An investigation of Musk’s “laptop from hell” and Twitter’s investigation of the Musk-Mumford-FTC social media deal
The social media platform said in a court filing that federal authorities were investigating Musk in connection with the acquisition.
In another filing, the company accused Musk’s legal team of failing to produce draft communications with the SEC and a slide presentation to the FTC in order to help determine if Musk can walk away from the deal.
Musk first attempted to end the deal in July, claiming that the mutual purchase agreement had been broken by the misrepresentations of the number of fake accounts on its platform. The lawsuit was filed after Musk used bots as a pretext to exit the deal he had been involved in.
Last week Musk proposed buying the company at the original deal price of $54.20 per share. The judge overseeing the dispute later in the week ruled to pause the legal proceedings until Oct. 28 following a request from Musk.
The FTC, which is responsible for enforcement of the consent order, did not publicly reveal the investigation. In public testimony, the chair of the FTC told Congress that if they determined that executives of a social networking site were responsible for legal violations, the agency would hold them personally accountable.
In a separate filing on Thursday, Twitter also maintained that it did not instruct Zatko to burn several notebooks as part of a separation agreement, as Musk’s team had claimed in a filing earlier this month. The notebooks Zatko destroyed were of his own choice, according to the social network.
After journalist Matt Taibbi dropped leaked emails from the former C-suite of the company now owned by Elon Musk, conspiracy theorists were overjoyed. And then Musk responded.
In the years since, that paranoia has only grown. The title of the book was called “laptop from hell”, a quip that Trump made about Hunter Biden’s computer. The book promised to uncover the “coordinated censorship operation by Big Tech, the media establishment and former intelligence operatives”, and was described as one of the greatest coverups in media history. The book acknowledges that the platform had made a mistake after the election, but castigates them for suppressing the story.
Foreign intelligence officials identified the laptop as possible Russian interference, and major news outlets, unable to corroborate its contents, held off on the story. Twitter went a step further, temporarily forbidding its users from sharing the Post story, even in their DMs.
After the 2016 election, social media executives knew they had a problem. Russian operatives had used their platforms to run a massive covert influence campaign to help elect Donald Trump, using bots to spread disinformation and sow division among Americans.
“The Twitter Files confirm Q’s entire main narrative,” one QAnon influencer wrote. Balenciaga confirmed the rest. That message, which references the fantastical claims about fashion brand Balenciaga’s role in child trafficking, was seen more than 120,000 times on Telegram. Despite some hopes that his account would be restored, that particular QAnon influencer isn’t. Taibbi posted a picture of the private email Jack Dorsey used to send his personal messages, which he didn’t mention that he used a top level domain.
The Dean Obeidallah Show: Why Do CNN Editors Don’t Cover Exactly What Else Is Saying About the Investigations of Sexual Explosives?
Editor’s Note: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show.” Follow him @DeanObeidallah@masto.ai. The opinions that he gives in this commentary are his own. CNN has more than one opinion on it.
Congress should subpoena the complete set of the so-called Twitter files in order to force past and current Musk to testify under oath.
The House Oversight Committee is headed by a GOP lawmaker who said the FBI needed to be dismantled.
Lieu did not like the idea of the FBI stopped investigating child sex predators or terrorists, as was reported by one of the journalists who shared the files with Musk.
First and foremost, Musk has only allowed two journalists he chose access to the files, conservative columnist Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, a former Rolling Stone writer who now has a newsletter on Substack. But when other media outlets sought access to the files, no copies of the documents were forthcoming. There’s no way to ensure that the documents are complete or that key information has not been withheld.
It is not known what relationship these two journalists have with Musk in terms of editorial freedom. Taibbi told me via a direct message that she does not work for Musk.
However, the thin-skinned Musk temporarily banned reporters from Twitter whom he falsely claimed shared his “exact real-time” location — and even those who just asked him for a quote, as The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz found out Saturday night. If these reporters don’t sell the exact story line, would Musk do the same? It’s impossible to know.
As CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy noted last week, “Musk has relied on a set of handpicked gatekeeping writers to cover the story, while keeping the raw materials — and context — locked away from the rest of the news media and broader public.”
Why did the FBI shut down Twitter? Hunter Biden and his father, Jill, and his son, Joe (Taybbi)
After the fact-finding has been completed, the FBI should testify. The FBI should be grateful for this opportunity because of the statements made by certain Republicans about the bureau.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, representatives of the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security met with social media giants to discuss threats posed by foreign actors to influence our elections.
Why did Donald Trump and his officials raise concerns about the release of misinformation about Joe Biden and his son, Hunter?
Beyond that, Taibbi alleges that the FBI began flagging certain Twitter accounts because of their content, starting in January 2020 — again under the Trump administration.
The requests continued through the last month and targeted Billy Baldwin, Alec Baldwin’s brother and an actor who was attacked by Trump over his portrayal of him on SNL.
The president asked the Justice Department if they could do the same thing with the FCC after he said the commission should investigate the show.
“We would never go to a company to say you need to squelch this story,” said one former FBI official who helped oversee the government’s cooperation with companies including Twitter, Google and Facebook.
He thinks that he made a mistake when he said that he didn’t make the final call on the laptop story. “It is widely reported that I personally directed the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story,” Roth said last month. It is not true.
“There were lots of reasons why the entire industry was on alert,” Roth said at a conference in November, not long after he resigned from Twitter. Roth insists he was not in favor of blocking the story and thought the company’s decision was a mistake.
The FBI has no earmarks of a Russian intelligence operation: Sens. Chan tells CNN that the FBI does not investigate the laptop of Hunter Biden
Chan testified that government agents never raised Hunter Biden directly, and that his name didn’t come up only when a Facebook analyst asked for relevant information. Chan said that she was not authorized to address the question since the FBI had not publicly confirmed its Hunter Biden investigation at the time.
The Republicans on Capitol Hill want to call tech executives to testify about why they were ordered by the government to suppress a story.
The email shows Baker setting up a meeting with Matthew Perry, an attorney in the FBI Office of General Counsel, in the midst of internal deliberations about what to do with the New York Post story. The two talked, but it is not known what they discussed.
Comer also wants to hear from several former US intelligence officials who, days after the laptop story broke, wrote an open letter saying it had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The group of former officials who signed the letter included former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who, as a CNN contributor, appeared on the network to express his view.
“The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
At the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, a team reviewing the internal communications released by Musk says it has identified the 10 documents Chan sent to Roth. The FBI official told CNN that there was nothing in the documents about Biden’s laptop or any story about it.
The FBI refers to foreign influence actors and activities as “malign foreign influence actors and activities”. There were at least three documents that the FBI flagged as potential evidence of election- related crimes, including voter suppression activities, according to an official.
The FBI says the bureau is obligated under federal law to reimburse companies for the cost they incur to satisfy subpoenas and other legal requests as part of the FBI’s investigative work.
“All the information exchanged is about the actors and their activity,” a second FBI official who reviewed the communications told CNN. We aren’t giving any details about the content or narrative. We are also not directing the platforms to do anything. We are just providing it for them to do as they see fit under their own terms of service to protect their platforms and customers.”
To prepare for the next election, executives beefed up their internal controls, hiring former law enforcement and intelligence officials. They knew they had to build a deeper relationship with the US government in order to root out foreign troll armies.
One former FBI official who spoke to CNN recalls that tech executives would insist on meetings away from their campuses, in part because government agents weren’t welcome. Feelings in Silicon Valley toward the intelligence community are still raw due to the Edward Snowden leaks.
Nevertheless, the meetings went ahead. The first one took place at Facebook. Later meetings were held at Twitter and LinkedIn’s offices, a person familiar with the meetings told CNN.
A telling moment came early on when a government lawyer lectured tech executives about the limits on what the government can do to help, multiple people who attended the meeting told CNN. The Silicon Valley executive told of a lawyer giving a speech about the First Amendment and government representatives not being able to tell companies to take any content down.
Former Twitter employees and FBI officials involved say that by 2020, their discussions had become better coordinated and useful to both sides. By 2020, Facebook was issuing press releases about some of the discussions, which shows how beneficial the relationship had become.
At various points, the Twitter communications show Roth resisting pressure to reveal certain information about users absent a formal legal request, such as which third-party VPN services were used by some account-holders to access Twitter.
Others within Twitter noted the US government’s interest in Twitter’s data and urged colleagues to “stay connected and keep a solid front against these efforts.”
According to a sworn declaration given to the Federal Election Commission in December 2020, the government had warned of hack-and-leak incidents targeting people associated with political campaigns. There was a rumor that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.
Roth did not point to the government as the source of the rumor, but his claim that law enforcement agencies gave general warnings about disinformation campaigns dovetails with recent testimony from Chan, the FBI agent who played a key role in the meetings.
Chan was deposed this year as part of a lawsuit brought by the Missouri attorney general alleging government censorship of social media. Chan said that the government would only have warned companies that it was a possibility if they had been told to expect hacks and leaks.