FEC needs to reopen the Twitter investigation now that documents Musk released show the company may have lied outright
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The Federal Election Commission is responsible for enforcing the law governing the collection and spending of federal campaign money. Last year, the commission dismissed a complaint filed against Twitter and their executives who claimed to have violated federal law. Given the recent public disclosures of Twitter’s internal and external communications with campaign organizations and parties, the FEC should reopen that investigation. You will need to determine if that firing was based on false information provided by Twitter.
In 2021, the FEC investigated three consolidated complaints filed against Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Brandon Borrman and the Biden for President campaign. Dorsey is the co-founder of Twitter and a former CEO, while Borrman is the former vice president of global communications for Twitter.
According to the “Factual and Legal Analysis” report prepared by the FEC’s general counsel, the complaints allege that Twitter made a “prohibited in-kind corporate contribution” to the Biden campaign. Federal law prohibits corporations from contributing “anything of value” to federal candidates. For example, if a corporation were to allow free use of a rental property it owns for a campaign, that would be an illegal corporate in-kind contribution.
The complaints argued that “Twitter made an in-kind contribution when it prevented users from tweeting links to or certain information derived from” the New York Post. articles on the Hunter Biden laptop. The complaints alleged that Twitter pledged to limit “the visibility of, or ‘shadow ban,’ Republican users” as well as “suppress distribution of an interview by an alleged former business associate of Hunter Biden.” The latest allegation concerned Tony Bobulinski, who claimed that Biden had defrauded him and that the Biden family was involved in an “influence peddling operation.” The complaints also claimed that Twitter illegally coordinated its actions with the Biden campaign, and thus the Biden campaign had “knowingly accepted prohibited corporate contributions.”
The repeated release of Elon Musk’s so-called ‘Twitter Files’ shed light on the company’s practices of secretly ‘blacklisting’ certain tweets and raised questions about what the company told the FEC.
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After investigating the allegations, the six commissioners voted to dismiss the complaint. But, according to the counsel general’s report, that decision was based on Twitter telling the FEC that Twitter had not made an illegal corporate contribution because it had “bona fide business reasons” for its actions and “were not done with the purpose of influencing a federal election”.
Additionally, Twitter “submitted an affidavit from its US Chief of Public Policy. [Lauren Culbertson] certifying that neither she nor any other Twitter employee ‘received any communication or had any communication with representatives of [the Biden Committee]'” before Twitter moved to suppress the New York Post revelations. The general counsel also reported that the “Biden Committee claims it did not coordinate with Twitter.”
The alleged “bona fide business reasons” provided by Twitter were its policy against distributing “hacked” materials. However, there was no evidence that the materials had been pirated. The New York Post articles made it abundantly clear that the information on him came from a laptop that Hunter Biden had abandoned at a computer repair shop. Furthermore, Twitter had no qualms about distributing articles based on the highly classified documents illegally disclosed by Edward Snowden in 2013.
There was also no evidence that the information on the laptop was false. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign have ever “publicly denied the authenticity of the laptop documents.”
Not surprisingly, recently disclosed internal communications show Twitter’s own policy communications manager saying he was “struggling to understand the policy rationale for flagging this as unsafe.”
These revelations show that the FEC may have dismissed these complaints based on false and incomplete responses from Twitter.
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The commission appeared to take at face value Twitter’s claim that it had acted for “good faith business reasons,” but the fact that executives within Twitter questioned its suppression of the story certainly casts doubt on that claim.
In addition, the now-revealed communications between Twitter and various political actors call into question whether the company was being truthful when it denied any communication with the Biden campaign on these issues. That also appears to have been a key factor in the FEC’s dismissal of the complaint. The counsel general’s report says: “there is no evidence that Twitter coordinated its action with the Biden Committee and as such, the actions did not constitute contributions.”
Given the recent public disclosures of Twitter’s internal and external communications with campaign organizations and parties, the FEC should reopen that investigation. You will need to determine if that firing was based on false information provided by Twitter.
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When they dismissed the FEC’s complaint, several of the commissioners asserted that even if Twitter had participated in the impugned actions, it was entitled to the media exemption for publishers in federal law. But Jack Dorsey himself said in 2020 when asked “Is Twitter a publisher? No, we’re not. We distribute information.”
There is now reason to believe that Twitter and its executives outright misled or lied to the FEC. The commission must reopen its investigation, subpoena Twitter for all materials and communications relevant to these issues, and determine whether federal campaign finance laws were violated. You should also investigate whether any person who submitted affidavits committed perjury and should therefore be referred to the Department of Justice for possible criminal charges.
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