying on Donald Trump’s campaign.

In June 2020, Baker was appointed Deputy General Counsel of Twitter, Inc. until he was fired this week.

The Twitter files reveal internal communications at the social media company revealing the extent to which employees tried to suppress the story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive.

Musk, following Baker’s firing, raised concerns about his potential role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the alleged interference in the Twitter Files post.

Jordan accused: “Jim Baker is in everything.”

“This just shows that big tech, big media and big government are working together to hide information from us the people. That’s the problem,’ she said in her interview with Fox News on Wednesday morning.

“And what I am committed to doing, what the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee are committed to doing, is taking on the role of the FBI in all of this,” the Ohio Republican continued.

‘Those weekly briefings they were doing with big tech after that letter from 51 former intelligence officials saying it was a ‘Russian disinformation operation.’ Bologna, they knew it was Bologna, but they were doing these briefings, that’s the big problem.’

Twitter immediately flagged a New York Post exposé featuring the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop as “unsafe,” justifying the suppression of the story because they claimed without evidence that it contained material hacked by foreign agents.

Democrats were quick to add to this rhetoric, repeatedly labeling the laptop story Russian disinformation or a Republican effort to discredit Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

The Twitter files reveal that Twitter went so far to suppress the story that it even blocked the transmission of the story’s URL via direct messages, which is a tool usually reserved for extreme cases like stopping the distribution of child pornography.

Twitter officials were also in contact with at least one Democratic lawmaker about the removal of the story, according to Twitter Files.