That quote from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice — “The truth will out” — seems particularly apt now, as new Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s fourth installment of “ The Twitter Files” was released over the weekend by newly-involved assistant Michael Shellenberger. There’s so much here at this point that it’s hard to keep it from becoming information overload, which would help no one except the leftists who want you to throw up your hands in frustration. Perhaps it’s best to start by following up a question I posed a few days ago.

John Ratcliffe Responds to Claims About the Office of the DNI

We’d learned through internal communications that high-level Twitter officials were having weekly meetings with personnel from the FBI, DHS, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. I observed that during the Trump years, the DNI was John Ratcliffe, whose office certainly would not have been a part of Twitter’s censorship activities. (James Clapper, who was pre-Ratcliffe, and Avril Haines, who followed Ratcliffe when Biden was inaugurated, are a different story.) Fortunately, Ratcliffe appeared with Maria Bartiromo on FOX News’ Sunday Morning Futures and addressed Maria’s question about these “weekly meetings,” among other issues related to the censored Biden story.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence would’ve only been authorized to participate in Trump National Security Council-approved and coordinated processes for election security briefings to groups of private companies. So it would have included companies like Twitter, but many other companies: YouTube, Microsoft, as well as state election officials, to talk about threats. None of those meetings…would’ve had anything to do with ‘content moderation,’ much less anything to do specifically with the Biden laptop as Russian disinformation. So there never would’ve been any authority or reason for anyone within the intelligence community to be saying anything otherwise.

Ratcliffe said he hoped the one reference to the DNI’s participation in a “weekly meeting” was part of that approved process for election security briefings. If it was just a meeting with Twitter, though, it apparently was not, and this is something we still need to know. If there was an unapproved meeting while Ratcliffe was DNI, he seems not to have known about it. Anyone who participated in such an effort, he said, was involved in election interference and “a disinformation campaign to mislead the American voting electorate.”

The whole interview is a must-watch. We’re not surprised to hear him say that James Baker’s hiring at Twitter could not have been a coincidence or fluke. “He was at the FBI when the FBI obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop — he would’ve known that the FBI [knew] that this was not Russian disinformation,” Ratcliffe said. “…I don’t think that Twitter just happened to find his resume on Monster.com.” Big question: “What was [Baker’s] relationship with Twitter before he got to Twitter?”

Kill a Story — ‘By Hook or By Crook’

Miranda Devine, the columnist for the New York Post who broke the Twitter-banned Hunter Biden story and wrote Laptop From Hell, appeared on Sunday evening’s Life, Liberty & Levin. She clarified that she didn’t time her story as an “October surprise”; it was just when she happened to get the hard-drive information from Rudy Giuliani after Giuliani had trouble getting it into the media. Giuliani’s lawyer had told him to “try Miranda.” (Of course, you know that the FBI had been spying on Giuliani and his contacts, including computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac.)

She said that before her story was banned, she never heard anything from Twitter, Facebook, or any of those 51 former intel officials who said the laptop had the “classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation. She called their letter “scurrilous,” saying, “This was election inference. The disinformation was coming from the FBI, the CIA. It was coming from Twitter and Facebook. It was coming from Adam Schiff. It was coming from Democratic operatives who fanned out in a very deliberate operation basically to decry our story, to discredit the laptop, to discredit the stories that were about Joe Biden.”

Three weeks before the election, she said, it was an extremely damaging story, because it showed that then-candidate Joe Biden was absolutely involved in his son’s foreign business dealings and that he’d straight-out lied about it to the American people. They were determined “by hook or by crook,” she said, that they would kill that story.

Christopher Wray had to have known what Hunter was up to and that the laptop was real, she said, because the FBI was “keeping tabs on him” while he was in China and “on a crack bender,” because this was a threat to national security.

Devine is reserving judgment on Musk regarding his commitment to free speech and transparency because, she says, “as yet, we haven’t seen a lot.” She wants to make sure he’s released everything, because the first installment “held a lot back.” (She was referring to the delay that was later tentatively explained by the lingering presence of Fox-Guarding-Henhouse Twitter official James Baker, the Russia Hoaxer formerly with the FBI.) I have to say, though, after seeing the revelations to date, that we have seen a lot, and I’m ready to give Musk a medal for this.

Joe and Hunter — ‘Joined at the Hip’

Levin followed up the Devine interview with one from Peter Schweizer, who has long been following the Biden money trail. Schweizer reiterated the fact that this is really a story about Joe Biden, not Hunter — the two were “joined at the hip” — and that there’s been a monstrous cover-up.

Schweizer pointed out that information on the laptop confirmed the foreign deals he’d already written about, noting that the four Chinese businessmen named in the deals that netted the Biden family $31 million “all have links to the Ministry of State Security.” This story is about compromise in the area of national security. The Chinese, he explained, have a term they call “elite capture,” meaning to “forge financial ties with leaders in other countries, and you capture them.” Look at the posture Biden has adopted, he said, and you’ll see he talks tough but won’t “lower the boom” when it comes to issues they’re really concerned about. (My thought: this would explain his repeal of the China Initiative, which had been intended as a crackdown on China’s pilfering of American intellectual property.)

Schweizer says that records the FBI has held for a long time are highly incriminating and also consistent with what’s on the laptop. They easily could have verified the laptop but FBI leadership chose not to. And now, what the “Justice” Department is trying to do is run out the clock.

Revelations From ‘The Twitter Files’

So now let’s look at some of the revelations from the latest installments of “The Twitter Files,” as offered by Elon Musk through author Michael Shellenberger and independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.

First, it seems that of all Twitter employees, only one junior staffer expressed any hesitation about banning President Trump. “This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world — which seems unsustainable,” this person wrote. (Apparently while Yoel Roth and Vijaya Gadde were making the decision to ban Trump, then-CEO Jack Dorsey was conveniently vacationing in French Polynesia.) Far be it from me to advise Elon Musk on hiring decisions, but if I were in his shoes, I’d fire everyone at Twitter except maybe that one junior staffer.

Now look at the double standard that was applied to tweets that were about the vulnerability of mail-in balloting. Pro-Biden tweets that warned about Trump “trying to steal the election” were…okay!

Daily Caller has a take on that as well. It was fine for Democrats to use Twitter to spread conspiracy theories about Trump’s administration tampering with Postal Service collection boxes to suppress votes.

Kyle Becker has a must-read piece about Twitter’s propensity for hiring former intel people from the FBI and CIA. The challenge will be to identify them and get them out, because they’re apparently busy scrubbing their LinkedIn accounts.

Yoel Roth, who appears to have been the most ruthless of all the censors at Twitter, followed his successful ban of Trump by also pushing for a permanent ban of Matt Gaetz, though Gaetz hadn’t violated any rules.

So, should Jack Dorsey be charged with lying to Congress? Law professor Jonathan Turley says that “Dorsey and others should clearly retain counsel in light of the contradictions in these files.” But he points out that Dorsey might have an ace; namely, the fact that partisan hack (our words) Merrick Garland runs the “Justice” Department and has that discretion.

Finally, when criticized for getting political, Elon Musk had an answer we should all get behind.

Speaking of the FBI, We Haven’t Forgotten This

As you know, Seth Rich was the DNC staffer who was gunned down while walking home on a DC street in the early morning hours of July 16, 2016. This case was never solved but was dubbed a likely robbery-gone-wrong, though Rich was shot twice from behind and nothing of value was taken. Julian Assange gave reason for many to strongly suspect that Rich, a Bernie Sanders supporter, was the source of the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks, though the (ahem) “preferred” narrative from the start was that this was a Russian hack. That set the stage for the whole “Russia Russia Russia!” Hoax.

Now, come to find out, the FBI has plenty more information about the Seth Rich case than it has let on, including his laptop computer and “a three (3) page forensic report detailing the actions performed by an outside entity to image the work computer.” Other materials include a third-party letter that accompanied the work computer and two FBI chain-of-custody forms.

These items had not been included in an electronic file created for Rich’s case. They were not indexed to Rich inside the FBI’s central records system. The forensic report doesn’t mention Rich’s name; neither do the custody forms. Gosh, it’s as if someone didn’t want them to be easily found, and it’s amazing they ever were; the article at this link has details. Needless to say, the FBI is maneuvering to keep Rich’s computers and forensic imaging hidden.

If speculation about Rich’s death is “conspiracy theory” — an umbrella term that describes so many things that turn out to be true — the FBI should put it to rest by releasing whatever they have. It’s too bad Elon Musk can’t just buy the FBI, too; at least then we’d get some transparency.

 

Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and longtime conservative commentator on issues in culture and current events. A New York Times best-selling author, he hosts the weekly talk show Huckabee on TBN.

Originally published at MikeHuckabee.com. Reprinted with permission.