The Federal Bureau of Investigation was doing far more to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story on social media networks than previously acknowledged, according to new information being released by Twitter through journalists who have been covering the “Twitter Files.”

In a “Twitter Files” thread released Monday by journalist Michael Shellenberger, new evidence is coming to light detailing what could be generously called a “proactive” approach to silencing the story before it even came out. According to Shellenberger, the FBI warned Twitter and other social media networks about a Russian “hack and leak” operation.

“We have discovered new info that points to an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms,” Shellenberger wrote in one of the tweets.

According to the information coming out, despite the fact that people were discovering Hunter Biden was getting tens of millions of dollars, he was doing very little work for the money, the FBI seemed more concerned that the information that was on Biden’s laptop would get out.

12. And yet, during all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian “hack and leak” operation.

This is from a sworn declaration by Roth given in December 2020.https://t.co/IvTjyYw9iR pic.twitter.com/5iq2ATB3bW

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022

Shellenberger also noted that Mark Zuckerberg mentioned the same thing was happening at Facebook. Unprompted, the FBI was coming in and saying “This is a Russian operation and you need to fight back against it.”

13. They did the same to Facebook, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “The FBI basically came to us [and] was like, ‘Hey… you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016 election. There's about to be some kind of dump similar to that.'" pic.twitter.com/yPGP8nYgCq

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022

It raises several questions about what the FBI thought was going on. By their own admission, they did not see the same level of foreign actors using social media to influence the election as they saw in 2016. FBI investigator Elvis Chan, who was also featured in last night’s Twitter Files, admitted as much.

“Through our investigations, we did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016,” admitted FBI agent Elvis Chan in November, according to Shellenberger’s thread.

And Twitter itself claimed that it saw very little such activity.

“[O]n Sept 24, 2020, Twitter told FBI it had removed 345 ‘largely inactive’ accounts ‘linked to previous coordinated Russian hacking attempts.’ They ‘had little reach & low follower accounts,'” Shellenberger wrote.

17. After FBI asks about a WaPo story on alleged foreign influence in a pro-Trump tweet, Twitter's Roth says, "The article makes a lot of insinuations… but we saw no evidence that that was the case here (and in fact, a lot of strong evidence pointing in the other direction).” pic.twitter.com/jJjnczZnA5

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022

“It’s not the first time that Twitter’s [Yoel] Roth has pushed back against the FBI,” he continued. “In January 2020, Roth resisted FBI efforts to get Twitter to share data outside of the normal search warrant process.”

Another Twitter official wrote to Roth, saying “We have seen a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our API policies. They are probing & pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to congressional staff).”

Roth’s skepticism is especially noteworthy, given how quickly his own partisan leanings led him to make rash decisions when it came to content moderation at the company. He and the rest of Twitter’s leadership repeatedly told the FBI that they were not finding major instances of foreign actors spreading disinformation in an attempt to influence anything, yet the FBI kept pushing.

21. Despite Twitter’s pushback, the FBI repeatedly requests information from Twitter that Twitter has already made clear it will not share outside of normal legal channels. pic.twitter.com/WyI03iZ0WF

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022

Then, the FBI gave information on a Russian hacking group to Roth, and that seems to have influenced his future decision-making on the Hunter Biden laptop story. Again, this is all without evidence that any such dump of information on the laptop was a Russian operation. This seems more and more like an attempt to make Roth believe that anything that was about to come out was Russian disinformation. A lot of effort to undermine what we now know was a very credible story.

24. Recently, Yoel Roth told @karaswisher that he had been primed to think about the Russian hacking group APT28 before news of the Hunter Biden laptop came out.

When it did, Roth said, "It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leap campaign alarm bells." pic.twitter.com/RKoR4NtH1s

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022

As more of this information continues to roll out, it becomes clear that, indeed, something really needs to be done about the FBI’s actions in recent years.