set up an encrypted election communication platform for the fbi and twitter. and that system soon came in very handy because in october 2020 within hours of hunter biden s legal team getting tipped off to the new york post story exposing his emails, roth received ten documents from chan through the new communication platform. we don t know the exact contents of the documents but we do know that once the new york post story was published hours later, twitter and other social media companies censored the story, preventing its spread before the vote. and also we know what happened in the aftermath. many twitter execs couldn t point to specific evidence. it was all hack material, thus violating twitter s policy, then twitter general counsel jim baker who had the same role of the fbi, was the most adamant that it was. in the end, with baker s help
to ensure that no derogatory material about joe biden from the laptop would ever see the light of day before the election. it was strangled at birth. wow.w. now, mike , before the twentyone twenty election season even got going, you had thiou hads the sl agent, elvis chan, he was interviewed about how the fbi was preparing for the election.. check it out. one of the things that was really important to us that we didn t have ahead of 2016 was established channels of communication with private sector companies , specifically have social media companies. so we ve done a much bette muchb since 2016 of really establishing channels of communicatio n, being able to share threat indicators with them so that they caney protect their platforms. a threat indicators their who protects us against the twitter people and the fbi agaiitter pet, mike , that they were protecting their platforms fromwere the tr.
to influence left-leaning voters. speak we know from the intelligence community that countries like russia are using social media to try to influence the election. at this present moment, russia is actively interfering in the 2020 election. we know that russia is seeking to manipulate public opinion across social media. laura: it turns out they weren t busy combating russian disinformation, they were desperately trying to find russian disinformation. throughout much of 2020, twitter execs were telling the fbi that they didn t see much evidence of russian bot activity. they told the bureau had only removed 345 largely inactive account. but the fbi kept pushing. in july of 2020, a special agent with the san francisco bureau upped the ante. he began arranging to grant top-secret security clearances for some twitter execs ahead of the election. just two months time, they had
uros eventual buy in the fbi s influence campaign to suppress anything related to the joe biden laptop story worked. joining me now, miranda devine, columnist at the new york post. author of the laptop from . also joining me is mike davis, founder and president ofpresiden the internet accountability project . miranda, it is disturbingng how interconnected the fbi was with twitter and then how the censorship began. well, i think, as always with these stories, it s the cover up that ends up tripping up the wrongdoers. and heregdoers because of elon d and his commitment to transparency, we are seeing what the fbi was up to andtter they were grooming twitter employees. we can see this throughoutrought the autumn of 2020 to immediately recognize our story. when it came up in october, of twenty , twenty three weeks before the election
and most revered researchers that one in three people who use marijuana in the last year will develop a cannabis use disorder. that s the medical diagnosis for addiction. there is these myths that the industry is trying to undermine your we need real science, not bogus science. laura: it reminds me a lot of the covert, you know funding, of research studies with covid. it reminds me a lot of that. luke, thank you for the work that smart approaches to marijuana does on this issue. the coordination between the fbi and twitter is so pervasive that the barrow temporarily granted top-secret clearance to twitter execs was one of the explosive findings in the latest twitter files. we walk through next.