James Baker, a former deputy general counsel for Twitter, was “exited” from the firm on Tuesday, according to Elon Musk, following disclosures about his involvement in how the platform handled the Hunter Biden laptop affair. James Baker, the FBI’s top attorney before joining the social media giant in 2020, was fired by Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter last month for $44 billion, for his “possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue,” according to a tweet posted on Tuesday.
The internal emails between Twitter’s top executives in October 2020 regarding how to handle the New York Post’s disclosure of information on Hunter Biden’s laptop were disclosed over the weekend by journalist Matt Taibbi.
Musk claimed that Baker, who was instrumental in the FBI investigation into allegations of Russian influence in the 2016 US presidential election, had provided an “unconvincing” justification for his actions.
Musk made his revelation just before independent journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted that Baker’s “vetting” of the documents without management’s approval had caused the anticipated disclosure of new internal documents linked to Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop incident to be postponed.
On Friday, Taibbi disclosed internal emails from October 2020 that explain how Twitter officials decided to limit the circulation of a New York Post article about items discovered on the laptop of US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The conversations show Twitter’s top officials debating if and how to censor the story, which claimed Hunter Biden used his father’s name in business deals in China and Ukraine.
n the end, Twitter management determined that the article should be blocked in accordance with their policy against hacked content because former US intelligence officials claimed that the laptop tale had all the hallmarks of Russian propaganda, despite the fact that no proof of Russian participation has ever been provided.
According to the emails obtained by Taibbi, Baker was one of the executives who favoured limiting the piece, saying it was “logical for us to assume” that it contained hacked material and “caution is necessary.”
However, there is no indication that the Biden campaign, law enforcement, or any other government entity directly requested the suppression of the New York Post piece in the documents made public on Friday. Instead, they pretend to show letters from the Biden campaign asking Twitter to remove specific tweets, including allegedly nude images of Hunter Biden that were published without permission.
