Former Twitter Executives to Face GOP Scrutiny on Hunter Biden Laptop Decisions

“We’ve witnessed Big Tech autocrats wield their unchecked power to suppress the speech of Americans to promote their preferred political opinions,” Rep.

James Comer

(R., Ky.), chair of the committee, will say in his opening remarks, according to an excerpt released in advance.

Mr. Comer will claim that Twitter restricted sharing of links to the articles at the behest of some government officials, who had warned that a foreign government might leak sensitive documents ahead of the 2020 election.

A former top Twitter lawyer will push back on those claims, telling the panel that he wasn’t aware of any meddling by the government—at the time led by Republican President

Donald Trump

—in Twitter’s decision, according to his prepared testimony.   

“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” said Jim Baker, Twitter’s former deputy general counsel and a former top lawyer at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in testimony viewed by the Journal. 

Mr. Baker added that in his view of the law, the First Amendment’s free-speech protections allow Twitter, as a private company, to make its own decisions about how to handle content. 

The Twitter executives’ decision occurred in the month before the Nov. 3, 2020, election, when the Trump administration was still in power. Citing its rules regarding the distribution of hacked materials, Twitter blocked users from posting links to two Post articles and locked the newspaper’s Twitter account. Twitter later reversed course, allowing links within two days and unlocking the account after a two-week standoff.  

Jack Dorsey,

Twitter’s CEO at the time, subsequently told Congress the company made a mistake in its handling of the episode, though he denied any political bias. 

Republicans, who took control of the House after the 2022 midterm elections, are also expected to maintain at the hearing that the Democratic-led Biden administration has pressured Twitter and other social-media companies to censor conservative views.

Emails recently released as part of a federal suit brought by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration show what the plaintiffs say are White House officials improperly pressing social-media companies to take down posts and remove accounts that conflicted with the government’s viewpoint. 

At Wednesday’s hearing, Democrats are likely to defend such efforts as necessary to prevent disinformation about public-health issues such as Covid-19 vaccines.

“Federal law enforcement and security officials…have every right and duty to share information with social media platforms as needed to warn of serious threats to the public and content that may violate their own terms of service, which the platforms of course may or may not choose to act upon,” Rep.

Jamie Raskin

(D., Md.), the oversight panel’s top Democrat, said in a recent statement to the Journal.

Mr. Raskin said that Republicans have also sought to influence content decisions by social-media platforms. 

The laptop articles incident occurred before Twitter’s acquisition last year by

Elon Musk,

who contends that Twitter’s previous leaders were too heavy-handed in trying to police users’ speech. 

Mr. Musk, whose acquisition of Twitter was cheered by Republicans, last year released internal Twitter documents that provided fuel for Wednesday’s hearing.

The documents, which were provided to a small group of journalists, included internal messages about how to handle the Post’s articles. Some of them were written by Mr. Baker and two other Twitter executives set to testify Wednesday—

Vijaya Gadde,

Twitter’s former chief legal officer, and

Yoel Roth,

its former global head of trust and safety. All three executives left the company after Mr. Musk’s acquisition. 

In the days following the articles’ publication, some former national-security officials said in a public letter that they suspected the materials might be part of a Russian disinformation campaign. 

Rep.

Jim Jordan

(R., Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee and a member of the oversight panel, on Tuesday wrote to the signatories of that letter, asking them to sit for transcribed interviews with the judiciary panel. 

Also testifying Wednesday is a witness called by Democrats, Anika Collier Navaroli, a former Twitter safety specialist. She spoke privately last year to a separate congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, telling investigators that the company failed to act on evidence that the platform was being used to incite that day’s violence.  

Write to Ryan Tracy at [email protected]