by Jerry Dunleavy
Haven't we seen this movie?: Shining a light on the Hunter Biden saga may yet still face more suppression by the Big Tech firms who rushed to block the truth in the run-up to the 2020 election. They succeeded.
The makers of a documentary about the IRS whistleblowers who shined a light on the DOJ’s slow-walking of its Hunter Biden investigation say the ads to fund their film may be being “suppressed” by social media companies in a saga reminiscent of Big Tech’s censoring of stories about Joe Biden’s son in October 2020.
Tristan Leavitt, the president of Empower Oversight, which represented IRS supervisory special agent Gary Shapley and IRS special agent Joseph Ziegler in their efforts to share the truth about the deeply flawed federal inquiry into Hunter Biden. Leavitt told key Republican lawmakers on Wednesday that the documentary featuring Shapley, Ziegler, and others seemed to be being suppressed by Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Google.
“We write to alert you to alarming big tech suppression of […] a campaign to fund the production of our documentary Shielded By Power: The Whistleblowers vs. the Big Guy,” Leavitt said in his letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer also a Republican representing Ohio, and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo.
A copy of the letter was also sent to the Trump White House.
Twitter locks New York Post out from reporting on Hunter and his infamous laptop
The day after Twitter blocked The New York Post’s mid-October 2020 stories on Hunter Biden’s lucrative business dealings in Ukraine and his connections to shady Chinese businessmen, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted: “Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix.”
Dorsey testified before the Senate in November 2020 after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump.
“We made a quick interpretation, using no other evidence, that the materials in the article were obtained through hacking, and according to our policy, we blocked them from being spread,” Dorsey said. “Upon further consideration, we admitted this action was wrong.”
"Reporting not Russian disinformation," Zuckerberg admits months after election
“When we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also admitted in an August 2024 letter. “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Zuckerberg has also suggested his platform blocked the Hunter Biden laptop stories as disinformation at the urging of the FBI.
But the new Empower Oversight letter said that “recent events suggest social media companies may again be suppressing particular viewpoints.”
“To tell this remarkable story, our organization has partnered with Fruition Productions to produce a documentary. We have already filmed many of the key interviews for the film. But to raise money for production and release, we launched a campaign on the crowdfunding website Indiegogo,” Leavitt wrote. “Indiegogo sought several changes to the content on our page, delaying the project’s launch by several weeks and impeding the momentum of the project.”
Meta Platforms, X Corporation, and Google LLC appear to be suppressing advertisements for divgerent viewpoints
Leavitt added: “Finally, when the campaign went live this month, we launched digital advertising directing viewers to www.shieldedbypower.com. The ads included video clips from journalists like Miranda Devine, whose story was suppressed in 2020; John Solomon, who received significant scoops on the story; and Matt Taibbi, whose reporting on the 'Twitter files' in 2022 and 2023 exposed more of the suppression. The ads also include clips from commentators like Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online, who educates the public on the pervasiveness of censorship in our society, and elected officials, including yourselves.”
“Yet Meta Platforms, X Corporation, and Google LLC strongly appear to be suppressing advertisements promoting this documentary. In recent weeks, our team has jumped through a Kafkaesque series of hoops attempting to run ads on all three,” the Empower Oversight leader added. “We have met every condition required. But Meta simply suspended the ad account, removing all user data of even unrelated ads, and forcing us to use other accounts to propose the ads for the documentary. Google also suspended our ad account. To date, not a single ad has run on any of the three platforms—and even their customer service representatives can’t explain why.”
X, Facebook, and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Just the News.
Ongoing "viewpoint discrimination," Leavitt says
One customer service specialist at Meta reportedly told the documentary makers that the platform doesn’t “support the scope of this content.” Leavitt argued that “not only is this reminiscent of prior instances of viewpoint discrimination — it constitutes suppression of the story of Facebook’s very own past actions on this exact same topic.”
Shapley and Ziegler — the IRS whistleblowers — said in congressional transcripts that special counsel David Weiss claimed that he was limited in his prosecutorial decision-making despite Attorney General Merrick Garland’s claims to the contrary. A Hunter Biden business associate told the FBI that Joe Biden had stopped by at least one China-related business meeting at Hunter Biden’s apparent request, that “optics” prevented a search warrant at Joe Biden’s guest house, and that the assistant U.S. attorney in the Delaware federal prosecutor’s office had told investigators “don’t ask about the big guy” — in reference to Joe Biden.
Investigators were also reportedly blocked from investigating Hunter Biden’s lucrative business dealings in Ukraine through Burisma under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Biden was convicted by a Delaware jury on gun charges in June, then pleaded guilty to tax charges in California in September 2024. Hunter Biden initially reached a plea agreement with Weiss on federal charges related to tax crimes and the illegal purchase of a handgun in what congressional Republicans dubbed a “sweetheart deal” in June 2023. The deal collapsed under scrutiny by a federal judge the next month, in part to the revelations made by the IRS whistleblowers.
Then-President Biden pardoned his son in December 2024, despite repeatedly promising he wouldn’t do so.
The two IRS whistleblowers who shed light on what they considered failures to properly investigate Hunter Biden – and who were allegedly retaliated against as a result – received promotions from the Trump administration in March last year to serve as senior advisers to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The infamous October 2020 laptop letter — signed by more than fifty former Democratic Party-leaning intelligence officials — contributed to the baseless narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop stories were nothing but a product of Russian disinformation, a narrative happily seized upon by Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and spread by some of the laptop letter signers.
Appellate Court says feds cannot plot with social media companies to remove First Amendment-protected content
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in September 2023 upheld the lower court decision in Missouri v. Biden barring the federal government from working with social media companies to remove First Amendment-protected content. The case was settled by a agreement. The settlement resolves a lawsuit brought by Missouri, Louisiana, and other individual plaintiffs who alleged that the Biden administration unlawfully coerced major social media companies into censoring posts about the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.
Twitter had weekly meetings with Biden's intelligence officers
Yoel Roth said in a December 2020 declaration to the Federal Election Commission that he was head of site integrity at Twitter, which is part of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Department.
“Since 2018, I have had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security,” Roth said. “During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October.”
Roth added: “I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter. These expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
Twitter and other tech companies worked to build information-sharing relationships with law enforcement
He said his team “determined that the information in the articles could have been obtained through hacking” and that his team “escalated” the articles for further review. Roth said Twitter’s Trust and Safety leadership then determined the articles “violated the Distribution of Hacked Materials Policy,” and the leadership group “instructed the Site Integrity Team to execute enforcement.”
Roth said his team then blocked Twitter users from sharing links to The New York Post articles. He says he did not discuss it with any Biden campaign representatives prior to censoring the articles.
Roth also testified in February 2023 that “Twitter and other tech companies worked to build closer information-sharing relationships with law enforcement such as the FBI” in the lead up to the 2020 election to deal with “threats” posed by Russian disinformation efforts similar to those in 2016.
An October 2020 complaint from the RNC alleged that “through its ad hoc, partisan oppression of media critical of Biden, [Twitter] is making illegal, corporate in-kind contributions as it provides unheard-of media services for Joe Biden’s campaign.” The FEC rejected the complaint in August 2021.
They knew as far back as 2019 that Hunter's laptop was genuine
The IRS whistleblowers previously revealed that the FBI verified the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop by November 2019 – nearly a year before the laptop emerged, but the stories about it were censored. URL's linking to The Post's stories about Hunter could not be shared on social media, and the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter was written, which possibly dragged Biden over the victory line.
Even if not, the saga of the laptop letter claiming it was "Russian disinformation" surely kept alive the DNC and mainstream media's narrative that Trump was nefariously connected to Vladimir Putin. That turned out to be wholly false, but the large dailies took more than a year to admit — half-heartedly — that they were wrong. By then, their preferred candidate was already settled into the White House.
Jerry Dunleavy
Source: https://justthenews.com/nation/free-speech/deja-vu-hunter-biden-whistleblower-documentary-ads-suppressed-big-tech-lawyers
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