Former Attorney General William Barr was paying close attention to the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday. He was glued to the screen as independent journalist Matt Taibbi and author Michael Shellenberger testified to the weaponization panel about their work on the Twitter Files.
Bill Barr defends free speech
Former Attorney General William Barr “responded to the revelations” coming out of congressional testimony on March 9 by “defending the First Amendment.” He’s not buying the story Merrick Garland cooked up to cover the Deep State by justifying censorship.
“The whole idea that the government should be encouraging companies to take out stuff that’s false is that’s a violation of the First Amendment.”
The First Amendment, Barr explained on Fox News, “actually protects false speech.” Whether liberals like it or not, “the idea that the government goes and encourages companies to exclude that stuff, to me, is a direct violation of the First Amendment.”
WATCH: @mtaibbi discusses how our own federal government is being turned into an instrument of censorship and social control.#TwitterFiles pic.twitter.com/fEd1XpVC6g
— Weaponization Committee (@Weaponization) March 9, 2023
One of the things which the Twitter Files exposed is that “much of the information” that had been “censored for false information turned out to be true.”
“Most of the important stuff turned out to be right,” Barr glowered, “and that just eviscerates the First Amendment.” Taibbi got to release the first tranche of Twitter Files analysis and it instantly went viral. The revelation was centered on “Twitter’s internal discussions leading to the censorship the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election.”
Even as they suppressed important information, some in management were “struggling to explain” how their “hacked materials” policies had been violated. The laptop wasn’t hacked, it was abandoned. All the reporting was true and all the evidence leaked from the laptop has been authenticated. Everything was true except the official story.
Blacklisting of conservatives
Another thing which concerns William Barr are the file dumps that show “Twitter ‘blacklisting’ prominent conservatives.” They “gave an inside look at Trump being suspended from the platform and put a spotlight on Twitter’s close ties with the FBI.” So close they were practically cuffed together.
The platform enthusiastically embraced “Hamilton 68, a so-called ‘dashboard‘ that gave a misleading impression of widespread Russian bot activity.” They had agents from every alphabet intelligence agency in existence sending them spreadsheets full of offensive accounts to have punished to the extent possible.
Michael Shellenberger “joined Taibbi in releasing Twitter threads detailing various internal communications from Twitter.” He also joined him on the witness stand Thursday. Barr also weighed in about another issue. What happened at Twitter must have happened at Facebook and all the others.
Jim Jordan's opening statement on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and the Twitter Files:
"Our government built a cozy relationship with big tech, they primed them for a hack and leak operation [Hunter Biden laptop], they funded the think-tank which further primed big… https://t.co/fsOujSyhMB pic.twitter.com/yumvENLsKP
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 9, 2023
Back in August, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook was in “contact with the FBI.” They warned him before the big Biden laptop story broke that there would be “Russian propaganda” coming which needed to be squashed like a bug.
“Did Zuckerberg, was Facebook really just being good citizens here and doing what the FBI said?” Barr asked. “My guess is, like every other company, they received general briefings and then when they were caught doing what they did, they are hiding behind the general ‘oh, we thought that we’re just responding to this general briefing.‘”
That flimsy excuse isn’t going to hold up much longer. The former AG can’t wait to see more on those. “I think we have to look exactly what those briefings were and what was being said to those companies, because if they were saying things like the Hunter laptop or getting too particular about the kinds of things they were looking for, that would have crossed the line, in my opinion.“
