The House Oversight and Accountability Committee in the US House of Representatives opened its promised investigation into the personal and business dealings of the Joe Biden family..The committee, comprised of Republicans and Democrats, focused initially on the first day on decisions made by top Twitter executives to censor conservative content and, most important to the committee, the company's decision in the weeks before the 2020 election to block a New York Post article about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden..In a statement last week, Hunter Biden's attorney, Abbe Lowell, acknowledged the laptop did belong to the younger Biden, but then did a complete turnaround and denied in a statement any connection between his client and what he called the "so-called laptop," including contents that Republicans "allege to be Mr. Biden's personal data.".Twitter, then headed by CEO Jack Dorsey, also locked The Post out of its Twitter account for more than two weeks because of baseless claims the report used hacked information..The Post's first laptop article revealed an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma emailed Hunter in 2015 to thank him for the "opportunity to meet your father," contradicting President Joe Biden's claims that he'd "never spoken" with his son about "his overseas business dealings." .The president has said, "I have never discussed with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses," The Post reported..The hearing is the GOP's opening act into what lawmakers promise will be a widespread investigation into the influence peddling of President Joe Biden and his family, with the tech companies being another prominent target of their oversight efforts, reports Newsmax Finance..“Americans deserve answers about this attack on the First Amendment and why Big Tech and the Swamp colluded to censor this information about the Biden family selling access for profit," Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the committee chairman, said in a statement announcing the hearing..Three former executives, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's former chief legal officer; James Baker, the company's former deputy general counsel; and Yoel Roth, former head of safety and integrity testified under subpoena before the committee..Anika Collier Navaroli, a former employee with Twitter’s content moderation team, was brought in by Democrats to testify. She testified last year to the House committee that investigated the Capitol attack about Twitter's treatment of, and eventual banning, two years ago of Donald Trump..Fireworks started even before the hearing opened, with the White House slamming the House Republicans for spending the day after President Joe Biden's State of the Union address to probe how Twitter handled content related to Hunter Biden..White House spokesperson Ian Sams called the investigation “a bizarre political stunt." .One Democrat representative on the committee, far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, took a pro-Biden defensive posture, smearing The Post’s bombshell story that first exposed Hunter’s laptop and its contents..She said the investigation was only being held because of what she claimed was a “24-hour hiccup in a right-wing political operation.”.“We’re talking about Hunter Biden’s half-fake laptop story. I mean, this is an embarrassment,” she raged, suggesting the hearing could have focused on abortion, civil rights and voting rights..Ocasio-Cortez did not identify which half of the laptop story she thought was fake..On Wednesday morning, Comer tweeted:"Twitter, under the leadership of our witnesses today, was a private company the government used to accomplish what it constitutionally cannot: limit the free exercise of speech. @GOPoversight will examine this coordination between the government & Big Tech." .After Elon Musk bought Twitter, the company’s internal documents, released as the Twitter Files, exposed how the company's previous management worked with the Biden administration to censor conservative content..Author Michael Shellenberger, in a series of tweets, explored how the intelligence community, including the FBI, "discredited factual information about Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings.".Roth said that The New York Post's October 2020 story about Hunter Biden's laptop did not violate any of the social media platform's policies.."Former Twitter exec Yoel Roth admits the @nypost's Hunter Biden's laptop story didn't violate any of Twitter's policies. Yet Twitter censored the story anyway," the Oversight committee tweeted.
