Given that Friday is my day off, the last thing I wanted to be doing last night was perching like a vulture on Twitter and waiting for Elon Musk to drop his promised expose’ on how Twitter’s former management blocked the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks before the 2020 elections. But like an addict trying to drive past the crack dealers on the corner, I just couldn’t help myself. In case you somehow missed it, John provided some very thorough coverage last night where you can read what was released in a much less frustrating format than a series of tweets spread out over several hours. So was this the “bombshell” that everyone was waiting for? We’ll get to that in a moment. First, the Post was, of course, doing an understandable end-zone dance, since they were the outlet most directly impacted by the horrendous decision.

That is “f—ed.”

Twitter “just freelanced” its baseless decision to censor The Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop scoop in the run up to the 2020 election — with top-level workers at the social media giant agreeing that controversial decision was “f–ked,” damning insider communications released by CEO Elon Musk Friday reveal.

The chaos and confusion behind closed doors at Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the October 2020 Hunter Biden expose show that a small group of top-level execs decided to label the Post’s story as “hacked material” without any evidence — behind the back of then-CEO and founder Jack Dorsey.

Before getting to the meat and potatoes (or lack thereof) from the release, I wanted to take a moment to address the mechanics of how this was done. First of all, the dump was quite a bit later than Musk initially announced. I suppose that’s understandable because they wanted to ensure they had the story correct, but the delay was still only the first of several annoyances involved in the event.

And why did it have to be done initially via a series of tweets stretching over much of the evening? I understand that Musk has an incentive to maximize traffic on his platform and he knew that the announcement would immediately blow up and go viral. (Which it did.) But it was still a very ham-handed way to deliver something that a lot of people were waiting for.

Then there’s the question of why Musk didn’t simply deliver the goods himself. For some reason, he enlisted Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi to tweet out all of the material. The Post has a profile of Taibbi and his involvement if you want to read through it. Matt is a self-identified liberal with a successful Substack channel, though he has become increasingly critical of the mainstream media and the bias that has infested it in recent years. Perhaps he was chosen to give the report a less partisan feel. It’s tough to say for sure. He even apologized for releasing it in that fashion on his Substack, saying that he had to agree to do it that way in order to get the story.

With all of that out of the way, I’ll just briefly address the actual contents of the release. There was a lot of internal Twitter correspondence included (with some of it being partially redacted) so there was definitely fresh material there. And much of it was certainly damning for the previous management of the company. While offering some cover to Jack Dorsey (who was apparently not involved in the decision to squash the story and did not approve of it) pretty much all of the blame is placed on the shoulders of the management at Twitter. They “invented” reasons to censor the story and argued about the decision between themselves. Taibbi admirably points out that the censorship was nearly (though not entirely) one-sided against conservatives because of Twitter’s overwhelmingly leftist workforce.

So you might be asking what’s missing in all of this. While we may not have seen the official internal documents detailing this process, these are all things that most of us already knew or at least strongly suspected. Obviously Twitter was trying to tilt the 2020 election in Biden’s favor and against Trump. So were Facebook, Apple, and the rest of the Big Tech superpowers. But where was the tie-in with the Biden campaign? We already know from various whistleblower documents that the Biden administration has been working with the major platforms to censor speech, but what’s been missing was the relationship between the Biden campaign and the social media giants.

The only thing that hinted in that direction was a single message from someone at Twitter who submitted a list of tweets with the message “more to review from the Biden team.” That was responded to by someone else from Twitter who said, “Handled these.”

8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.” pic.twitter.com/mnv0YZI4af

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022

Yes, that looks bad for both the Biden campaign and for Twitter and seems to show that they were feeding examples of tweets they wanted to be deleted and Twitter was going along with them. But it’s still not the full smoking gun we should be asking for. Who were those people at Twitter who were “handling” this censorship? Who inside the Biden campaign was sending the information? If the House is going to hold hearings next year regarding all of the censorship that’s been going on, those are the sorts of details that we’re going to want to see.

Could some of that information still be forthcoming, as was suggested to me this morning by a couple of people? Possibly. But if Elon Musk has actually found the smoking gun, why hold it back? Is he just trying to tease this whole process out for maximum traffic and attention? If so, that’s not the most impressive way to handle the situation. But if there isn’t anything else, then the culpability of the Biden campaign is measurably diminished and the blame falls largely on the liberal censorship czars at Twitter. And we already knew they were up to no good.