By now it has been well established how the left-liberal ecosystem had come together to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the US presidential elections in 2020. Major left-wing media houses had decided not to publish the explosive stories revealed after Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden had left his laptop at a repair shop. And when New York Post published the reports, Twitter and Facebook had censored the story. Now it has been revealed that left-wing billionaire George Soros was also behind the conspiracy to bury the story to help Biden win the election.
The revelation was made in Twitter Files, the initiative by new Twitter owner Elon Musk to expose how the social media platform under previous management had suppressed right-wing voices. In Twitter Files 7 released by author Michael Shellenberger on December 7, it was revealed how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) paid a whopping $3.4 million to Twitter between October 2019 and February 2021 and coerced top Twitter executives into gutting the ‘Hunter Biden story‘ of the New York Post.
According to the expose, the FBI was actively involved in Twitter affairs so much so that they created their own “private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.” During that time, Twitter Safety Head Yoel Roth participated in a September 2020 “tabletop exercise” by Aspen Institute, a left-wing group run by elite liberals, on a potential “Hack-and-Dump” operation pertaining to the New York Post story on Hunter Biden.
The event was organised by Vivian Schiller, former president and CEO of National Public Radio, former head of news and journalism partnerships at Twitter, and also former vice president and chief digital officer for NBC News. Representatives of several media houses like the New York Times, the Washington Post, apart from Twitter Safety Head Yoel Roth and Facebook policy manager for influence operations (IO) Olga Belogolova had attended the meeting.
One of the persons who had attended the meeting was Claire Wardle, former executive director and co-founder of First Draft News. A screenshot of an email sent to the invitees of the event includes the email address [email protected], making it clear that Claire Wardle also attended the meeting.
First Draft News was funded by Open Society Foundations run by George Soros. Founded in 2015, First Draft News was shut down in June 2022.
The Aspen Institute exercise titled “The Burisma Leak” involved a series of hypothetical leaks showing that Hunter Biden had made more money in his role at Ukrainian company Burisma than previously disclosed and had communicated with his father about his work there, as revealed in the Twitter files. The exercise was meant to shape how the media covered the eventual leak of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the way social media platforms carried it.
The exercise was organised after an anonymous website and a Twitter handle had started to publish documents related to Hunter Biden and Burisma, and the matter had started to gain traction on social media. The objective of the exercise was to formulate strategies on how to cover it after the expose is picked up by media, and how to suppress it.
The exercise was a success, because when the story was eventually published by New York Post, left wing media houses chose to ignore it, and then Twitter and Facebook censored the story, preventing its spread. Twitter had even suspended the NYT account.
The New York Post based on documents obtained from the abandoned laptop revealed that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive from the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. Less than a year later, Joe Biden reportedly pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the firm.
The Aspen Institute is a left-leaning think tank funded by leftist philanthropic organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation. Aspen is known for its far-left bias, even though it claims that it fights disinformation. The Commission on Information Disorder run by Aspen Institute regularly approaches social media platforms to censor accounts.
