Newly obtained internal FBI chat logs are sending waves through Washington, as they reveal the bureau actively suppressed information about the Hunter Biden laptop story on the very day the New York Post broke the bombshell report in October 2020. The House Judiciary Committee released the documents Tuesday, exposing what appears to be a coordinated effort by senior FBI officials to stifle discussion of the laptop’s contents — even as one FBI analyst tried to confirm its authenticity to the social media platform then known as Twitter before it became X.
“Please do not discuss Biden matter,” reads one message from October 14, 2020, in an FBI internal chat log now made public. On the same day, the FBI, which had been in possession of the laptop confirmed its authenticity — but informed social media companies otherwise, leading Big Tech to censor the story as purported Russian disinformation.
In testimony to Congress, Laura Dehmlow, then the China unit chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, recalled that “somebody from Twitter essentially asked whether the laptop was real. And one of the FBI folks… did confirm that, yes, it was — before another participant jumped in and said no further comment.”
The chat logs indicate that the FBI analyst was later reprimanded and allegedly told to “shut up” for merely speaking the truth. Following this, a senior FBI lawyer reportedly issued a “gag order” to the analyst to prevent any further confirmation of the claims. “NOPE… just a domestic hit job, yay,” one message read sarcastically on the day the Post story broke. Another official asked, “You guys are tracking the coverage of the laptop right?” to which one response was: “Tried to thread a smallll needle there.”
The internal crackdown took place at a time when tech companies were leaning heavily on guidance from the FBI to determine what content to censor. Internal communications from Facebook, released last year, revealed that executives discussed suppressing the New York Post’s story in part to “calibrate” favor with the potentially incoming Biden-Harris administration.
Meanwhile, as more than 30 million Americans cast their votes during the week the story was buried, federal investigators were in possession of verified evidence suggesting the Biden family’s foreign business dealings were real — and potentially corrupt. The laptop, originally turned over to the FBI by Delaware repairman John Paul Mac Isaac in December 2019, had already been authenticated.
The Judiciary Committee’s interim report points to the FBI’s actions as a direct interference in the 2020 election. “While the FBI eventually conceded that it had no indication the allegations in the Post story were Russian disinformation,” the report says, “the FBI still withheld the fact that it had seized and authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop months prior.”