Chris Lieberman, FISM News
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Republican lawmakers have issued notices to a number of big tech companies and intelligence officials to preserve documents related to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, setting the stage for a potential collusion investigation should the GOP retake the House in November.
Several Republicans expressed outrage last week after the New York Times admitted that both the Hunter Biden laptop and emails reported on by the New York Post in October 2020 were authentic. The Times had spent the previous 17 months denying the validity of the Post story, which detailed how Hunter Biden used his political influence as son of then-Vice President Joe Biden for personal gain. Facebook and Twitter restricted users’ ability to share the Post story, and 51 U.S. intelligence officials wrote a public letter calling the report Russian disinformation.
Now that the Times and others have reversed course on the laptop story, Republicans are demanding an investigation, with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) leading the charge. Issa is expected to chair the House Oversight and Reform Committee should Republicans gain a majority in the election this November.
“What I can’t live with,” said Issa, speaking to Just the News podcast’s John Solomon, “is the fact that when the New York Post, one of the oldest print newspapers in the country, founded in 1801, comes out with credible evidence, which they can show how they got it, what their sources were — there were no hidden sources on this — they not only got shut down by … Facebook and Twitter, but they got shut down by the New York Times, by public broadcasting, by virtually everyone. And they were shut down by having more than 50 of the most informed people in the intelligence world all saying that they knew that this was false information. That is a conspiracy of monumental size.”
Issa took to Twitter Wednesday to announce the first step in the probe, writing to Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, and others to tell them to preserve all documents related to the Hunter Biden story. Republicans currently lack the ability to demand any documents due to the Democratic majority in Congress but will be able to issue subpoenas should they retake the House.
Today, we are sending our first document preservation notices in getting to the bottom of the Hunter Biden/Big Tech/Mainstream Media scandal and coverup.
Twitter: Check your inbox.
— Rep. Darrell Issa (@repdarrellissa) March 23, 2022
“We’re asking to have the evidence preserved,” Issa told Solomon. “And when we receive the ability to subpoena again … on the anticipation that the House will return to the [GOP] majority, this is an investigation that has to be done, because shutting down the First Amendment is now a pattern of new media. But it’s also becoming a pattern of old media. And there aren’t very many older than the New York Times.”
Issa said that this investigation is an issue of protecting free speech. “The First Amendment is the one that protects our democracy,” he said. “Right now, there is an attack on free speech. Everything else will be washed away in the annals of history if we cannot have … diversity of opinion that used to be common on college campuses and certainly used to be on the pages of the major newspapers, both left and right.”
It appears that a majority of Americans share in the GOP’s concern with this story. A Rasmussen poll taken this week found that 66% of likely voters believe that the Hunter Biden laptop story is important, including 49% who say it’s very important. 65% believe that it is likely that Joe Biden was consulted in, and perhaps benefited from, his son’s business dealings, and 48% think it likely that Joe Biden would not have been elected president if the media had fully covered the story.