FBI Directly Involved in Using Twitter to Control Election Results; Taxpayers Foot Bill to Ban Accounts

By: Jared Evan

An exclusive New York Post report has found that the FBI was directly involved with using Twitter to control the recent presidential election results.

Jon Levine of The New York Post writes, “The Post found FBI influence was considerably more significant than just James Baker, the FBI’s former general counsel who later worked in the same role for Twitter.

He was recently fired by Musk for interfering in the billionaire’s efforts to come clean about past transgressions at the company.

Elon Musk took over Twitter and made it his mission to bring wrong doing to light. The news comes on the heels of the latest Twitter Files disclosures which show how the agency dedicated dozens of agents to pressuring the company to remove political tweets it found objectionable. In some cases, the former G-men and -women held positions that would have put them close to company leadership directly involved in censoring The Post’s Hunter Biden coverage in October 2020.

Matthew Williams spent more than 15 years with the FBI, working mostly out of Seattle, where he served most recently as an intelligence program manager and senior supervisory intelligence analyst, according to The New York Post.

The New York Post found FBI influence was considerably more significant than just James Baker, the FBI’s former general counsel who later worked in the same role for Twitter.

He was recently fired by Musk for interfering in the billionaire’s efforts to come clean about past transgressions at the company.

Williams joined Twitter in June 2020 — the same month as Baker — as a “senior director of product trust,” according to his LinkedIn. In June 2022 he moved into a more expansive position as “senior director of product trust, revenue policy, counsel systems & analytics at Twitter.” He noted this made him “co-lead of Trust & Safety.”

The exclusive New York Post report shows that Twitter staff before the Musk takeover were famously liberal, with 99% of employee campaign donations heading to Democratic candidates. Williams gave small but consistent amounts to Democrats running for federal office during his years at the company, Federal Election Commission records show.

Jeff Carlton worked for the FBI, CIA and as an intelligence officer for the US Marines before joining Twitter in May 2021. His now deleted LinkedIn account says he led “Twitter’s Strategic Response Team of 50+ employees/agents in resolving the highest-profile Trust & Safety escalation,” which served to promote “healthy public conversations.” In November 2021, he donated $100 to California Democratic House candidate Will Rollins, according to The New York Post.

Meanwhile in other news on the Twitter Files WND reported:

Factual information about the foreign business dealings with the Biden family was discredited by the FBI and the IC both after and before the Post’s blockbuster Oct. 14, 2020, story, according to the seventh Twitter Files release, reported by journalist Michael Shellenberger on Monday.

Significantly, in July 2020, the FBI’s Elvis Chan – assistant special agent in charge at the office in San Francisco, where Twitter is headquartered – arranged for temporary Top Secret security clearances for Twitter executives to enable the FBI to share information about “threats” to the upcoming elections.

Further, the latest release of internal communications revealed, the FBI paid Twitter at least $3.4 million for its work.

Shellenberger recalled that Twitter Files No. 6, released Friday, showed the FBI had a system in place in which it had “constant and pervasive” contact with Twitter executives, acting as if it were a “subsidiary” of the social-media giant.

The Daily Mail of the UK reported on Tuesday that The FBI handed nearly $3.5 million of taxpayers money to Twitter to pay its staff to handle requests from the bureau as it sought to ban accounts.

A Twitter employee wrote in a February 2020 email that the company’s Safety, Content & Law Enforcement (SCALE) had ‘collected $3,415,323’ in less than two years from the FBI for ‘law-enforcement related projects.’

The email, which was revealed by Shellenberger, stated that SCALE had instituted a ‘reimbursement program’ in exchange for devoting staff hours to ‘processing requests from the FBI,’ as was reported by the Daily Mail of the UK.

The accounts the FBI asked Twitter to ban were largely linked to conservatives and ‘foreign influence operations’.

The Daily Mail also reported that Twitter initially believed the Hunter Biden laptop story was ‘Russian disinformation’. It was revealed Monday that Jim Baker, Twitter’s top lawyer and ex-FBI general counsel, personally intervened to say it should be banned.

Baker told Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of security, that the laptop story should be blocked – a day after getting a top secret briefing from his former FBI colleagues, according to the Daily Mail report.

He wrote: ‘There are some facts that indicate the materials may have been hacked. We simply need more information.’

He went on to write: ‘I’m guessing we are going to restrict access to their article as violation of our Hacked Materials policy.’

The Daily Mail also reported that an investigation into Twitter’s behavior around the 2020 presidential election by the incoming Republican majority in the house has been promised with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy telling Fox News this week: ‘This is going to be a much bigger situation than people realize.’

McCarthy is one of the many Republicans who will be calling for a more thorough investigation of the FBI’s relationship with social media when the GOP takes control of the house in 2023, according to the Daily Mail report. McCarthy added: ‘This is going to be a much bigger situation than people realize.’

Elon Musk, the current owner of Twitter said of the e-mails, ‘”Government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public.’

In a previous dump, journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted: ‘Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,’ as was reported by the Daily Mail.