Jamie Raskin drops the hammer on Republicans after their Oversight hearing turns up 'absolutely nothing'
In a fiery statement concluding today's Twitter testimony at the House Oversight Committee, ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tore apart the entire premise of the hearing and chided Republican members for failing to focus on more serious problems in social media.
The hearing, which included three former Twitter executives, focused on the decision by the company to briefly suppress a New York Poststory detailing information about Hunter Biden's laptop ahead of the election as disinformation — a decision the company has freely admitted was a mistake, as many of the details of the story subsequently proved to be true. Republicans have claimed, without any evidence, that the FBI or the Biden campaign pressured Twitter into suppressing the story.
"I want to start with a simple point," said Raskin. "We have members threatening witnesses with arrest and prosecution for clearly imaginary offenses, or at least offenses that might make sense in their mind, but I don't know what they would be," said Raskin. "Twitter is a private, First Amendment protected media entity, and you make your own decisions, like Fox News — and I might get kicked off of Fox News or they might not cover me — or the Wall Street Journal or MSNBC. I've got no constitutional right to go there, so I think there is legal fallacy and logical fallacy that pervades most of the questioning today."
"Under our First Amendment, there's state action requirement; there is no state action here," said Raskin. "Now, there's an attempt to, perhaps, jerry-rig some state action by claiming, well, it was really the FBI that committed whatever offense was there, but what do we have in terms of what we found today? Today's witnesses, each and every one, testified no U.S. governmental official directed any of them to censor, remove, or take down the New York Post story. That was their mistake. Two, today's witnesses testified the Biden campaign did not direct Twitter to take action against the New York Post story. And three, the whole hearing was predicated on the idea the FBI directed Twitter to take down the New York Post story to protect Biden, but, once again, not a single witness testified the FBI even communicated with Twitter about the New York Post story."
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The upshot, said Raskin, is that "this has been a wild cyber goose chase all day. It has turned up absolutely nothing."
"But there was one serious point made by our witness, Ms. Navaroli," continued Raskin. "The violence and the chaos that was wracked upon this institution not far from where we sit today on January 6, the attempt to topple a presidential election and install someone who had not been elected as president, was facilitated by Twitter and other social media entities and, at Twitter at least, the brass specifically rejected the pleas of employees to take seriously all of the signs and clues of coming violence and the insurrectionary action that took place. That's a serious problem that we're going to have to deal with in a serious hearing."
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