Emma Jo-Morris, a former New York Post reporter and Fox News producer who now is a Politics Editor for Breitbart News, testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Thursday.
Morris recounts how the NY Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story sent shockwaves throughout the 2020 campaign, resulting in a government-led, coordinated campaign to shut down and discredit the story. Her testimony is provided in full below.
“My name is Emma Jo-Morris, politics editor at Breitbart. I’m here today cause I published a series of news stories three years ago in October of 2020 about Hunter Biden’s, now infamous laptop, also known as the Laptop from Hell, which is seen as some of the most scandalous reporting of the last decade. What was more scandalous than the reporting itself though was the fact that it exposed the unholy alliance between the intelligence community, social media platforms, and legacy media outlets.”
“At the time, I was Deputy Politics Editor at the New York Post. And my reporting showed that despite then candidates Joe Biden’s repeated and furious denials, he was apparently involved in the foreign business deals of his family. Over several days, just weeks before Americans would vote for their next president, I revealed verified authentic 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 got action on a deal with CEFC, a China energy company. The Post published exactly how the material for the reporting was obtained, even identifying our sources, as well as a federal subpoena showing the FBI was in possession of the material the story was based on and had been since December of 2019.”
“But when the stories appeared on social media that morning, the venue where millions of Americans go to find their news and editors to get their angles within hours, the reporting was censored on all major platforms on the basis of being called ‘hacked’ or ‘Russian disinformation.’ Twitter refused to allow users to share the link to the stories, ban the links from being shared in private messages. A policy by the way, that’s used to clamp down on child porn and lock the post out of its verified account.”
“Facebook said it would curb distribution and reach of the links on its platform. However, the stories were not based on hacked materials, nor were they Russian disinformation. And despite those claims appearing to come out of thin air at the time, we would eventually learn that they actually didn’t come out of thin air at all. On October 19th, five days after the post began publishing, Politico ran a story headline, hunter Biden’s 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 letter completely uncritically from veteran members of the US intelligence community, falsely claiming that the Post expose has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
“My God. Most notable among the signatories of that letter were Jim Clapper, former DNI Michael Hayden, former CIA John Brennan, former CIA, despite having such damaged credibility following their participation in the Russia collusion conspiracy theory. A few days later, on October 22nd, when Biden appeared in the second presidential debate and was confronted with the facts of the post reporting, he said to Trump, 50 former national intelligence professionals said this. What he’s accusing me of is a Russian plot, but it was not. And he knew that.”
“Now, fast forward to this year, three years later, just last Spring, House investigators revealed it was a call by now Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, to former acting CIA director Michael Morrell. That prompted the spy letter published by Politico, which bypassed agency approval processes that would’ve been normally applied. It is also now known that ahead of my reporting, federal agencies were priming social media companies to execute an operation to discredit it.”
“According to internal documents released by Elon Musk upon his acquisition of Twitter, the FBI and other intelligence community members essentially directed the platform censorship operation, in part externally by working with top management and in part internally by social media companies hiring eye-popping numbers of agency alumni. Journalist Michael Shellenberger reported based on documents he obtained from Musk that during all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Twitter executives to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian hack-and-leak operation. Feds arranged for top secret security clearances to be granted to Twitter management and even had encrypted messaging network set up, which they dubbed a virtual war room. To this day, hundreds of people from the intelligence community work at social media companies.”
“Over the last few years, my reporting has been confirmed by virtually every mainstream news outlet from the Washington Post to the New York Times to Politico when the stakes were nothing. By the way, two years later, no one denies that the laptop is real, that the origin story is exactly what I told you it was in the first place. This elaborate censorship conspiracy wasn’t because the information being reported on was false. It was because it was true and it was a threat to the power centers in this country. What this relationship between the US government officials and American corporations represent is, is an unprecedented push to undermine the First Amendment, the right to think, right to read, say whatever we want, and how we respond will determine whether we see a free press as inalienable or as optional.”
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Source: Becker News Rephrased By: InfoArmed