The FBI agents who claimed that negative headlines about the president’s son were “Russian disinformation” are being questioned by the two Republican senators who initiated an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business affairs.
In recent weeks, whistleblowers have come out to claim that the agency attempted to play down suspicions about Hunter Biden in order to prepare for the 2020 presidential race.
They have added that the FBI omitted deliberately looking through Hunter’s laptop’s contents in favour of classifying reports about it as “Russian misinformation.”
Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa are now requesting that the two FBI agents who briefed Congress on Russian disinformation testify once more in September explain the intent behind the briefing.
It was “unnecessary and was only done because of pressure from our Democratic colleagues, especially Democratic leadership to falsely portray our Biden probe as advancing Russian disinformation,” they write in a memo to the agents they delivered on Thursday.
Simply put, they claimed that the unneeded FBI briefing gave Democrats and the left media the means to disseminate the myth that their efforts had helped Russian disinformation.
Nikki Floris, the intelligence analyst in charge of the Washington Field Office’s intelligence division, and Bradley Benavides, deputy assistant director of the Washington Field Office’s Counterintelligence Division, are identified in the letter obtained by the Washington Examiner as the FBI officials who delivered the briefing on August 6, 2020.
Floris and Benavides attempted to reassure the senators, as they state in the letter, that “the FBI didn’t aim to “interfere” in or inquiry.”
The practical impact of such a pointless briefing and the following leaks about it, they claimed, “caused interference, which impeded and hampered Congressional oversight operations.”
The two senators continued by claiming they had frequently voiced their concerns to FBI Director Christopher Wray on the briefing but that they had been disregarded.
The senators later noted that they discovered the briefing “consisted primarily of information that we previously knew and information unconnected to our Biden investigation” after attending it.
At the briefing, Grassley and Johnson “made clear to you that it was not germane to the substance of our work,” they continued.
They said, “We also made explicit our fear that the briefing would be open to a leak that would cast a false light on the focus of our inquiry,” citing a Washington Post article from the time as evidence that their worries were justified.
Additionally, the senators emphasised that they had repeatedly asked for “relevant materials relating to what occurred at the briefing, including the 302 or comparable summary, the intelligence justification for the briefing, and the persons involved in making the decision to brief us.”
However, they claimed that the FBI has “consistently failed to answer in full to each request and has failed to produce these essential materials, which further raises questions about the real intent behind the briefing.”
However, as Grassley and Johnson write, the opportunity has now arisen for the FBI agents to provide testimony regarding the meeting’s purpose.
“Whistleblowers have recently alleged that FBI officials initiated a scheme to downplay negative information on Hunter Biden in August 2020, the same month you provided the briefing to us,” they write. “This was done in order to stop investigative activity relating to his potential criminal exposure by labelling it disinformation.”
Whistleblowers claim that local FBI leadership told staff members not to examine the Hunter Biden laptop right away once the FBI received it.
The claims reaffirm Johnson’s earlier assertions that insiders had told him local FBI leadership had instructed staff members to refrain from looking at Hunter Biden’s laptop and that the FBI “is not going to affect the outcome of the election again.”
Additionally, he said that a fresh whistleblower had disclosed that “the FBI did not begin to study the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election—potentially a year after the FBI acquired the laptop in December 2019.”
Based on documents they discovered on his laptop, Grassley and Johnson’s investigation on Hunter Biden’s business connections in China was eventually released in September 2020.
It highlighted Hunter’s efforts to get funding for US energy projects on behalf of the Chinese company CEFC China Energy and claimed that Hunter Biden had “cashed in” on his reputation.
According to the study, over the course of nearly a year, Hudson West III, a project backed by CEFC and its chairman Ye Jianming, paid Owasco P.C. $4,790,375.25.
Washington, D.C. records claim that Hunter controls Owasco P.C., but a study of personal and business communications reveals little about the work Hunter did for Hudson West, and he barely referenced it in his book.
Ye has not been seen in public since Chinese authorities charged him of “economic crimes” in 2018, including suspected fraud and bribery.
Additionally, according to a 2017 email from Hunter’s business partner James Gilliar, Hunter would hold 10% of the shares in their multi-million dollar contract with the Chinese government-affiliated company CEFC on behalf of “the big guy,” a rumoured but unverified allusion to Joe Biden.
10 held by H for the big guy?, Gilliar wrote.
However, Joe Biden has consistently maintained that he was a private person at the time of the email and that he had no participation in his son’s business affairs.
As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained how the social network used an algorithm to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story, the senator asked the two FBI agents to testify.
On Thursday’s Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg discussed media censorship and answered a question on Facebook’s handling of contentious news stories.
The billionaire explained that while the site did not entirely suppress the post, unlike Twitter, it was nonetheless moved down users’ newsfeeds for up to a week until additional information came down that would reveal if the report was accurate or not.
He said that the platform chose to restrict sharing of the news but did not outright forbid it.
Therefore, we chose a different route from Twitter. The FBI basically approached several members of our team and said, “Hey, like, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert.”
I believe that is the basic context in this situation. In the 2016 election, there was a lot of what we believed to be Russian propaganda.
We are aware that there will likely be some sort of dump of, or anything comparable. So simply use caution.
According to Zuckerbeg, if something is alleged to be false information, a third-party fact-checking team evaluates the claim.
So, unlike Twitter, our protocol is distinct. Twitter acted by stating that you are not permitted to share this at all. That’s not what we did,’ Zuckerberg remarked.
We also employ this third party fact-checking programme because we don’t want to be the ones to decide what is real and untrue when something is reported to us as potentially, disinformation, or crucial misinformation, he stated.
I believe it took about five to seven days to determine whether it was true or not. Although Facebook’s distribution was lessened, sharing was still permitted. You could still distribute it. You could still eat it, he advised.
When questioned what he meant by “decreased distribution,” Zuckerberg responded that he meant that the story will appear further down on people’s newsfeeds.
Rogan questioned the percentage of the distribution’s decline.
He said, “I don’t know off the top of my head, but it’s significant.” However, in general, many people were still able to share it. There were numerous complaints that this was the situation.
We weren’t quite as categorical about it as Twitter was. We simply assumed that the FBI, which is still in my opinion a genuine institution in this nation, was a highly skilled law enforcement agency.
They approach us and alert us to the fact that we must exercise caution. Then I want to consider that seriously,” stated Zuckerberg.
Did they clearly state that you should be cautious about that story? Rogan enquired.
Zuckerberg said, “I don’t remember if it was that explicitly, but it roughly fit the pattern.”
But Rogan persisted, asking what happened when the story was suppressed even though it turned out to be true.
‘Yeah. It’s awful how it ended out in retrospect, I mean. After the fact-checkers looked at it, nobody was able to refute it, correct? In essence, it went through a time where it received less distribution,’ remarked Zuckerberg.
“I think it probably stinks, but I think in the same sense that perhaps going through something like a criminal trial, but ultimately being found innocent, stinks.” Even though you were found not guilty at the end of the criminal trial, it still stinks, he said.
I’m not sure if the response would have been to do nothing or to have no process. The procedure seemed to me to be fairly sensible. We still permit sharing, but clearly you don’t want circumstances like that,’ he said.