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The media-ratings giant NewsGuard denied it was “government-funded” after being called out as part of the vast Censorship Complex during congressional hearings last week. But government records and the company’s own public announcement celebrating a nearly $750,000 federal grant suggest otherwise.
On Thursday, independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger appeared before the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to testify about what they had discovered during a review of internal Twitter communications. An hour before the weird hearing began, Taibbi released the latest installment of the “Twitter Files.”
Halfway through his thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Taibbi wrote: “Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded NewsGuard, not only see content moderation but apply subjective ‘risk’ or ‘reliability’ scores to media outlets, which can result in a reduction in revenue.” Embedded in the post was a picture of a nearly $750,000 award from the Department of Defense to NewsGuard, an organization the independent journalists characterized as a “government-funded” entity implicated in the Censorship Complex.
In response to Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz’s question — “Who is NewsGuard?” — Shellenberger explained: “Both the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard are U.S. government-funded entities who are working to drive advertisers’ revenue away from disfavored publications and towards the ones they favor.” In Shellenberger’s words, “This is totally inappropriate.”
“If we do not take a look at NewsGuard,” Gaetz responded, “we have failed.”
NewGuard’s Co-CEO Gordon Crovitz emailed Taibbi the next morning to say, “There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about NewsGuard and our work.”
“During the hearing, NewsGuard was inaccurately described as ‘U.S. government funded,’” Crovitz continued, adding, “unlike other entities mentioned during the hearing, we are not a non-profit funded by government grants. We are a business with many licensees paying to access our proprietary data, including government entities that pay to license our data.”
“These licenses are only for access to our data and are entirely unrelated to our rating of news publishers,” the email added.
Crovitz then claimed NewsGuard’s work for the Pentagon is targeted at analyzing anti-American info ops from adversaries such as China and Russia. “Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online,” NewsGuard’s CEO proclaimed.
NewsGuard “operates in an entirely different manner” from the Global Disinformation Index, the CEO told Taibbi, working to separate his organization from others in the Censorship Complex. Crovitz, claiming to be skeptical of Silicon Valley “advocacy groups” himself and stressing his “longtime” work as “an editorial writer and conservative columnist for the Wall Street Journal,” ended with an offer to answer Taibbi’s questions and this rejoinder:
So we are not ‘funded’ by the U.S. government, like you we oppose government censorship, and our ratings of news sources are done in a fully transparent and apolitical manner.
When it comes to transparency, NewsGuard definitely surpasses the Global Disinformation Index, but its history of rating news outlets seems hardly apolitical.
While federal grants did not fund the for-profit NewsGuard’s “Nutritional Label” rating system, the use of private ratings to squelch speech proves problematic, especially when the corporate media giants it promotes as “generally reliable” botched some of the most significant stories of the day, including the Russia-collusion hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop story, many Covid-related stories, and more. In contrast, NewsGuard graded The Federalist, which accurately reported all of those stories, as one of the most unreliable outlets.
So what about NewsGuard’s claim that it is not funded by the government? NewsGuard’s email to Taibbi suggested the $750,000 payment from the Department of Defense was a “licensing fee.” But in its 2021 “Social Impact Report,” NewsGuard called the award a “grant” from the Small Business Innovation and Research program.
When asked whether the “$749,387 was a grant or a licensing contract,” Crovitz told The Federalist, “The contract you’re referring to was an agreement for us to license our Misinformation Fingerprints product we were building out and provide this product to the DoD under a license agreement so that DoD could acquire the rights to use our work, including to research how our work could best be used.”
When The Federalist highlighted NewsGuard’s 2021 Social Impact Report that clearly stated the award was a grant to develop the program and asked whether the company’s report was inaccurate, Crovitz replied:
When the DoD does research they frequently use the term ‘grant’ or ‘research and development grant.’ So, that is why we announced it that way. It is what they call it. But it was clearly a license to use our data to see (‘research and development’) how our data enhanced their ability to track false narratives.
NewsGuard’s CEO provided The Federalist a copy of a licensing agreement it entered with the government, confirming the organization had given the government a “license to use the NewsGuard Data … for the purposes of tracking and monitoring disinformation and misinformation campaigns.”
In turn, the licensing agreement defined “NewsGuard Data” as the company’s “compilation and updates of its lists of website credibility ratings,” and “data to help customers identify and track misinformation and disinformation narratives.” Missing from the agreement, however, was any specified licensing fee, with the agreement merely stating it was to be negotiated based on “use cases.”
Under these circumstances, and even though NewsGuard had previously called the nearly $750,000 award a “grant,” Crovitz maintained that “news accounts have falsely referred to NewsGuard as ‘government funded.’”
“Calling us government-funded for licensing our Misinformation Fingerprint product is like calling Verizon ‘government funded’ because the government pays to access its communications services,” Crovitz analogized.
NewsGuard’s co-CEO, Steven Brill, offered another comparison, suggesting calling NewsGuard “government-funded,” would be like calling The Federalist “solar-industry funded” because ads for solar power companies appear on the website. “It’s technically true, I guess, but is hardly an adjective that gives a clear picture of the website,” Brill said.
But are either of those examples really analogous to NewsGuard’s relationship with the government?
Research shows NewsGuard’s relationship with the government began earlier: In 2020, it won the “Pentagon-State Department contest for detecting COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation.” In a press release, NewsGuard explained it would “help” the DOD and State Department by identifying those spreading so-called Covid disinformation, speculate about the motives behind it, and then “flag” misinformation and “hoaxes.”
NewsGuard further explained its contest entry relied on “a human intelligence solution” to disinformation and had “two key components.” First, it relied on its own “journalist-produced ratings” and “Nutrition Labels” that scored news websites for supposed reliability. Second, it used its database of “Misinformation Fingerprints,” a Rolodex of so-called “hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives.” From there, NewsGuard used “AI and social listening tools to identify the initial source of the hoax,” and to find instances of the hoax being “repeated or amplified” online.
For this award-winning project, NewsGuard received $25,000 to conduct a pilot study, while “working with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center to scope and develop a test in support of the DoD’s Cyber National Mission Force,” the August 2020 press release said.
A link to the government’s announcement of the contest suggests the $25,000 award was in-kind, though, not cash, with the prize specifying the “State Department’s Global Engagement Center will sponsor your capability’s test and assessment on their Technology Engagement Team’s Testbed, hosted by Disinfo Cloud — worth $25,000.”
“Disinfo Cloud” should sound familiar. That organization was funded by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which awarded another non-governmental entity, Park Advisers, approximately $300,000 to manage Disinfo Cloud. Park Advisers describes Disinfo Cloud as a tool to help the federal government “and its partners,” such as academia and other governments, resist “foreign propaganda and disinformation,” although the link at Park Advisers’ webpage to Disinfo Cloud no longer works.
Likewise, the multi-agency Global Engagement Center used Disinfo Cloud to funnel government dollars to the Global Disinformation Index in another contest, the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge, which it co-sponsored with the heavily government-funded Atlantic Council. According to a State Department spokesman, the Global Disinformation Index received a $100,000 award from the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge, although the Global Engagement Center used Park Advisers as a conduit for the award.
The U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge prize represents the most direct U.S. government funding of that nonprofit, although other recipients of government grants reportedly also funneled money to the Global Disinformation Index.
NewsGuard would later report that the $25,000 prize from 2020 supported a pilot program that allowed the Pentagon’s Cyber Command “to monitor content containing state-sponsored mis- and disinformation” and identify the primary purveyors of it. But the piloting of NewsGuard’s program was only one part of the Pentagon-State Department’s prize package.
According to the contest details, the winner would also score a spot to “present at a (virtual) showcase event for Department of Defense information operations professionals and technology scouts,” and gain access to a “Government Contracting 101 session” and a “Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) crash course.”
And sure enough, next came the NewsGuard announcement referenced above that in September of 2021, it “was awarded a grant through the Small Business Innovation and Research program.” That grant announcement explained that the SBIR program “funds early-stage companies to develop products and technologies that can be helpful for government” (emphasis added).
“Under the grant,” NewsGuard explained in its Social Impact Statement, it “plans to further develop the Misinformation Fingerprints tool and test the effectiveness of the Fingerprints in detecting state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.”
The SBIR webpage shows the 2021 grant NewsGuard received totaled $749,387.00 and involved the Department of Defense. In addition to the dollar amount of the grant, the contract number coincides with the award number posted in a search of government contracts under the Department of Defense, a screenshot of which Taibbi posted in his Twitter thread.
That nearly $750,000 grant followed the Global Engagement Center’s initial $25,000 prize to NewsGuard, as well as the training sessions the government promised winners so they could learn the ropes of seeking support from SBIR and be primed to obtain federal contracts.
From these details, you can form your own conclusion as to whether Taibbi and Shellenberger accurately described NewsGuard as “government-funded.” But I’m inclined to think a Federalist Nutritional Rating would take a hit if it called money paid from the government to a Trump-run business a “licensing fee,” if that business had previously announced the funds were a “grant.”
As for why NewsGuard cares so much about the modifier, Crovitz told The Federalist the organization is “sensitive to the distinction because of other reporting that treated our government contract to license our Misinformation Fingerprints product the same as the broad grant that another entity got, apparently to develop its ratings.”
“In the case of the other entity, GDI, it seems clear they applied for grants unrelated to any specific sale of a product but rather to help fund what they see as their good works policing news,” Crovitz stressed.
Crovitz and Brill — both of whom were extremely responsive to questions — also repeatedly stressed the government award was unrelated to their work rating media companies. “In a nutshell, this work had nothing to do with the government wanting us to rate websites or give us a ‘grant’ to rate websites,” Brill wrote.
Whether the government awarded NewsGuard a grant (or a contract) to rate websites does not extricate the company from the Censorship Complex scandal, however. NewsGuard licensed to the Department of Defense its “compilation and updates of its lists of website credibility ratings,” as well as other data, to help the government identify and track so-called misinformation and disinformation narratives. And NewsGuard received nearly $750,000 from the federal government.
While NewsGuard stresses that the “Misinformation Fingerprints” are intended to monitor “clearly false narratives” such as “hostile information operations by Russia and China,” the “Twitter Files” show that the federal government sees things very differently and has no qualms about silencing ordinary Americans speaking the truth.
As a result, many Americans see things differently now too, and no longer view organizations profiting from the disinformation business as the good guys — especially when the money comes from their tax dollars.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The media-ratings giant NewsGuard denied it was “government-funded” after being called out as part of the vast Censorship Complex during congressional hearings last week. But government records and the company’s own public announcement celebrating a nearly $750,000 federal grant suggest otherwise.
On Thursday, independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger appeared before the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to testify about what they had discovered during a review of internal Twitter communications. An hour before the weird hearing began, Taibbi released the latest installment of the “Twitter Files.”
Halfway through his thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Taibbi wrote: “Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded NewsGuard, not only see content moderation but apply subjective ‘risk’ or ‘reliability’ scores to media outlets, which can result in a reduction in revenue.” Embedded in the post was a picture of a nearly $750,000 award from the Department of Defense to NewsGuard, an organization the independent journalists characterized as a “government-funded” entity implicated in the Censorship Complex.
In response to Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz’s question — “Who is NewsGuard?” — Shellenberger explained: “Both the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard are U.S. government-funded entities who are working to drive advertisers’ revenue away from disfavored publications and towards the ones they favor.” In Shellenberger’s words, “This is totally inappropriate.”
“If we do not take a look at NewsGuard,” Gaetz responded, “we have failed.”
NewGuard’s Co-CEO Gordon Crovitz emailed Taibbi the next morning to say, “There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about NewsGuard and our work.”
“During the hearing, NewsGuard was inaccurately described as ‘U.S. government funded,’” Crovitz continued, adding, “unlike other entities mentioned during the hearing, we are not a non-profit funded by government grants. We are a business with many licensees paying to access our proprietary data, including government entities that pay to license our data.”
“These licenses are only for access to our data and are entirely unrelated to our rating of news publishers,” the email added.
Crovitz then claimed NewsGuard’s work for the Pentagon is targeted at analyzing anti-American info ops from adversaries such as China and Russia. “Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online,” NewsGuard’s CEO proclaimed.
NewsGuard “operates in an entirely different manner” from the Global Disinformation Index, the CEO told Taibbi, working to separate his organization from others in the Censorship Complex. Crovitz, claiming to be skeptical of Silicon Valley “advocacy groups” himself and stressing his “longtime” work as “an editorial writer and conservative columnist for the Wall Street Journal,” ended with an offer to answer Taibbi’s questions and this rejoinder:
So we are not ‘funded’ by the U.S. government, like you we oppose government censorship, and our ratings of news sources are done in a fully transparent and apolitical manner.
When it comes to transparency, NewsGuard definitely surpasses the Global Disinformation Index, but its history of rating news outlets seems hardly apolitical.
While federal grants did not fund the for-profit NewsGuard’s “Nutritional Label” rating system, the use of private ratings to squelch speech proves problematic, especially when the corporate media giants it promotes as “generally reliable” botched some of the most significant stories of the day, including the Russia-collusion hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop story, many Covid-related stories, and more. In contrast, NewsGuard graded The Federalist, which accurately reported all of those stories, as one of the most unreliable outlets.
So what about NewsGuard’s claim that it is not funded by the government? NewsGuard’s email to Taibbi suggested the $750,000 payment from the Department of Defense was a “licensing fee.” But in its 2021 “Social Impact Report,” NewsGuard called the award a “grant” from the Small Business Innovation and Research program.
When asked whether the “$749,387 was a grant or a licensing contract,” Crovitz told The Federalist, “The contract you’re referring to was an agreement for us to license our Misinformation Fingerprints product we were building out and provide this product to the DoD under a license agreement so that DoD could acquire the rights to use our work, including to research how our work could best be used.”
When The Federalist highlighted NewsGuard’s 2021 Social Impact Report that clearly stated the award was a grant to develop the program and asked whether the company’s report was inaccurate, Crovitz replied:
When the DoD does research they frequently use the term ‘grant’ or ‘research and development grant.’ So, that is why we announced it that way. It is what they call it. But it was clearly a license to use our data to see (‘research and development’) how our data enhanced their ability to track false narratives.
NewsGuard’s CEO provided The Federalist a copy of a licensing agreement it entered with the government, confirming the organization had given the government a “license to use the NewsGuard Data … for the purposes of tracking and monitoring disinformation and misinformation campaigns.”
In turn, the licensing agreement defined “NewsGuard Data” as the company’s “compilation and updates of its lists of website credibility ratings,” and “data to help customers identify and track misinformation and disinformation narratives.” Missing from the agreement, however, was any specified licensing fee, with the agreement merely stating it was to be negotiated based on “use cases.”
Under these circumstances, and even though NewsGuard had previously called the nearly $750,000 award a “grant,” Crovitz maintained that “news accounts have falsely referred to NewsGuard as ‘government funded.’”
“Calling us government-funded for licensing our Misinformation Fingerprint product is like calling Verizon ‘government funded’ because the government pays to access its communications services,” Crovitz analogized.
NewsGuard’s co-CEO, Steven Brill, offered another comparison, suggesting calling NewsGuard “government-funded,” would be like calling The Federalist “solar-industry funded” because ads for solar power companies appear on the website. “It’s technically true, I guess, but is hardly an adjective that gives a clear picture of the website,” Brill said.
But are either of those examples really analogous to NewsGuard’s relationship with the government?
Research shows NewsGuard’s relationship with the government began earlier: In 2020, it won the “Pentagon-State Department contest for detecting COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation.” In a press release, NewsGuard explained it would “help” the DOD and State Department by identifying those spreading so-called Covid disinformation, speculate about the motives behind it, and then “flag” misinformation and “hoaxes.”
NewsGuard further explained its contest entry relied on “a human intelligence solution” to disinformation and had “two key components.” First, it relied on its own “journalist-produced ratings” and “Nutrition Labels” that scored news websites for supposed reliability. Second, it used its database of “Misinformation Fingerprints,” a Rolodex of so-called “hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives.” From there, NewsGuard used “AI and social listening tools to identify the initial source of the hoax,” and to find instances of the hoax being “repeated or amplified” online.
For this award-winning project, NewsGuard received $25,000 to conduct a pilot study, while “working with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center to scope and develop a test in support of the DoD’s Cyber National Mission Force,” the August 2020 press release said.
A link to the government’s announcement of the contest suggests the $25,000 award was in-kind, though, not cash, with the prize specifying the “State Department’s Global Engagement Center will sponsor your capability’s test and assessment on their Technology Engagement Team’s Testbed, hosted by Disinfo Cloud — worth $25,000.”
“Disinfo Cloud” should sound familiar. That organization was funded by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which awarded another non-governmental entity, Park Advisers, approximately $300,000 to manage Disinfo Cloud. Park Advisers describes Disinfo Cloud as a tool to help the federal government “and its partners,” such as academia and other governments, resist “foreign propaganda and disinformation,” although the link at Park Advisers’ webpage to Disinfo Cloud no longer works.
Likewise, the multi-agency Global Engagement Center used Disinfo Cloud to funnel government dollars to the Global Disinformation Index in another contest, the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge, which it co-sponsored with the heavily government-funded Atlantic Council. According to a State Department spokesman, the Global Disinformation Index received a $100,000 award from the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge, although the Global Engagement Center used Park Advisers as a conduit for the award.
The U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge prize represents the most direct U.S. government funding of that nonprofit, although other recipients of government grants reportedly also funneled money to the Global Disinformation Index.
NewsGuard would later report that the $25,000 prize from 2020 supported a pilot program that allowed the Pentagon’s Cyber Command “to monitor content containing state-sponsored mis- and disinformation” and identify the primary purveyors of it. But the piloting of NewsGuard’s program was only one part of the Pentagon-State Department’s prize package.
According to the contest details, the winner would also score a spot to “present at a (virtual) showcase event for Department of Defense information operations professionals and technology scouts,” and gain access to a “Government Contracting 101 session” and a “Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) crash course.”
And sure enough, next came the NewsGuard announcement referenced above that in September of 2021, it “was awarded a grant through the Small Business Innovation and Research program.” That grant announcement explained that the SBIR program “funds early-stage companies to develop products and technologies that can be helpful for government” (emphasis added).
“Under the grant,” NewsGuard explained in its Social Impact Statement, it “plans to further develop the Misinformation Fingerprints tool and test the effectiveness of the Fingerprints in detecting state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.”
The SBIR webpage shows the 2021 grant NewsGuard received totaled $749,387.00 and involved the Department of Defense. In addition to the dollar amount of the grant, the contract number coincides with the award number posted in a search of government contracts under the Department of Defense, a screenshot of which Taibbi posted in his Twitter thread.
That nearly $750,000 grant followed the Global Engagement Center’s initial $25,000 prize to NewsGuard, as well as the training sessions the government promised winners so they could learn the ropes of seeking support from SBIR and be primed to obtain federal contracts.
From these details, you can form your own conclusion as to whether Taibbi and Shellenberger accurately described NewsGuard as “government-funded.” But I’m inclined to think a Federalist Nutritional Rating would take a hit if it called money paid from the government to a Trump-run business a “licensing fee,” if that business had previously announced the funds were a “grant.”
As for why NewsGuard cares so much about the modifier, Crovitz told The Federalist the organization is “sensitive to the distinction because of other reporting that treated our government contract to license our Misinformation Fingerprints product the same as the broad grant that another entity got, apparently to develop its ratings.”
“In the case of the other entity, GDI, it seems clear they applied for grants unrelated to any specific sale of a product but rather to help fund what they see as their good works policing news,” Crovitz stressed.
Crovitz and Brill — both of whom were extremely responsive to questions — also repeatedly stressed the government award was unrelated to their work rating media companies. “In a nutshell, this work had nothing to do with the government wanting us to rate websites or give us a ‘grant’ to rate websites,” Brill wrote.
Whether the government awarded NewsGuard a grant (or a contract) to rate websites does not extricate the company from the Censorship Complex scandal, however. NewsGuard licensed to the Department of Defense its “compilation and updates of its lists of website credibility ratings,” as well as other data, to help the government identify and track so-called misinformation and disinformation narratives. And NewsGuard received nearly $750,000 from the federal government.
While NewsGuard stresses that the “Misinformation Fingerprints” are intended to monitor “clearly false narratives” such as “hostile information operations by Russia and China,” the “Twitter Files” show that the federal government sees things very differently and has no qualms about silencing ordinary Americans speaking the truth.
As a result, many Americans see things differently now too, and no longer view organizations profiting from the disinformation business as the good guys — especially when the money comes from their tax dollars.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
And We Know – Feb 9th, 2023
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Steve Watson
The hearing was called to investigate the role government played, specifically the FBI, with regards to censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop report by the New York Post.
Former Twitter Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, Former Deputy General Counsel James Baker, and Former Global Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth were grilled by Representatives, with Congressman Clay Higgins telling them they could be arrested for interfering with the 2020 presidential election.
“The bottom line is that the FBI had the Biden Crime Family laptop for a year. They knew it was leaking. They knew it would hurt the Biden family. So the FBI used its relationship with Twitter to suppress criminal evidence from being revealed about Joe Biden one month before the 2020 election,” Higgins asserted.
“You, ladies and gentlemen interfered with the United States of America 2020 presidential election! Knowingly and willingly!” he continued, adding “That’s the bad news! It’s gonna get worse! Because this is the investigation part! Later comes the arrest part, your attorneys are familiar with that.”
“I’d like to spend five hours with these ladies and gentlemen doing depositions surely yet to come,” the Congressman added.
Here comes the BOOMS!@RepClayHiggins warns the Twitter employees that their depositions and arrests will soon be waiting for them. 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/XQpbEubpk7
— Woke Societies (@wokesocieties) February 8, 2023
Elsewhere during the hearing, Rep. Nancy Mace blasted the former executives for also, as highlighted by the Elon Musk’s release of The Twitter Files, working to suppress information regarding COVID.
“I along with many Americans have long term effects from COVID. Not only was I a long-hauler, but I have effects from the vaccine,” Mae declared.
She continued, “It wasn’t the first shot but it was the second shot. I have now developed asthma that has never gone away since I had the second shot. I have tremors in my left hand. And I have the occasional heart pains that no doctor can explain. And I’ve had a battery of tests.”
“I find it extremely alarming Twitter’s suppression spread into medical fields,” Mace told the former execs.
“You’re not a doctor, right?” Mace directly asked Gadde, adding “What makes you think you or anyone else at Twitter have the medical expertise to censor actual, accurate CDC data?”
Gadded pathetically claimed she was not familiar with these particular situations.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’re not,” Mace shot back.
Twitter censored doctors from Stanford and Harvard for sharing truthful information about COVID-19.@RepNancyMace calls out former Twitter employees for larping as medical experts and silencing views that don’t fit with the mainstream narrative. pic.twitter.com/AK0J35ha0O
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) February 8, 2023
Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan told them they “got played by the FBI” over the Hunter Biden laptop, forcing Roth to admit that the New York Post report didn’t violate any Twitter policies in his opinion, but was censored anyway.
“This to me is the real takeaway,” Jordan said, going on to state “51 former intelligence officials, five days after you guys take down the Hunter Biden story and block the New York Post’s account, five days later, 51 former intel officials send a letter and they say, ‘the Hunter Biden story has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’ The information operation was run on you guys, and then by extension then run on the American people. And that’s the concern.”
Twitter got played by the FBI. pic.twitter.com/78O2fbzWK9
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) February 8, 2023
Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert asked the former Twitter executives “Who the hell do you think you are?” for shadow banning people they disagree with on the platform.
Boebert also asked the execs if they had shadow banned her own account.
“I can reach out to Elon and to his staff, and I can see what’s happened ,and I can sit here today and hold you all in account,” Boebert concluded, adding “I am angry for the millions of Americans who were silenced because of your decisions, because of your actions, because of your collusion with the federal government. They can’t reach out to Elon. They can’t sit here today and hold you in account.”
The chair of the Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky highlighted Tweets made by Roth in the past calling Republicans ‘Nazis’.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told Roth “You permanently banned my Twitter account but you allowed child porn all over Twitter.”
.@RepMTG to Yoel Roth: “You permanently banned my Twitter account but you allowed child porn all over Twitter.” pic.twitter.com/kshgUbXD8x
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 8, 2023
The former execs mostly either claimed ignorance and denied any wrong doing.
FBI’s informant James Baker just lied under oath. #TwitterFilesHearing pic.twitter.com/Ek0oIf03Dc
— 🇺🇸RealRobert🇺🇸 (@Real_RobN) February 8, 2023
Twitter’s Former Deputy Counsel James Baker: “I was not aware of and certainly did not engage in any conspiracy or other effort to do anything unethical, improper or unlawful while I was at Twitter. Period. I did not act unlawfully…with respect to Hunter Biden’s laptop.” pic.twitter.com/IeEHgX2Bhy
— CSPAN (@cspan) February 8, 2023
Meanwhile, Roth attempted to argue that censorship on Twitter under his watch helped to create more freedom of speech.
Roth also admitted that he finds it “regrettable” that the conservative account LibsOfTikTok is still allowed to be active on Twitter:
AOC says that @libsoftiktok lied about Boston Children’s Hospital giving hysterectomys to children.
AOC: “That account is still on the platform isn’t it?”
Roth: “Regrettably, yes it is” pic.twitter.com/o64LZpO55o
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 8, 2023
AOC says that @libsoftiktok lied about Boston Children’s Hospital giving hysterectomys to children.
AOC: “That account is still on the platform isn’t it?”
Roth: “Regrettably, yes it is” pic.twitter.com/o64LZpO55o
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 8, 2023
You mean to tell me this guy is mad that I’m still on Twitter? What a compliment! https://t.co/Fp9ukUxQaW pic.twitter.com/ov7UmH7ODT
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 8, 2023
The great irony here is that @AOC is lying. Libs of TikTok has simply reported the facts about what these hospitals have said about their own services. It’s all documented. But this is what they do — they use misinformation to smear you as being a source of it. https://t.co/b5rRlIrFDz
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) February 8, 2023
Going forward, Twitter will be broadly accepting of different values, rather than trying to impose its own specific values on the world
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 7, 2023
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High-priced attorneys for Hunter Biden dispatched letters on Wednesday to the Delaware attorney general and the Department of Justice pushing them to launch investigations into a slew of individuals who had shared information allegedly retrieved from the laptop abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. But yesterday’s transparent attempt to sic top state and federal law enforcement officials on those exposing the Biden family pay-to-play scandal is already backfiring, with Biden’s clarifying the letters are not an admission that the laptop was Hunter’s.
In two detailed, 14-page letters penned by Winston & Strawn attorney Abbe David Lowell, the Hunter Biden attorney requested the attorney general of Delaware and the Department of Justice investigate whether John Paul Mac Isaac, Robert Costello, Rudy Giuliani, Stephen Bannon, Jack Maxey, Garrett Ziegler, and Yaacov Apelbaum committed state or federal crimes. “There is considerable reason to believe” those individuals violated various laws “in accessing, copying, manipulating, and/or disseminating Mr. Biden’s personal computer data,” Hunter’s attorney opened his Wednesday missive.
The lengthy letters then detail each of the individuals’ purported actions that Lowell claims provide “considerable reason to believe” they committed various state or federal crimes, which the Winston & Strawn attorney then identifies and analyzes.
Starting with John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Delaware repair shop where the laptop was left for repairs, Lowell asserts, “Mr. Mac Isaac has admitted to gaining access to our client’s personal computer data in Delaware without Mr. Biden’s consent.”
“Mr. Mac Isaac has admitted to copying that data without Mr. Biden’s consent, and Mr. Mac Isaac has admitted to distributing copies of that data from his place in Delaware,” the letter to the Delaware AG continues.
Given that Mac Isaac has maintained from day one that the “computer data” he copied was contained on a laptop abandoned at his repair shop by an individual he believed was Hunter Biden, yesterday’s letters to the Delaware attorney general and the DOJ appeared as an apparent admission by Hunter that yes, the laptop was his.
But when asked whether Hunter “now acknowledge[s] he or someone on his behalf dropped off his laptop for repairs at Mac Isaac’s store,” Lowell told The Federalist, “These letters do not confirm Mac Isaac’s or others’ versions of a so-called laptop. They address their conduct of seeking, manipulating and disseminating what they allege to be Mr. Biden’s personal data, wherever they claim to have gotten it.”
In an exclusive interview with The Federalist, Mac Isaac’s attorney Brian Della Rocca seemed flabbergasted by the continued obfuscating by Hunter Biden’s legal team. “Is Hunter denying that he was in Delaware in April of 2019 then? To this day, he has not denied being in Wilmington at that time,” he said. “Nor has he ever denied dropping off the laptop with John Paul. Is he denying doing so now?”
“John Paul has not, nor will he ever manipulate the data on Hunter’s hard drive. That is just not who he is,” Della Rocca told The Federalist. And it would be easy to confirm the authenticity of the data, Della Rocca explained, stressing that “the data on the drive he has can be compared to the laptop, which is in the possession of the FBI, to show he has not made any changes to the information.”
Della Rocca also condemned the letters’ attempt to suggest Mac Isaac lied to law enforcement officials.
“Mr. Mac Isaac has insisted that he did not make a bit-by-bit copy or clone of the hard drive,” page eight of the Biden attorney’s letter maintained, continuing:
Nor could he make such a copy because the hard drive was soldered to the laptop’s mother board, and he could not stay logged into the waterlogged laptop long enough to copy the entirety of the hard drive because the waterlogged laptop would periodically turn off. Instead, Mr. Mac Isaac chose what he wanted to access and copy from Mr. Biden’s personal data that Mr. Mac Isaac unlawfully obtained. Thus, any representation by Mr. Mac Isaac to law enforcement that what was in his possession was the entire hard drive would have been a knowing false statement. Moreover, the absence of a true clone of the hard drive created the opportunity for mischief—namely, the addition of files to this “hard drive,” the manipulation of files on this “hard drive,” and the destruction of files from this “hard drive.”
Mac Isaac’s attorney told The Federalist this passage represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the process for retrieving data from a damaged MacBook Pro 13. “Due to the damaged condition and poor stability of the MacBook, John Paul had to manually recover the user data,” Mac Isaac’s attorney explained. “John Paul was able to recover the entire contents (220GB) [of] the folder named, RobertHunter.”
“Per Hunter’s request, no attempt to recover the remaining system files or applications was made because they did not include personal data,” Mac Isaac’s lawyer stressed. Della Rocca added that “the only law enforcement agency to which John Paul has provided a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the FBI,” and that the FBI also took custody of the laptop at the same time, making it possible for the FBI to compare what Mac Isaac recovered from the “RobertHunter” folder on the original laptop. “There would be no difference,” Mac Isaac’s attorney emphasized.
The accusation that Mac Isaac accessed Hunter Biden’s personal data without his consent is also “absolutely false,” Della Rocca told The Federalist.
While Della Rocca did not elaborate, the signed repair contract stated that if the laptop was not retrieved within 90 days of “notification of completed service,” it would be treated as “abandoned.” Hunter Biden’s attorney did not respond to The Federalist’s inquiry on whether it was his position that Hunter Biden had “not abandoned the property under the repair contract,” with the Winston & Strawn attorney instead stressing the letters do not confirm Mac Isaac’s “versions of a so-called laptop.”
The repair contract further provided that the owner of the equipment agreed to hold Mac Isaac “harmless for any damage or loss of property.”
Yet, here we are, with “another privileged person hiring yet another high-priced attorney to redirect attention away from his own unlawful actions,” Della Rocca scoffed. “This is entirely a P.R. move,” he added, telling The Federalist he first saw the lengthy letters from Hunter’s attorney when CBS contacted him for comment.
The public relations move, however, is already backfiring, with the general public interpreting the letter as an implicit acknowledgment that the laptop from hell was Hunter Biden’s. And things may only get worse, if the FBI is forced to confirm that, yes, the damning documents publicly circulating are authentic copies of the material contained in the MacBook’s “RobertHunter” folder.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
While addicted to drugs, cavorting with prostitutes, and making deals with businessmen tied to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence, Hunter Biden lived in the house where Joe Biden stored classified documents.
On a background-check application dated July 2018, Hunter Biden claimed that he paid $49,910 per month in rent and that his “current residence” at that time was 1209 Barley Mill Road in Wilmington, Delaware, according to a document found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop.
Hunter also listed that Wilmington address as his primary residence on at least one form of identification (his Delaware driver’s license) and used the same address as his billing address for both his personal credit card and Apple account in 2018 and 2019, a review of files from Hunter’s abandoned laptop reveals.
According to the background check document, Hunter claimed that he paid rent from March 2017 until February 2018 (11 months) at the Wilmington address leading some to wonder if he was paying rent to his father, who has owned the home since 1996. But Hunter apparently filled out the form in error.
Contrary to some reporting, Hunter Biden was not paying his father $49,910 per month; rather, that figure represents the amount Hunter was paying to rent prime office space at the prestigious House of Sweden in Washington, D.C., materials in Hunter’s laptop show.
Nevertheless, the period that Hunter claimed he was living at 1209 Barley Mill Rd (the Wilmington house where classified documents were found) overlaps with the time multiple Biden family members were taking money from foreign businessmen linked to the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intelligence apparatus.
President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in Johns Island, SC, on Aug. 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Hunter claimed on various documents and financial statements that he lived at the Wilmington House between early 2017 and 2019—immediately following his father’s second term as vice president and as Joe Biden was gearing up for his presidential run.
Given the discovery of the classified documents at multiple unsecure locations, the timeline of the Bidens’ Chinese business deals paints a troubling picture.
Beginning in late 2015, while his father was still vice president, Hunter Biden began making plans to meet with officials from the Chinese energy company CEFC. CEFC and at least four of its principals and associates, Ye Jianming, Patrick Ho, Gongwen Dong and Jiaqi Bao, have been linked to the Chinese government and its military intelligence apparatus. Hunter once described Patrick Ho as “the fucking spy chief of China.”
Many observers viewed CEFC as a state-directed entity. CNN, for example reported in 2018:
From the yellow stars in its logo to the fact it had China in its name – a privilege normally reserved for state-owned companies – CEFC China Energy’s messaging strongly suggested state ties.
By early 2017, Hunter was directly corresponding with CEFC personnel and flew to Miami in February of that year to meet with CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming. During this trip, Ye Jianming gave Hunter a 3.16 carat diamond valued at approximately $80,000.
Photo from Hunter Biden’s laptop showing the diamond he received from the CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming.
When Hunter’s ex-wife discovered that he had obtained something of such immense value, she had her divorce attorney send an “Urgent” email seeking to determine the whereabouts of the diamond and secure the asset before Hunter could “dissipate” it. Hunter’s attorney offered a shady denial:
There is no diamond in Hunter’s possession. I don’t know where Kathleen is getting access to this information, but on this score, what your email purports below is inaccurate.
Metadata gleaned from photos of the diamond on the abandoned laptop indicate that Hunter lied about not having the diamond and he in fact had the diamond with him in Wilmington. The current location of the 3.16 carat diamond remains unknown.
After the fateful February 2017 meeting with Ye, and around the time Hunter claimed to have moved into the Wilmington house where classified documents were found, the Bidens’ business with CEFC exploded.
Nine days after Miami meeting, Hunter received two separate wire transfers of $3 million which the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network flagged as suspicious.
CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming (Photo: CEFC)
Between April 2017 and September 2018, CEFC and its affiliates funneled millions of dollars to the Bidens (mostly to Hunter, but some of that money flowed to Joe Biden’s brother and sister-in-law, James and Sara Biden). Joe Biden met with Hunter’s business partners during this time. All the while, top secret and sensitive compartmented information documents were just lying around in unsecured locations (such as the closet of the Penn Biden Center and the Wilmington garage), easily accessible by the Bidens and their associates.
James Biden, Joe’s brother, was central to the Biden business dealings with CEFC. One of Hunter’s former business associates, Tony Bobulinski, messaged another associate, James Gilliar, on April 30, 2017, wondering “what is the deal [with] Jim Biden as he wasn’t part of the discussion and now seems a focal point.” Likely alluding to Hunter’s addictions, Gilliar replied:
[With Hunter’s] demons, [it] could be good to have [Jimmy as] a backup…he strengthens our U[nique] S[elling] P[roposition] to [the] Chinese as it looks like a truly family business. [Emphasis added]
Bobulinski met with Hunter, James, and Joe Biden for at least an hour on the evening of May 2, 2017, and he alleges that they discussed the Biden family business dealings in China with which the former vice president was “plainly familiar.”
James and Sara Biden arrive at the White House to attend the State Dinner for South Korea, on October 13, 2011. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)
On May 13, 2017, Gilliar emailed Bobulinski an equity breakdown of a new business venture involving CEFC wherein Gilliar proposed Hunter will hold a 20 percent equity stake and 10 percent will be held by Hunter for “the big guy.” Tony Bobulinski alleges that Joe Biden is the big guy.
According to messages Bobulinski provided to congressional investigators, Hunter claimed he talked to Ye on a “regular basis” because “we have a standing once a week call as I am also his personal counsel (we signed an attorney client engagement letter) in the U.S.” Hunter also claimed he was advising Ye “on a number of his personal issues (staff visas and some more sensitive things).”
The chairman of CEFC, Ye Jianming, has been linked to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence and CNN reported that Ye was a suspected “princeling” of People’s Liberation Army top brass.
In their summer 2017 correspondences, Hunter sent “best wishes from the entire Biden family” and Ye concluded his reply “please accept my best regards to you and your family.”
Between February 9, 2017, and December 20,2018, tens of millions—perhaps more than $150 million—flowed between a dizzying web of CEFC-linked companies and shell corporations. And some of that money went directly into Biden family coffers.
On August 8, 2017, CEFC wired $5 million to an entity called Hudson West III. That same day, Hudson West began wiring payments that would ultimately total $4,790,375.25 to Hunter Biden’s Owasco LLC. The last payment was on September 25, 2018, according to congressional investigators. Between August 14, 2017, and August 3, 2018, Owasco sent 20 wires totaling $1,398,999 to James and his wife Sara Biden’s consulting firm.
The following photo retrieved from Hunter Biden’s hard drive appears to show a flow chart describing the ownership breakdown of Hudson West.
Throughout the summer of 2017, as the CEFC arrangements were being hashed out, Hunter talked with Ye Jianming about the impending legal troubles of another CEFC principal, Patrick Ho (the “spy chief”).
In September 2017, Hunter agreed to represent Ho and executed an agreement to provide “Counsel to matters related to US law and advice pertaining to the hiring and legal analysis of any US Law Firm or Lawyer.” Hunter was ultimately paid $1 million through his Owasco LLC (the wire transfer memo line read “Dr Patrick Ho Chi Ping Representation”) to represent Ho.
Patrick Ho was arrested on November 18, 2017 and he was convicted in December 2018 on international bribery and money laundering charges, according to the New York Times. Upon incarceration, Ho’s first phone call from jail was to James Biden. He was looking for Hunter and James Biden gave him Hunter’s contact information.
Notably, Hunter Biden had never been a serious attorney, so his receiving one million dollars to represent Ho is notable given that Hunter was apparently living in a house with classified documents at the time.
Patrick Ho, former Hong Kong home secretary and senior executive with CEFC Fund, poses during an interview in Hong Kong in July 2015. (AP Photo)
The same month that Hunter executed the representation agreement for the Patrick Ho matter, September 2017, CEFC-linked companies provided three separate credit cards for Hunter, James, and Sara Biden. These credit cards allowed the Bidens to go on extravagant shopping sprees and the racked up more than $100,000 in purchases.
Also in September 2017, Hunter Biden leased the plush office space at the House of Sweden for an entity called the Biden Foundation and for a CEFC branch. A September 2017 email shows Hunter requesting keys to the building for Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Jim Biden, and “Chairman Ye CEFC emissary.” It was here that he paid $49,910 per month. in rent.
And it was at this time that Hunter claimed 1209 Barley Mill Road as his residence. That home, owned by Joe and Jill Biden, is where Joe Biden kept the sensitive documents next to his Corvette in the garage (“so it’s not like [these classified documents] were just sitting in the street,” Biden said in his own defense last week).
By spring 2018, the business with CEFC was beginning to fall apart. Patrick Ho was tainted by his international bribery charges and Ye Jianming was under investigation in China for “suspected economic crimes,” and had essentially vanished after detention by CCP officials.
In a now famous January 2019 text message, Hunter complained to his daughter Naomi that Joe Biden (whom the family called “Pop”) had demanded half his (Hunter’s) salary for decades:
I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family [for] 30 years. It’s really hard. But don’t worry unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.
Joe Biden benefitted from Hunter’s business dealings which helped to finance father’s monthly bills, paid for repairs to the Barley Mill road estate in Wilmington, and bankrolled the office space for Joe and Jill Biden’s foundation at the pricey House of Sweden complex.
Hunter Biden (right) watches as his father Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2021. (Saul Loeb/Pool Photo via AP)
My colleague Peter Schweizer’s runaway bestseller, Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, first revealed that the Biden family received some $31 million from the highest levels of Chinese intelligence at the same time Hunter was paying the vice president’s bills. Schweizer believes that there is a slam dunk case to indict Hunter Biden.
The latest developments involving apparent mishandling of classified information underscore the gravity of the ongoing Biden corruption scandals.
Seamus Bruner is the director of research at the Government Accountability Institute and the author of Compromised: How Money & Politics Drive FBI Corruption and Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russia Spies, and D.C. Lies. Follow him @seamusbruner.
