In a comment to reporters on Tuesday, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) accused the FBI of interfering in two consecutive U.S. presidential elections and said “somebody should go to jail for all of this.”
Hawley’s press secretary Abigail Marone tweeted a clip of Hawley’s comments to the press.
Hawley offered his comments after recent rounds of the “Twitter Files” detailed the extensive ties between the FBI and Twitter and showed the FBI’s efforts to forewarn Twitter about a Russian “hack and leak operation” involving then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. The FBI’s warnings about such a “hack and leak operation” came ahead of the New York Post publishing a series of articles based on the laptop. Twitter acted quickly to censor those New York Post articles based on the belief that the materials violated their “hacked materials policy.”
In Part 7 of the “Twitter Files” series, journalist Michael Shellenberger noted that the FBI had collected evidence in December of 2019 from a Delaware computer repair shop that possessed Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop. Nine months later, in August of 2020, the computer repair shop owner still hadn’t heard back from the FBI about the materials they had taken from his possession.
The files also included a portion of a legal statement by Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth, who described multiple in-person meetings with FBI officials who warned him about potential 2020 election “hack-and-leak operations” including rumors that one of the operations “would involve Hunter Biden.”
On Oct. 13, 2020, Hunter Biden and his lawyer became aware that the New York Post would publish a story based on the laptop. That same day, an FBI agent contacted Roth notifying Roth that he would send along some documents and asking Roth to confirm receiving them once they arrived.
