Tangle - The Twitter files on Hunter Biden.

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

Today, we're covering Twitter's decision to suppress the Hunter Biden story and the new leaks showing internal discussions. Plus, an important story about Covid relief money for hospitals.You can read today's podcast here, today’s “Under the Radar” story here, and today’s “Have a nice day” story here.Today’s clickables: Quick hits (00:58), Today’s story (2:10), Right’s take (9:02), Left’s take (13:41), Isaac’s take (17:51), Under the Radar (23:09), Numbers (24:06), Have a nice day (24:51)You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum. Some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul. I hope you all had a great weekend and those of you in the Northeast managed to stay warm. I know it's getting chilly up here in Pennsylvania. Before we jump into our main story today, which is the Twitter files that were released

over the weekend by journalist Matt Taibbi. We will start off, as always, with some quick hits. First up, the Supreme Court said that it will hear challenges to the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness plan. The court's order left in place a lower court's decision to pause the introduction of the program while the legal process unfolds. Number two, Iranian officials say they have shut down the country's morality police after a month's long protest across the country. The demonstration started after a 22-year-old woman mysteriously died while in their custody following her reported arrest for not wearing a

hijab. Number three, the Democratic Party advanced a new primary schedule for 2024 that would replace Iowa with South Carolina as the first state to vote in the presidential primary, followed by Nevada, New Hampshire, Georgia, and Michigan. Number four, the Senate ratified an agreement between labor unions and rail companies while voting down a provision that would increase paid sick days to seven. Number five, in an interview on Alex Jones Infowars, Kanye West praised Hitler and Nazis. Twitter CEO Elon Musk suspended Ye from the platform for sharing the image of a swastika. Stick out. Fox News alert. Elon Musk exposes Twitter files showing the censorship of Hunter of Joe Biden and his son Hunter from the site. A small group of top level Twitter executives decided to

label the New York Post article as hacked material, allegedly without any evidence. If we truly care about preserving democracy, anyone and everyone of all ideological stripes, of all news organizations should want this information out there. On Friday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk told his followers that he would be releasing documents showing, quote, what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter in the lead up to the 2020 election, calling the company's actions free speech suppression. On Saturday, independent journalist Matt Taibbi started a Twitter thread he called the Twitter Files, sharing screenshots of internal communications at Twitter,

which showed how members of the moderation team decided to throttle the story of Hunter Biden's laptop. A quick reminder, in October of 2020, just weeks before Election Day, the New York Post published a salacious story with the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. The Quick reminder, in October of 2020, just weeks before Election Day, the New York Post published a salacious story with the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. The laptop included pictures of Biden using drugs and having sex, text messages between him and his father, and email exchanges with business partners where Hunter attempted to use his father's political clout to lure people into business deals. In perhaps the most newsworthy item, Biden asked a potential partner in a Chinese venture to put a 10% cut aside for quote, the big guy,

which appeared to be a reference to his father, Joe. After this story broke, 51 intelligence officials signed a letter warning that it might be a piece of Russian disinformation and that the materials may have been hacked or otherwise edited. No evidence of either allegation has ever been produced, and the contents of the laptop have now been independently verified by several news outlets and digital forensics experts as authentic. Nevertheless, Twitter opted to throttle the story, suspending some accounts that shared it and even disallowing it from being shared in private direct messages. Former President Donald Trump and his supporters have pointed to the suppression of the story as the reason he lost the 2020 election. So what's happening now? Well, last month, Elon Musk hyped the decision of more information about

the decision. Then, on Friday, independent journalist Matt Taibbi shared internal communications showing how the decision was made. Included in the cache of emails were messages showing then-candidate Joe Biden's campaign sending contacts at Twitter links to lewd images of Hunter circulating on the site and asking those images to be taken down. Twitter employees responded with quotes like, handled these. Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored, Taibbi said. However, this system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation,

there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left, well, Democrats, than the right. In one notable exchange, a member of the moderation team informed an employee that Hunter's laptop story was being suppressed because it violated the platform's hacked materials policy. Another employee wrote back saying they were, quote, struggling to understand the policy basis, end quote, for killing the story and warning that the company will face hard questions if they don't have solid reasoning. Former vice president of Global Communications Brandon Borman asked, can we truthfully claim this part of the policy? Twitter's Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker, a former FBI General Counsel, responded that caution is warranted and they needed more facts to assess if the materials were really hacked, but supported the decision to suppress

the story in the interim. Also contained in the files were emails from Representative Ro Khanna, the Democrat from California, who suggested there was backlash on the Hill and pushed Twitter's team to allow the story to be shared, noting that suppressing it seemed like a violation of First Amendment principles. Aside from Khanna's email encouraging Twitter to allow the story to be shared, none of the files show active members of the government urging Twitter employees to take any specific action. Perhaps most notable about the story to be shared, none of the files show active members of the government urging Twitter employees to take any specific action. Perhaps most notable about the story was just how many decisions were made without the input of then-CEO Jack Dorsey. Months later, Dorsey expressed regret about Twitter's decision to suppress the story and characterized it as a mistake. Before Taibbi posted the story on Twitter, he told followers that he had agreed to unnamed

conditions in order to receive the material in the leaks. He was criticized for doxing low-ranking Twitter employees whose email addresses were left unredacted in the leaks, leading to online harassment after the images were posted. The leaks also included personal email addresses for Khanna and Dorsey. Musk conceded in a Twitter space on Saturday that some missteps happened in breaking the story, including private email addresses being shared. Former President Trump responded to Taibbi's Twitter thread by suggesting the termination of rules, even those found in the Constitution, to have a new election or simply install him

as president. Former Twitter trust and safety chief Yoel Roth criticized Taibbi for sharing identities of frontline employees involved in moderation decisions, saying it put them in harm's way and is a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do. The leaks come at the end of another newsy week at Twitter, where Musk suspended the account of Kanye West after he posted an image of a swastika and once again delayed the relaunch of a paid checkmark system. Musk and Taibbi both insisted that more information was coming, including a second chapter on Saturday, which never emerged. Musk said he

has also shared documents with another Substack writer, Bari Weiss, and said he may share more with the public in the future. Today, we're going to take a look at some reactions from the right and the left, and then my take. First up, we'll start with what the right is saying. Many on the right laud the leaks, saying they are proof of Twitter's political activism against the right. Some call out Twitter's moderation team for suppressing the story when they knew their grounds to do so were shaky. Others say the leaks were underwhelming and don't represent a First Amendment violation. In The Federalist, Jordan Boyd said the files confirm big tech leftists suppressed the Hunter Biden story. Insider documents released on Friday confirmed Twitter's decision to suppress

New York Post's legitimate reporting about Hunter Biden's laptop mere weeks before the 2020 presidential election was a political one, Boyd said. The documents also demonstrate those leftist censors happily excused the company's election meddling on behalf of President Joe Biden using a weakened manufactured hacked materials policy. manufactured hacked materials policy. In his Twitter thread detailing the insider information, Taibbi confirmed the story, one that had the potential to change Americans' votes in the 2020 election, was deliberately blocked by big tech censors who spent months building relationships with Biden's presidential campaign. Taibbi maintains that Twitter employees were not basing their censorship orders for the laptop stories on demands from the government. He did, however, add that several Twitter sources recalled hearing the FBI's demand that the social media giants censor Russian

disinformation. Just this week, FBI Supervisor Special Agent Elvis Chan confirmed the government's information suppression campaign to Attorneys General Eric Schmidt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana, Boyd said. In his testimony, Chan disclosed that agents from the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency met weekly with big tech companies to encourage censorship ahead of the 2020 election. In the New York Post, Michael Goodwin said the FBI, big tech, and big media were partners in collusion against Trump. Musk's revelation must be the start of a national campaign to expose the entire picture of the unholy collusion between partisan government

censors and big tech. Consider that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted to podcaster Joe Rogan the FBI warned the company in the fall of 2020 to watch out for Russian disinformation schemes, Goodwin wrote. Zuckerberg said that by way of explaining why Facebook limited and in some cases blocked users from sharing the Post's laptop report. Twitter obviously got the same warning, which almost certainly involved James Baker, a former FBI general counsel who was involved in investigating the Trump campaign in 2016 and now holds a similar position at Twitter. Naturally, the release files show he was without remorse or doubt in urging repression of the Post's story. Moreover, as The Intercept reporter

Lee Fang has detailed, and as former Twitter officials confirmed, the FBI held weekly meetings in Silicon Valley with tech officials about policing disinformation, he added. Of course, their definition of disinformation was so broad as to include virtually anything that made Joe Biden or Democrats look bad. But knowing all that, it still would be naive to think we know the whole story. We do know the FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop for a year before the post started to reveal the contents. You don't have to be a cynic to wonder if the agents waved Facebook and Twitter off the story because they knew it was true. Some conservatives, like David French, were underwhelmed by the thread. Taibbi's documents provided further evidence demonstrating what Twitter's critics, including me, have long argued,

that the decision to suppress the information was both incoherent and inconsistent, French wrote. Twitter suppressed the information based on its so-called hacked materials policy, but the application of that policy was hardly clear in this instance, especially given that the platform had, at the time, just permitted widespread sharing of New York Times stories about Donald Trump's leaked tax information. I agree with the attorney and election analyst Jeffrey Blahar about Taibbi's thread. Writing a national review after last night's release, he said the thread contained few, if any, explosive revelations for those who follow the story closely. Responding to a document where a Twitter employee indicated that Twitter had handled those posts, Musk tweeted,

If this isn't a violation of the Constitution's First Amendment, what is? Tucker Carlson declared that the documents show a systemic violation of the First Amendment, the largest example of that in modern history. Musk and Carlson are both profoundly wrong. The documents released so far show no such thing. In October 2020, when the laptop story broke, Joe Biden was not president. The Democratic National Committee, which also tasked for Twitter to review tweets, is not an arm of the government. It's a private political party. Twitter is not an arm of the government. It is a private company. Alright, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying.

Twas the season of chaos and all through the house, not one person was stressing. Holla differently this year with DoorDash. Don't want to holla do the most? Holla don't. More festive, less frantic. Get deals for every occasion with DoorDash. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older,

and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. Many on the left said the leaks were a bust and criticized the right for overreacting to them. Some call out Taibbi for sloppily sharing the email addresses of the subjects of his reporting. Others criticize the right for their fixation on Hunter Biden. Colby Hall said the Twitter file bombshell went off with a whimper. The vast majority outlined stuff that was already known, that the laptop tweets were blocked due to the hacked information standard that raises an entirely other conversation about what information

is hacked and what is not, Hall wrote. The screenshot of Biden's team requesting a takedown of tweets that Taibbi shared is clearly dated October 24th, 2020. Joe Biden was not president at the time. His team reaching out to have tweets removed was a campaign issue, not a government one. Moreover, it's been widely reported that many of the links the Biden team asked Twitter to remove were pornographic photos of Hunter Biden, a fact omitted by Taibbi, which are in violation of Twitter's standards. Now, it's almost certain that the Biden White House has continued to dialogue with Twitter about inflammatory tweets. Nearly every significant media outlet and institution

has a relationship with Twitter. It is how they do business. It is not clear, however, that the Biden White House has engaged explicitly in requests for censorship, as Taibbi appears to be suggesting, Hall said. In short, this bombshell Friday night reveal is remarkably short on bombshells. Or, as the New York Post writer and frequent Fox News guest Miranda Devine flatly said to Tucker Carlson, there was really not the smoking gun we had hoped for. In the New Republic, Michael Tomasky criticized the right's fixation with Hunter Biden. If you had the good fortune or sense not to crawl down this particular rabbit hole over the weekend, fear not, I won't drag you into the depths that I descended.

The briefest recap is this, Tomaschi wrote. On Friday, Elon Musk tweeted that he was going to reveal how Twitter supposedly covered up the Hunter Biden scandal in October of 2020. Matt Taibbi, the Tulsi Gabbard of Substack, as the Bulwark's Tim Miller icily dubbed him, posted some of the emails found on Hunter's hard drive. Some showed the Biden campaign asking Twitter to refrain from posting certain material. That's basically it. In some quarters of the right, this is the biggest scandal in the history of the republic because it allegedly proves that Biden used his governmental power, a neat trick

for someone who at the time controlled no part of the government, to set fire to the Constitution, he said. Now, here's the psychotic part. As Miller put it, the offending material that Taibbi revealed was removed by Twitter at the Biden campaign's request turns out to have been a bunch of links to Hunter Biden in the buff. Perhaps it comes down to simply this. It's all they have, and that makes them insane. Joe Biden has been in public life for a half century and has never been attached to a whiff of financial scandal. It makes the right, especially the Trumpy right, nuts. In The Verge, Jacob Castronakis called it a flop that doxed multiple people. The emails show Twitter's team struggling with how to explain their handling of the New York Post story that broke the news of Hunter's leaked laptop files, and whether they made the correct moderation decision in the first place, Castanakis said.

At the time, it was not clear if the materials were genuine, and Twitter decided to ban links to or images of the Post story, citing its policy on the distribution of hacked materials. While Musk might be hoping we see the documents showing Twitter's largely former staffers nefariously deciding to act in a way that helped now-President Joe Biden, the communications mostly show a team debating how to finalize and communicate a difficult moderation decision. The story also revealed the names of multiple Twitter employees who were in communications about the moderation decision, he wrote. While it's not out of line for journalists to report on the involvement of public-facing individuals or major decision makers. That doesn't describe all of the people

named in the leaked communications. And given the fervor around Hunter's laptop, the leaked materials could expose some of those people to harassment. I don't get why naming names is necessary. Seems dangerous, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote tonight in an apparent reference to the leaks. All right, that is it for the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. I'll try not to rehash areas of this story I've covered already. Here at Tangle, we publish podcasts and newsletters about the Hunter Biden laptop story repeatedly. From the beginning, I thought that the laptop was real, that allegations it was Russian disinformation

were unsupported, and that it deserved more attention and investigation than it was getting. I criticized Twitter and Facebook for suppressing the story and gave kudos to former CEO Jack Dorsey when he admitted it was a mistake. I also criticized news outlets who seemed to gleefully share lewd images of Hunter using drugs or having sex with prostitutes as it was obvious that he was and is struggling with serious issues and that much of that content had very little relevance for the public. It had the trappings of a sloppy political hit job. That's to say nothing of the contents of the laptop that actually made Joe Biden look like a compassionate, concerned, and caring dad. I've also maintained that I'm not sure the suppression of the story impacted the election. In fact, Hunter probably got more attention because it was suppressed than he would have

otherwise, which is the well-known Streisand effect. Of course, Trump lost some 2020 swing states by very thin margins, so it's hard to say what impact this story may have had. But it is not unlike the sour grapes from Hillary Clinton, who still maintains James Comey's decision to announce an investigation into her emails cost her the election in 2016. At least Clinton can point to polling changes for proof of this. Trump has no such luxury. What Taibbi's reporting does

show is that the decision was not justified and many Twitter employees knew it at the time. This is why when Elon Musk was going to join Twitter's board, I celebrated the idea he would add political diversity at the top. Twitter employees are predominantly left-wing, and that makes the insular nature of their moderation decisions very worrisome. And yet, it's hard for me to buy that this story is a big bombshell. To put it plainly, there was very little new information that hasn't already been reported here in this newsletter and podcast, which is a story of its own.

Musk presumably has access to every single Twitter email ever if he wanted, and the best he could do was scrounge up emails from Biden's campaign asking Twitter to remove tweets that were clear violations of its terms of service. There is a reason even the most ardent pro-Trump conservatives like Seb Gorka or conservative columnists like Miranda Devine expressed disappointment. There was a lot of hype and not much new information. Taibbi is an excellent reporter and writer. He is, frankly, one of my idols. We've done talks together about the state of journalism, and I respect him a great deal.

He isn't responsible for how the partisans take his reporting and run it through the talking points machine. So, we should take his reporting on face value for what he actually said. Twitter unjustifiably called Hunter's laptop hacked materials so they could throttle the story. Many Twitter employees knew this was wrong. They did it anyway. In the materials shared so far, there is no proof of direct FBI or government contacts to Twitter pushing for that suppression to happen. Remember, Trump was president at the time. We do know the FBI and other intelligence officials warn Facebook and Twitter employees about potential misinformation. We can reasonably assume former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker,

who is then working at Twitter and is seen in the emails, reinforced those warnings. On top of that, Taibbi emphasizes that Twitter has more Democratic contacts than conservatives and thus is more responsive to their moderation requests. But he also notes that these channels are open across the political spectrum. All of this, again, was previously known. He just now has the receipts to confirm how regularly these contacts happen. I think it is a great thing that Taibbi is reporting on these emails, and I hope the leaks keep coming.

I am of course curious about the conditions he agreed to and I'm hopeful he will share those at some point. But I do not buy for a second that Taibbi is doing PR for Musk, as some other more liberal reporters allege. Many of those same reporters have totally ignored the Hunter Biden story altogether. For now, the more we learn about how Twitter has made these choices, the better. The more we know about how government entities might be influencing these decisions, the better. The more we know about the biases of Twitter's moderation team, the better. This is a story a team of journalists could take weeks or months reporting out. Hopefully, Musk decides to share the files with other news outlets, including places like the New York Times that have requested them. So far, he seems to have refused, which makes all of us

worse off. The more reporters with these emails, the better. The Hunter laptop story is a scandalous story with many threads. President Biden's potential entanglement in foreign business dealings, Hunter's lucrative career leveraging his father's power, and the president's absurd denial that he never talks about his son's business dealings with him despite meeting with many of his business partners as vice president. The story also contains threads of the way the intelligence community manipulates the media and big tech's coordinated effort to prevent this specific story from being shared. All of these threads are worth pulling at, and Taibbi's reporting is a valuable

addition to the picture we have. I hope it continues to get clearer. All right, that is it for my take. We are skipping today's reader question to make some space for our main story. As always, if you want to ask a question, you can write in isaac at readtangled.com. That brings us to our under-the-radar story. Billions of dollars of COVID relief money went to well-off hospital systems that didn't need it, according to a new Wall Street Journal analysis. The mismatch stemmed from the way the federal government opted to allocate the money, which was based on a hospital's revenue and not its COVID caseload or financial distress. The idea was that revenue was a good indication of size, but recipients ended up being large and

wealthy hospital owners. Meanwhile, hundreds of hospitals that got funding-reported losses were forced to lay off staff and said they didn't get enough aid to overcome the pandemic. The Wall Street Journal has the story, and there is a link in today's episode description. The Wall Street Journal has the story and there is a link in today's episode description. All right, next up is our numbers section. The percentage of Americans who say they back an investigation into Hunter Biden is now 28%, according to Morning Consult. The percentage of Republicans who say the next Congress should focus on investigating Hunter Biden is now 52%, according to Morning Consult. The percentage of all voters who say an investigation into Hunter Biden would be warranted

is also 52%, according to a separate USA Today poll. The percentage of Americans who think Donald Trump running for president again in 2024 is a bad thing is 57%, according to a new Quinnipiac poll. The percentage of Americans who think Donald Trump running for president in 2024 is a good thing is 34% according to the same Quinnipiac poll. All right, that is it for our numbers section, which brings us to last but not least, our have a nice day story. Dakota Hudson and Lauren Patterson weren't sure they would survive. Last week, a tornado tore through their Lamar County, Texas neighborhood, destroying their home and their family's home next door as they hid in their bathroom. As the couple explored the

damage, Dakota realized something else. The engagement ring he had just bought for his girlfriend was gone in the storm. But when a Paris Junior College softball team came by the property to help out, something of a miracle came to be. One member of the team heard about the missing ring and spent hours searching for it in the rubble and managed to find it. Needle in a haystack doesn't come close to what we were looking for, Dakota said. He proposed on the spot and Lauren said yes. NBCDFW has the story and there's a link to it in today's episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast.

As always, if you want to support our work, please do share the podcast with friends. This is a really good one to share. I feel like a lot of people are interested in this story. Not a lot of people are covering it with views from both sides of the spectrum. So please do consider passing it around. We'll be right back here same time tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace.

Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Our script is edited by Ari Weitzman, Sean Brady, and Bailey Saul. Shout out to our interns, Audrey Moorhead and Watkins Kelly, and our social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who designed our logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75.

For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our website at www.readtangle.com Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior chinatown follows the story of willis woo a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond chinatown when he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime willis begins to unravel a criminal web his family's buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada,

which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.