WASHINGTON — The FBI warned major US tech companies ahead of The Post’s first reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020 that Russian agents were preparing a strikingly similar document dump — and once the scoop materialized, Facebook executives discussed calibrating censorship decisions to please what they assumed would be an incoming Biden-Harris administration, a congressional investigation found.
The new details — contained in an interim report by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the weaponization of government — are emerging as former President Donald Trump leads in polls ahead of the Nov. 5 election and as his allies urge a house-cleaning at the FBI and possible new regulations or antitrust actions to punish and restrain platforms like Facebook.
“FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,” an unidentified Microsoft employee wrote on Oct. 14, 2020, the day The Post published the first in a series of bombshell stories on the Biden family’s foreign dealings, according to the congressional report.
Internal Facebook communications, including a chat log, show that employees quickly discounted The Post’s reporting because it was the “[e]xact content expected for hack and leak.”
“Right on schedule,” another Facebook employee concurred.
“Obviously, our calls on this could colour [sic] the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than almost anything else…,” Facebook’s then-vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg wrote on the same day to vice president of global public policy Joel Kaplan.
The Post spent nearly a month verifying the authenticity of laptop files ahead of their publication, though it’s unclear to what extent the FBI was aware of that work as it prepared its prebuttal.
The FBI has possessed Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop since December 2019 and knew that files cited by The Post in its coverage came from a Delaware computer repairman and not the Kremlin — but, after downplaying the world exclusive to Big Tech, the FBI kept silent publicly as 51 ex-intelligence officials suggested and then-candidate Joe Biden outright alleged that the files originated in Russia.
The Post’s reporting showed that Biden, while vice president, interacted with international business associates of his son Hunter and brother James — including in countries where he helped steer US policy, such as China and Ukraine.
The reports were widely, if belatedly, corroborated by other news outlets and the files were even used by federal prosecutors in court — but only after Biden defeated Trump in November 2020 by narrow swing-state margins, which some Republicans say was in part due to the cloud of suspicion over the laptop.
Repairman-turned-whistleblower John Paul Mac Isaac provided the laptop, which Hunter failed to retrieve, to the FBI in December 2019, believing it had significant information about international corruption. He later provided copies of the same files to The Post.
Congressional Republicans accuse the FBI and tech platforms of collaborating to defeat Trump in the last election — a perception that social media company employees were aware of at the time.
“[W]hen we get hauled up to [Capitol] [H]ill to testify on why we influenced the 2020 elections we can say we have been meeting for YEARS with USG [the US Government] to plan for it,” a Facebook employee wrote in a July 15, 2020, message published in the new report.
The FBI told some Twitter employees on the day of the first laptop story that the device was real, but that message did not appear to be widely circulated internally, and a similar acknowledgment has not emerged involving Facebook.
“[I]f the FBI’s intent was truly to help social media companies combat actual foreign influence operations, the FBI should have shared the single most important fact: the influence-peddling allegations in the Post story were based off of real, credible information, including information in the FBI’s possession,” says the Republican-drafted report, compiled under subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
“The FBI failed to do so. While the FBI eventually conceded that it had no indication that the allegations in the Post story were Russian disinformation — only after an FBI agent mistakenly revealed to Twitter that the laptop was ‘real’ — the FBI still withheld the fact that it had seized and authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop months prior.
“As a result, Twitter and Facebook continued to censor the most significant news story of the election cycle, limiting the reach of allegations of Biden family corruption and ultimately benefitting the Biden-Harris campaign.”
The report blasted the FBI — led then, as now, by Director Christopher Wray — as other congressional Republicans fault the bureau’s role in investigating alleged Iranian hacking of Trump’s campaign in this election.
House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) denounced on Sunday in a post to X “the FBI’s deep corruption regarding foreign election interference from Iran targeting President Trump” and alleged “a corrupt coverup” — a message retweeted by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
Trump allies also remain furious about the FBI’s hard-charging and leaky investigation of Trump’s alleged links to Russia in the 2016 election — which turned up no evidence of a conspiracy after dominating more than half of Trump’s term of office — and the bureau’s role in a pair of unprecedented criminal prosecutions of the former president for allegedly mishandling national security records and challenging his 2020 loss to Biden.