The FBI is in the midst of some damage control after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the FBI had warned his company of some incoming “misinformation” right before the Hunter Biden laptop story broke.

Appearing on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” Zuckerberg revealed to host Joe Rogan that his social media platform definitely censored the Hunter Biden laptop story since his leftist “fact-checkers” were always on the hunt to suppress political “misinformation.” Facebook and many other social media platforms were speedy in hiding the Hunter story…maybe a bit too speedy.

(READ: Now That We Know the Federal Government Is Calling the Shots on Social Media Censorship, Conservatives Need to Wake Up)

According to Zuck, it’s because the FBI contacted them before it broke about some fake news that’d be making the rounds.

BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for 7 days based on a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation. pic.twitter.com/llTA7IqGa1

— Minds💡 (@minds) August 25, 2022

The FBI is now also quickly coming to its own defense, claiming that warning social media websites of incoming misinformation is nothing new. NBC News reported that the FBI said it can’t ask these companies to take direct action but that it can warn them of a potential threat:

In a statement Friday night, the FBI said it has provided companies with “foreign threat indicators” to help protect their platforms and customers, but that it “cannot ask, or direct, companies to take action on information received.”

“The FBI routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats,” the agency said.

This doesn’t exactly make them look any better. In fact, if they warned Facebook that the Hunter laptop story was incoming “misinformation” when it was absolutely true, and they just admitted they warn these platforms on a regular basis, then this tells me they’re serial offenders of news suppression. They know their influence will affect how a company operates and they’re openly abusing it in order to try to manipulate the news cycle to the administration’s benefit.

Even if they didn’t exactly know that the story that was breaking was the Hunter Biden laptop story, then attempting to manipulate social media as a “just in case” measure is still manipulation, just in the blind.

If the FBI was hoping to make itself an innocent party here, they’ve done the opposite. They’ll put a lot of time and effort into trying to find anything to desperately make Trump guilty of a charge the government clearly wasn’t that concerned about previously, but in all their digging they didn’t realize a laptop full of incriminating evidence that belonged to Hunter Biden wasn’t on the lamb? They just heard rumors of incoming “misinformation” and decided to warn social media companies right before it came out?

I’m not buying it and neither should you. The far more plausible story is that they knew it was the laptop and attempted to use their influence as a government law enforcement arm to manipulate social media companies into suppressing or even banning the information.