Emma Jo-Morris, a former New York Post reporter and Fox News producer who is now the politics editor of Breitbart News, testified before the House Select Subcommittee on Federal Government Arming on Thursday.
Morris explains how the NY Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story sent shockwaves through the 2020 campaign, leading to a coordinated government-led campaign to shut down and discredit the story. His testimony is presented in full below.
“My name is Emma Jo-Morris, politics editor at Breitbart. I’m here today because I published a series of stories three years ago in October 2020 about Hunter Biden’s now-infamous laptop, aka the Laptop from Hell, which is seen as one of the most scandalous reports of the last decade.. What was more scandalous than the report itself was the fact that it exposed the unholy alliance between the intelligence community intelligence, social media platforms and legacy media.”
“At the time, I was deputy politics editor at the New York Post. And my reporting showed that, despite candidate Joe Biden’s repeated and furious denials, he was apparently involved in his family’s foreign business. For several days, just weeks before Americans voted for their next president, I revealed authentic verified emails from [Hunter] Biden’s hard drive, showing Ukrainian business partners receiving leaks from the Obama White House.
“I documented an off-the-books meeting between then-Vice President Biden and a Ukrainian Energy executive, and introduced the world to the Big Guy who struck a deal with CEFC, an energy company in China. The Post went release exactly how the material for the report was obtained, even identifying our sources, as well as a federal subpoena showing that the FBI was in possession of the material on which the story was based and had been since December 2019”.
“But when the stories hit social media that morning, the place where millions of Americans go for their news and editors to get their views within hours, the reports were censored across the board. major platforms because it was called ‘hacking’ or ‘Russian disinformation’. Twitter refused to allow users to share the link in stories, prohibiting links from being shared in private messages. By the way, a policy that used to crack down on child pornography and block your verified account from posting.”
“Facebook said it would curb the distribution and reach of the links on its platform. However, the stories were not based on hacked material, nor were they Russian disinformation. And while these claims seemed to come out of the blue at the time, we would eventually learn that they didn’t actually come out of thin air. On October 19, five days after the post first went live, Politico ran a headline on the story, The Biden Hunter Story Is Russian Disinfo. Dozens of former Intel officials say… God, I can’t even say that with a straight face. You know, Politico printed a completely uncritical letter from veteran members of the US intelligence community, falsely claiming that the Post exposé has all the classic hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation.
“My God. Among the signatories of this letter, the most notable were Jim Clapper, former DNI Michael Hayden, former CIA John Brennan, former CIA, despite having such damaged credibility after their involvement in the theory of Russia Collusion Conspiracy A few days later, on October 22, when Biden appeared at the second presidential debate and confronted the facts of the Post’s report, he told Trump, 50 former national intelligence said so. What he accuses me of is a Russian plot, but it wasn’t. And I knew it.”
“Now, fast forward to this year, three years later, just last spring, House investigators revealed that it was a call from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, to former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell . This led to the spy letter published by Politico, which bypassed the agency’s approval processes that would have normally applied. It is now also known that prior to my report, federal agencies were preparing companies to social networks to run an operation to discredit it.”
“According to internal documents released by Elon Musk after his acquisition of Twitter, the FBI and other members of the intelligence community essentially ran the platform’s censorship operation, in part externally working with the high management and partly internally by social media companies that were hiring surprising numbers of the agency’s alumni. Journalist Michael Shellenberger reported, based on documents he obtained from Musk, that throughout 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Twitter executives to dismiss reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian hacking and leaking operation Feds arranged for security clearances secrets to managing Twitter and even set up an encrypted messaging network, which they dubbed a virtual war room. To this day, hundreds of people in the intelligence community work at social media companies.”
“Over the past few years, my reports have been corroborated by virtually every major media outlet, from the Washington Post to the New York Times to Politico when the bet was nothing. By the way, two years later, no one is denying that the laptop is real, that the origin story is exactly what I told you it was in the first place. This elaborate conspiracy of censorship was not because the information being reported was false. It was because it was true and it was a threat to the centers of power in this country. What this relationship between US government officials and corporate America represents is an unprecedented push to undermine the First Amendment, the right to think , the right to read, say what we want and how we respond will determine whether we see a free press as inalienable or as optional”.
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