Ex-Twitter Execs to Testify About Hunter Biden

House Republicans are expected to question former Twitter executives about the platform’s handling of reporting on Hunter Biden, the president's son, fulfilling a party promise to investigate anti-conservative bias at social media companies.

Three former executives will be appearing Wednesday before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to testify for the first time about the company’s decision in the weeks before the 2020 election to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.

Legal Execs to Testify

The witnesses Republicans subpoenaed to testify are Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's former chief legal officer; James Baker, the company's former deputy general counsel; and Yoel Roth, former head of safety and integrity.

Democrats have a witness of their own, Anika Collier Navaroli, a former employee with Twitter's content moderation team. She testified last year to the House committee that investigated the Capitol attack about Twitter's treatment of, and eventual banning, two years ago, of Donald Trump.

The hearing is the GOP's opening act into what lawmakers promise will be a widespread investigation into the influence peddling of President Joe Biden and his family, with the tech companies another prominent target of their oversight efforts.

“Americans deserve answers about this attack on the First Amendment and why Big Tech and the Swamp colluded to censor this information about the Biden family selling access for profit," Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the committee chairman, said in a statement announcing the hearing.

The New York Post first reported in October 2020, weeks before the presidential election, that it had received from Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of a hard drive from a laptop that Hunter Biden had dropped off 18 months earlier at a Delaware computer repair shop and never retrieved. Twitter blocked people from sharing links to the story for several days.

Dorsey: Block 'Unacceptable'

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Months later, Twitter’s then-CEO, Jack Dorsey, called the company’s communications around the Post article “not great.” He added that blocking the article’s URL with “zero context” around why it was blocked was “unacceptable.”

Just last week, lawyers for the younger Biden asked the Justice Department to investigate people who say they accessed his personal data. But they did not acknowledge that that data came from a laptop that Hunter Biden is purported to have dropped off at a computer repair shop.

The issue was also reignited recently after Elon Musk took over Twitter as CEO and began to release a slew of company information to independent journalists, what he has called the “Twitter Files.”

The documents and data largely show internal debates among employees over the decision to temporarily censor the story about Hunter Biden.

Comer and other Republicans have used the Post story as the basis for what they say is another example of the Biden family's “influence peddling."

One of the witnesses on Wednesday, Baker, is expected to be the target of even more Republican scrutiny.

Baker was the FBI’s general counsel during the opening of two of the bureau’s most consequential investigations in history: the Hillary Clinton investigation and a separate inquiry into potential coordination between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Republicans have long criticized the FBI’s handling of both investigations