Context Is All. All The Time.

Congressman @JamesComer's Dick Pics Hearing Just Became an Alleged Stolen Laptop Hearinghttps://t.co/GbrZZvgeLA

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 2, 2023

Let's start here:

In letters asking former Twitter executives Jim Baker, Yoel Roth, and Vijaya Gadde to testify next week, Comer described the substance of the hearing to be about their, “role in suppressing Americans’ access to information about the Biden family on Twitter shortly before the 2020 election.” As Matt #MattyDickPics Taibbi has helpfully revealed, some of the “information about the Biden family” that Twitter suppressed Americans’ access to before the election were nonconsensual dick pics, including a number posted as part of a campaign led by Steve Bannon’s buddy Guo Wengui.

Context is all. All the time. 

Oh, it just gets better:

Certainly, the Twitter witnesses, who themselves have been dangerously harassed as the result of #MattyDickPics’ sloppy propaganda, would be within the scope of Comer’s stated inquiry to explain why a private company doesn’t want to be part of an organized revenge porn campaign, even if a Congressman from Kentucky wants to see those dick pics.

But Comer’s campaign also just became about something else: Twitter’s decision to suppress a story based off a laptop that its purported owner claims was unlawfully obtained.

Here I pause to interject that the House is voting today to remove Ilhan Omar from a committee. I still think “15 ballots” Kevin can’t count, but the Democrats are helpfully pointing out that the Republicans can’t get their agenda even through the House, so they are”owning the libs” with votes like this that don’t get anything done (Democrats are remarkably on-message these days. They seem to have learned something.) I think Comer is proving their point, though this hearing, even on its face, doesn’t lay a finger on the Democrats.

We resume.

As several outlets have reported (WaPo, CNN, NBC, ABC), Hunter Biden has hired Abbe Lowell, who has written letters to DOJ, Delaware authorities, and the IRS, asking for investigations into those who have disseminated the materials from the alleged laptop (though Lowell made clear that no one is confirming any of the versions of the laptop).

I quote that because the distinction is important.  The provenance of all the material from “HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP!” 💻 should still be questioned, as well as the provenance of the laptop itself. But let’s get down to the nut-cutting:

But the public coverage of this will undoubtedly change the tenor of next week’s hearing. At the very least, it will validate Yoel Roth’s concerns in real time that the NYPost story was based on stolen data. It will, retroactively, mean that the NYPost story was a violation of Twitter’s terms of service agreement. 

None of (the coverage of) these letters describes a key detail: How the Oversight Committee got the copy of the laptop they claim they have. These criminal complaints are broad enough that they likely include at least a few people involved in the channel via which the Committee obtained the laptop, meaning that the Committee would be — is — harboring data from a private citizen that he claims was illegally obtained.

So allowing the NYPost story probably violated Twitter’s TOS; and the data the Committee is using is allegedly stolen property. I think the hearing is gonna be lit 🔥 before the witnesses start talking.

None of this will slow down Comer; but the Democrats should use it to direct the news coverage. 

I thought it would take some doing to top kicking off one’s chairmanship by having a hearing to complain about non-consensual dick pics. But having a hearing to complain that stolen private information wasn’t more widely disseminated may top that.

Exactly.