[House Hearing, 118 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                   PROTECTING SPEECH FROM GOVERNMENT 
                  INTERFERENCE AND SOCIAL MEDIA BIAS,
                 PART I: TWITTER'S ROLE IN SUPPRESSING.
                         THE BIDEN LAPTOP STORY

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                              COMMITTEE ON
                      OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY
                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                            FEBRUARY 8, 2023

                               __________

                            Serial No. 118-3

                               __________

  Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability
  
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]  


                       Available on: govinfo.gov,
                         oversight.house.gov or
                             docs.house.gov

                                __________

                                
                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
50-898 PDF                  WASHINGTON : 2023                    
          
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------   
                            
               COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY

                    JAMES COMER, Kentucky, Chairman

Jim Jordan, Ohio                     Jamie Raskin, Maryland, Ranking 
Mike Turner, Ohio                        Minority Member
Paul Gosar, Arizona                  Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of 
Virginia Foxx, North Carolina            Columbia
Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin            Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts
Gary Palmer, Alabama                 Gerald E. Connolly, Virginia
Clay Higgins, Louisiana              Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois
Pete Sessions, Texas                 Ro Khanna, California
Andy Biggs, Arizona                  Kweisi Mfume, Maryland
Nancy Mace, South Carolina           Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York
Jake LaTurner, Kansas                Katie Porter, California
Pat Fallon, Texas                    Cori Bush, Missouri
Byron Donalds, Florida               Shontel Brown, Ohio
Kelly Armstrong, North Dakota        Jimmy Gomez, California
Scott Perry, Pennsylvania            Melanie Stansbury, New Mexico
William Timmons, South Carolina      Robert Garcia, California
Tim Burchett, Tennessee              Maxwell Frost, Florida
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia      Becca Balint, Vermont
Lisa McClain, Michigan               Summer Lee, Pennsylvania
Lauren Boebert, Colorado             Greg Casar, Texas
Russell Fry, South Carolina          Jasmine Crockett, Texas
Anna Paulina Luna, Florida           Dan Goldman, New York
Chuck Edwards, North Carolina        Jared Moskowitz, Florida
Nick Langworthy, New York
Eric Burlison, Missouri

                       Mark Marin, Staff Director
       Jessica Donlon, Deputy Staff Director and General Counsel
            James Mandolfo, Chief Counsel for Investigations
        Jake Greenburg, Deputy Chief Counsel for Investigations
      Mallory Cogar, Deputy Director of Operations and Chief Clerk

                      Contact Number: 202-225-5074

                  Julie Tagen, Minority Staff Director

                      Contact Number: 202-225-5051
                                 ------                                
                         
                         
                         C  O  N  T  E  N  T  S

                              ----------                              

                                                                   Page
Hearing held on February 8, 2023.................................     1

                               Witnesses

Mr. James Baker, Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel; Former 
  FBI General Counsel
Oral Statement...................................................     6

Ms. Vijaya Gadde, Former Twitter Chief Legal Officer
Oral Statement...................................................     8

Mr. Yoel Roth, Former Twitter Senior Director, Head of Trust & 
  Safety
Oral Statement...................................................    10

Ms. Anika Collier Navaroli (Minority Witness), Former member of 
  Twitter's U.S. Safety Policy Team
Oral Statement...................................................    11

 Opening statements and the prepared statements for the witnesses 
  are available in the U.S. House of Representatives Repository 
  at: docs.house.gov.
                           INDEX OF DOCUMENTS

                              ----------                              

  * Tweet from Rep. Raskin; submitted by Rep. Fallon.

  * Article, The New York Post, ``Twitter Refused to Remove Child 
    Porn Because It Didn't `Violate Policies' ''; submitted by 
    Rep. Gosar.

  * Article, New York Post, ``Latest `Twitter Files' Reveal 
    Secret Suppression of Right-Wing Commentators''; submitted by 
    Rep. Higgins.

  * Memo, Timeline of Hunter Biden's Business Dealings and Joe 
    Biden's Official Actions; submitted by Rep. Higgins.

  * Graphic, Big Tech & Big Government Collusion; submitted by 
    Rep. Luna.

  * Graphic, Correspondence; submitted by Rep. Luna.

  * Article, Wall Street Journal, ``The Twitter Blacklisting of 
    Jay Bhattacharya''; submitted by Rep. Mace.

  * Report, Anti-Defamation League, ``Murder and Extremism in the 
    United States 2021''; submitted by Rep. Mfume.

  * Report, U.S. Secret Service, ``Mass Attacks in Pubic Spaces 
    2016-2020''; submitted by Rep. Mfume.

  * Article, The Washington Post, ``Now Warning About the Hunter 
    Biden Laptop Disinfo: The Guy Who Leaked It''; submitted by 
    Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.

  * Study, Princeton University, ``Powered by Twitter? The 
    Taliban's Takeover of Afghanistan''; submitted by Rep. 
    Palmer.

  * Article, Rolling Stone, ``Twitter Kept Entire `Database' of 
    Republican Requests to Censor Posts''; submitted by Rep. 
    Raskin.

  * Statement for the Record by Rep. Gerald Connolly.

  * Questions for the Record: to Mr. Baker; submitted by Rep. 
    Gosar.

  * Questions for the Record: to Ms. Gadde; submitted by Rep. 
    Gosar.

  * Questions for the Record: to Mr. Roth; submitted by Rep. 
    Gosar.

  * Questions for the Record: to Mr. Roth; submitted by Rep. 
    Luna.

  * Questions for the Record: to Mr. Baker; submitted by Rep. 
    Luna.

  * Questions for the Record: to Ms. Gadde; submitted by Rep. 
    Luna.

The documents listed above are available at: docs.house.gov.

 
                   PROTECTING SPEECH FROM GOVERNMENT
                  INTERFERENCE AND SOCIAL MEDIA BIAS,
                 PART I:  TWITTER'S ROLE IN SUPPRESSING
                         THE BIDEN LAPTOP STORY

                              ----------                              


                      Wednesday, February 8, 2023

                       House of Representatives,

               Committee on Oversight and Accountability,

                                                   Washington, D.C.

    The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:01 a.m., in 
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. James Comer 
(Chairman of the Committee) presiding.
    Present: Representatives Comer, Jordan, Gosar, Grothman, 
Palmer, Higgins, Sessions, Biggs, Mace, LaTurner, Fallon, 
Donalds, Armstrong, Perry, Timmons, Burchett, Greene, McClain, 
Boebert, Fry, Luna, Edwards, Langeworthy, Burlison, Raskin, 
Norton, Lynch, Connolly, Krishnamoorthi, Mfume, Ocasio-Cortez, 
Porter, Bush, Brown, Gomez, Stansbury, Garcia, Frost, Balint, 
Lee, Casar, Crockett, Goldman, and Moskowitz.
    Chairman Comer. The Committee on Oversight and 
Accountability will come to order. I want to welcome everyone.
    Without objection, the Chair may declare a recess at any 
time.
    I recognize myself for the purpose of making an opening 
statement.
    Today's hearing is the House Oversight and Accountability 
Committee's first step in examining the coordination between 
the Federal Government and Big Tech to restrict protected 
speech and interfere in the democratic process. Social media 
platforms are increasingly the place where Americans go to 
express their views, debate issues, and gather news and 
information. These platforms are the virtual town square. 
However, many social media platforms are under the control of 
people who are hostile to the fundamental American principles 
of free speech and expression protected in the U.S. 
Constitution.
    We have witnessed Big Tech autocrats wield their unchecked 
power to suppress the speech of Americans to promote their 
preferred political opinions. Twitter was once one of these 
platforms until Elon Musk purchased the company a few months 
ago. Mr. Musk has pledged to end censorship that goes beyond 
the law. He has pledged to allow Americans' voices be heard, 
not quashed. In this hearing, we will examine the actions taken 
by Twitter prior to Mr. Musk's ownership.
    Many of these actions were carried out by the witnesses 
before us today. Prior to Mr. Musk's take over the company, 
Twitter aggressively suppressed conservative elected officials, 
journalists, and activists. This included shadow banning, 
blocking accounts, and banning accounts altogether. In fact, 
Twitter's previous management team de-platformed and suppressed 
not just conservative voices, but anyone whose opinions strayed 
from what they deemed acceptable, opinions such as that 
students could and should attend school in person to curb 
learning loss.
    In the past, Twitter's leadership, including the previous 
CEO, Jack Dorsey, claim the company did not limit the 
visibility of certain accounts and tweets known as shadow 
banning. He said this in front of Congress in 2018, but we now 
know they did, even placing such accounts on search and trend 
blacklists. Twitter's employees made censorship decisions on 
the fly, often not following the company's own publicly stated 
policies. It worked hand-in-hand with the FBI to monitor the 
protected speech of Americans, receiving millions of tax 
dollars to do so.
    Twitter, under the leadership of our witnesses today, was a 
private company the Federal Government used to accomplish what 
it constitutionally cannot limit: the free exercise of speech. 
We now know all this thanks to Elon Musk and the independent 
journalists, who have contributed to what are known as the 
Twitter Files. That brings us to the specific topic of today's 
hearing: Twitter's censorship of a news article that shed light 
on Joe Biden's involvement in his family's suspicious business 
deals.
    In the months leading up to the laptop story, the FBI 
advised senior Twitter executives to question the validity of 
any Hunter Biden story. We also know that one of the witnesses 
before us today participated in an Aspen Institute exercise in 
September 2020 on a potential hack-and-dump operation related 
to Hunter Biden. Other Big Tech companies and reporters 
attended as well. This exercise prepared them for their future 
collusion to suppress and delegitimize information contained in 
Hunter Biden's laptop about the Biden's family business 
schemes.
    On October 14, 2020, The New York Post published its first 
story based on information contained in Hunter Biden's laptop. 
The Post provided proof of the laptop's legitimacy by releasing 
a computer repair store's signed receipt for the laptop and the 
Federal subpoena used by the FBI to retrieve it in 2019. The 
article revealed that a top executive at Burisma, who was 
paying Hunter Biden $50,000 a month, had spent time with then 
Vice President Biden in Washington, DC. Throughout his 
Presidential campaign, Joe Biden assured the American people 
that he had never spoken to his son about his overseas business 
dealings. However, the details exposed in the Post article 
indicate that Joe Biden lied to the American people.
    Immediately following the story's publication, America 
witnessed a coordinated campaign by social media companies, 
mainstream news, and the intelligence communities to suppress 
and delegitimize the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop and its 
contents. That morning, Twitter and other social media 
companies took extraordinary steps to suppress that story. 
Twitter immediately removed the story and banned The New York 
Post account. Twitter also banned accounts who shared the 
story, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, 
and blocked its transmission via direct message. This episode 
marked the first time Twitter directly limited the spread of 
information from a mainstream news organization, and The New 
York Post would not get its account back for two weeks. Twitter 
would finally admit its mistake, but the damage had already 
been done. On October 19, 51 former intelligence officials 
published a letter that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian 
disinformation, which Joe Biden used as a talking point at a 
Presidential debate on October 22, but we all know now this was 
not Russian disinformation. It wasn't disinformation.
    I want to make sure the American people truly understand 
the timeline here, because it is very important. The Hunter 
Biden laptop story was published on Wednesday. Twitter did not 
acknowledge their mistake for at least 24 hours. Then on Monday 
morning, 51 former intelligence officials published their 
letter. That letter was then wholeheartedly accepted by 
mainstream news as proof that the laptop was fake. Joe Biden 
used that letter to brush aside the few questions he received 
about the story. During that time, the mainstream media was 
more concerned about what flavor of ice cream Joe Biden had 
ordered on a particular day. All this happened two weeks before 
the 2020 election. Two weeks.
    One survey found that 70 percent of Biden voters would not 
have voted for the Biden-Harris ticket if they had known about 
the Biden laptop, but many Americans did not know about it 
because of a coordinated cover up by Big Tech, the swamp, and 
mainstream news. Now, mainstream media outlets have verified 
the laptop, but the damage has been done.
    Today we are joined by three former high-ranking employees 
at Twitter: Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's former top lawyer; James 
Baker, Twitter's former deputy general counsel; and Yoel Roth, 
Twitter's former head of trust and safety. We are also joined 
by Anika Collier Navaroli, Twitter's former head of trust and 
safety, former member of Twitter's U.S. Safety Policy Team. Let 
me get that right. I would like to thank you all for your 
participation in today's hearing. We owe it to the American 
people to provide answers about this collusion to censor 
information about Joe Biden's involvement in his family's 
business schemes.
    With that, I yield to the Ranking Member for his opening 
statement.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman. Last night in 
his State of the Union address, over all the heckling, 
President Biden reviewed significant achievements his 
Administration and congressional Democrats are delivering for 
the American people: the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 
years; a manufacturing boom in clean energy, semiconductors and 
infrastructure; expanding healthcare for veterans and lowering 
prescription drug costs for seniors and people with diabetes; 
beating the opioid epidemic and addressing our national mental 
health crisis; and historic action on climate change. But this 
morning, we returned not to focus on advancing this robust 
agenda of progress, but instead to take up an authentically 
trivial pursuit, all based on the obsessive victimology of 
right-wing politics in America. The majority has called a 
hearing to revisit a two-year-old story about a private 
editorial decision by Twitter not to allow links to a single 
New York Post article made for a two-day period that had no 
discernible influence on anyone or anything.
    The New York Post published the article in its own pages, 
and it was carried by lots of other media outlets. It was 
widely discussed, including on Twitter itself, even during the 
brief moment in time when links weren't provided, and it was a 
fixture in right-wing media for the next three weeks before the 
election. I think even the Chairman and other Members of this 
Committee were out on TV and social media talking about it. But 
instead of letting this trivial pursuit go, my colleagues have 
tried to whip up a full scandal about this two-day lapse in 
their ability to spread Hunter Biden propaganda on a private 
media platform. Silly does not even begin to capture this 
obsession.
    What is more, Twitter's editorial decision has been 
analyzed and debated ad nauseam. Some people think it was the 
right decision, some people think it was the wrong decision, 
but the key point here is that it was Twitter's decision. 
Twitter is a private media company. In America, private media 
companies can decide what to publish or how to curate content, 
however they want. If Twitter wants to have nothing but tweets 
commenting on New York Post articles run all day, it can do 
that. If such tweets mentioning New York Post never see the 
light of day, they can do that, too. That is what the First 
Amendment means. Twitter can ban Donald Trump for inciting 
violent insurrection against the Union, as he was impeached by 
the House of Representatives, and as 57 of 100 Senators found 
he did, and he can also try to resurrect his political career.
    Elon Musk just purchased Twitter and, therefore, controls 
its editorial content. And among the first things he did was to 
fire some people, hire some people, denounce some prior 
decisions, and reinstate an unrepentant and still clearly lying 
Donald Trump to the platform. Those decisions, however heroic 
or imbecilic you think they might be, are protected by the 
First Amendment in the United States of America.
    Officially, Twitter happens to think they got it wrong 
about that day or two period. In hindsight, Twitter's former 
CEO, Jack Dorsey, called it a mistake. This apology might be a 
statement of regret about the company being overly cautious 
about the risks of publishing contents of potentially hacked or 
stolen materials, or it may reflect craven surrender to a 
right-wing pressure campaign. But, however you interpret it, 
the apology just makes the premise of this hearing all the more 
absurd. The professional conspiracy theorists who are heckling 
and haranguing this private company have already gotten exactly 
what they want: an apology. What more do they want, and why 
does the U.S. Congress have to be involved in this nonsense 
when we have serious work to do for the American people?
    But what makes this hearing tragic is that if our 
colleagues really wanted to examine a serious problem involving 
American democracy in social media, my friends, it is staring 
us in the face right now. Twitter and other social media 
companies acted as central organizing and staging grounds 
through the January 6 violent insurrection against Congress and 
against Vice President Pence. Twitter became the national and 
global platform for incitement to seditious violence against 
our government and a forum on the day of attack through 
coordinating logistical movements and tactical maneuvers in the 
mob violence against our police officers.
    In the lead-up to January 6, Twitter decided to allow 
Donald Trump and countless MAGA extremists to use the platform 
to spread Trump's ridiculous Big Lie and disinformation about 
the election. And soon the internet was replete with incitement 
for civil war, race war, insurrection, revolution, and mob 
violence. Twitter did so despite increasingly desperate appeals 
from its own employees to act in the interest of public safety 
approaching January 6. The First Amendment is robust and 
expansive, but it stops at this point. It does not protect 
anyone's right to engage in incitement to imminent lawless 
action and violent action against the government or against 
other people. This is the Brandenburg principle.
    There is no carveout to free speech for speech relating to 
the New York Post, or Hunter Biden, or laptops, but there is a 
significant carveout when the speech is deliberately calculated 
to produce imminent violence and chaos against the government. 
That is why Twitter's deliberate indifference to Trump's big 
lies and incitement, its decision to ignore the pleas of its 
own employees, to deal with the impending explosion against our 
police and against Congress on January 6, are matters that 
require real investigation and reflection. Rather than 
conspiring to suppress right-wing MAGA speeches, my colleagues 
astonishingly claimed Twitter and other media companies 
knowingly facilitated Trump's spread of disinformation, or what 
his own sycophantic Attorney General William Barr would come to 
call bullshit, and gave voice to his followers, glorification 
of violence, and calls for civil war.
    Today we will hear from Anika Collier Navaroli, a former 
Twitter employee turned corporate whistleblower and patriotic 
hero, who raised the alarm inside Twitter about numerous 
accelerating warning signs that she saw leading up to the 
violent and catastrophic attack on the Capitol on January 6, 
2021. Ms. Navaroli is here today to publicly testify about how 
senior officials at Twitter resisted her efforts to put 
policies in place or to enforce existing policies to promote 
public safety and to defend our national security. Twitter 
management, however, did not want to cross Donald Trump.
    I don't know precisely how we will solve the problem of 
private social media platforms being used for the organization 
of coups and incitement of violent insurrection against the 
United States, or Brazil, or any other country, but this is a 
grave problem confronting democracy, not just America, but all 
over the world. It is not a silly concocted partisan issue. We 
must analyze it carefully and legislate effectively to address 
it. And we must never forget that the enemies of democracy, led 
by autocrat and war criminal, Vladimir Putin, are spending 
hundreds of millions of dollars on social media propaganda and 
disinformation to destabilize democracy all over the world, 
even as they wage their genocidal, illegal aggressive war 
against the people from Ukraine.
    How are we going to prevent the liberal democracies from 
being overrun by propaganda, disinformation, and violent 
incitement? We will listen to Anika Collier Navaroli because 
she has something important to say. She poses a problem that 
would be worthy of a serious congressional hearing, and we 
should have one. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. I want to thank 
again the witnesses for appearing here today. Today's witnesses 
are former Twitter employees, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's former 
General Counsel; James Baker, Twitter's former Deputy General 
Counsel; Yoel Roth, Twitter's former Head of Trust and Safety; 
and Anika Collier Navaroli, a former member of Twitter's U.S. 
Safety Policy Team.
    I want to remind everyone, you all are appearing under 
subpoena by your own request. Pursuant to Committee Rule 9(g), 
the witnesses will please stand and raise their right hands.
    Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you are 
about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but 
the truth, so help you God?
    [A chorus of ayes.]
    Chairman Comer. Let the record show that the witnesses all 
answered in the affirmative.
    We will begin the five-minute question portion of our 
hearing today. We will start with the opening statements, then 
we will go to the questions. So, each witness will get a five-
minute opening statement, and we will begin with you, Mr. 
Baker.

   STATEMENT OF JAMES BAKER, FORMER DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL, 
                            TWITTER

    Mr. Baker. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, Ranking 
Member Raskin, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the 
opportunity to appear before you today. I hope that we will 
have a useful conversation about matters that are of great 
importance to the Nation and the world.
    My main goals for this statement are simply to attempt to 
set the record straight with respect to certain false 
assertions that have been made about me in the public arena and 
to offer a suggestion with respect to potential legislation in 
the area of social media regulation. As the Committee is aware, 
however, based on the advice of counsel, I believe in good 
faith that I am constrained today by my legal and ethical 
obligations as a former lawyer for Twitter, as well as by 
certain non-disclosure agreements. Within those constraints, 
however, I will endeavor to respond to the Committee's 
questions as fully as I possibly can, and I believe I can make 
the following statements.
    First, I was not aware of and certainly did not engage in 
any conspiracy or other effort to do anything unethical, 
improper, or unlawful while I was at Twitter. Period. I did not 
act unlawfully or otherwise inappropriately in any manner with 
respect to Hunter Biden's laptop. Indeed, documents that 
Twitter has disclosed publicly reflect that I urged caution 
with respect to the matter and noted that we needed more 
information to fully assess what was going on and to decide 
what to do, hardly a surprising piece of advice from a 
corporate lawyer.
    Moreover, I am aware of no unlawful collusion with or 
direction from any government agency or political campaign on 
how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop 
situation. Even though many disagree with how Twitter handled 
the Hunter Biden matter, I believe that the public record 
reveals that my client acted in a manner that was fully 
consistent with the First Amendment. I think that the best 
reading of the law is that as a private entity, the First 
Amendment protects Twitter and its content moderation 
decisions. And I do not believe that the facts in the public 
record indicate that Twitter became a state actor as that 
concept is defined under existing precedent, such that the 
First Amendment would have constrained it.
    Second, I believe that at all times, I executed my duties 
and responsibilities to my client, Twitter, lawfully and 
ethically. At no time was I an agent or operative of the 
government or any political actor when I worked at Twitter. To 
the contrary, I believe that I worked zealously and diligently 
within the bounds of the law in pursuit of my client's best 
interests. Third, I did not destroy or improperly suppress any 
documents at Twitter regarding information important to the 
public dialog. At all times I sought to help my client 
understand and comply with its legal obligations. It is worth 
noting that the public record indicates that after I left the 
company, attorneys or other unidentified third parties 
collected and/or reviewed the contents of at least some of the 
Twitter Files prior to their release.
    Fourth, Twitter disclosed publicly emails between me and 
Yoel Roth regarding one of Donald Trump's tweets about COVID. I 
do not have access to my Twitter email, so I do not know if or 
how I responded to Mr. Roth. To the best of my recollection, I 
do not recall directing or urging him to take action with 
respect to Mr. Trump's tweet. Instead, what I recall is that I 
asked him a question so that I could better understand how he 
and others were implementing Twitter's COVID misinformation 
policy. Asking questions and learning more about what a 
client's activities are is what I think good lawyers should do, 
and again, hardly surprising.
    Fifth, the Twitter Files referenced prior investigations of 
me. It is true that the Department of Justice investigated 
certain aspects of my conduct while I was employed by the FBI 
related to the handling of certain information. Because I 
believe in the accountability for government officials, I 
cooperated with the Department, including sitting for lengthy 
interviews. Eventually the Department closed the matter. No 
adverse action was taken with respect to me, and my security 
clearances while a government employee were never restricted 
because of the matter.
    In closing, Mr. Chairman, I want to return briefly to the 
general topic of government interaction with social media 
companies. The law permits the government to have complex, 
multifaceted, and long-term relationships with the private 
sector. Law enforcement agencies and companies can engage with 
each other regarding, for example, compulsory legal process 
served on companies; criminal activity that companies, the 
government, or the public identify, such as crimes against 
children, cybersecurity threats, and terrorism; and instances 
where companies themselves are victims of crime. When done 
properly, these interactions can be beneficial to both sides 
and in the interest of the public.
    As you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Jordan, and others have proposed, 
a potential workable way to legislate in this area may be to 
focus on the actions of Federal Government agencies and 
officials with respect to their engagement with the private 
sector. Congress may be able to limit the nature and scope of 
those interactions in certain ways, require enhanced 
transparency and reporting by the executive branch about its 
engagements, and require higher-level approvals within the 
executive branch prior to such engagements on certain topics so 
that you can hold Senate-confirmed officials, for example, 
accountable for those decisions. In any event, if you want to 
legislate, my recommendation is to focus first on reasonable 
and effective limitations on government actors. Thank you, Mr. 
Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you, Mr. Baker. Ms. Gadde?

 STATEMENT OF VIJAYA GADDE, FORMER CHIEF LEGAL OFFICER, TWITTER

    Ms. Gadde. Chairman Comer, Ranking Member Raskin, and 
Members of the Committee, thank you for this opportunity to 
provide this opening statement.
    After a decade as a corporate lawyer, I joined Twitter in 
2011 as the first member of the corporate legal team. In 2013, 
I was promoted to general counsel. In 2018, I became the chief 
legal officer and continued in that role until October 2022. 
During my time at Twitter, I had many distinct teams reporting 
to me, including legal, trust and safety, public policy, 
corporate security, and compliance.
    I was drawn to work at Twitter because I was inspired by 
how people were able to use the platform and awed by its 
potential. Twitter enabled anyone to hear directly from any 
individual instantly. People from around the world were coming 
together on Twitter for an open and free exchange of ideas. The 
work was challenging and fulfilling. After Jack Dorsey returned 
to CEO in 2015, one of his top priorities became what we called 
the health of the public conversation. This was based on 
customer research, advertiser feedback, Twitter's declining 
revenue, user growth, and stock price. Teams across Twitter 
were focused on making the platform safer, better, and more 
profitable. As an executive of the company, I also was 
responsible for helping to achieve the corporate goals set by 
Mr. Dorsey, and I was accountable to him, the board of 
directors, and ultimately Twitter's public stockholders.
    As we prioritized the health of the public conversation, we 
did not lose sight of what Twitter was for most people: a place 
to talk about their favorite things, topics that animated the 
platform ranged from K-pop, to the World Cup, to video games 
and movies. We needed to ensure that differences of opinion 
would not cross the line, for example, into sending death 
threats to soccer players who missed important goals, 
distributing non-consensual intimate photos, or cyber bullying 
so vicious that it could compromise a teenager's mental health. 
Twitter's platform rules covered a wide range of conduct and 
changed over time based on new behaviors and harms on the 
platform and feedback from customers, regulators, governments, 
advertisers, researchers, and others. This feedback led to a 
principles-based approach, which we applied to an array of 
difficult, yet equally complicated, situations around the 
world. These rules were also benchmarked against industry 
standards. We all knew how difficult it would be to design, 
much less apply, one set of global rules for hundreds of 
millions of accounts that shared billions of tweets a week.
    While I was at Twitter, the company never lost sight of its 
deep commitment to promoting and defending free expression 
around the world. For example, to protect human rights 
defenders, we fought for the right of people to use pseudonyms 
on the platform. We litigated in courts around the world to 
protect the rights of people to express their opinions, often 
defending them against their own governments who were acting 
unlawfully or violating international human rights. And we took 
extra precautions to ensure we scrutinized or challenged and 
never just acquiesced to government legal demands.
    Defending free expression and maintaining the health of the 
platform required difficult judgment calls. Most applications 
of Twitter's rules were fact-intensive, subject to internal 
debate, and needed to be made very quickly. We recognized that 
after applying our rules, we might learn that some of them did 
not work as we imagined and that we would have to update them. 
We always remained open to new information from our customers 
and critics regarding our policies and enforcement. At times, 
we also reversed course.
    For example, on October 14, 2020, the New York Post tweeted 
articles about Hunter Biden's laptop with embedded images that 
looked like they may have been obtained through hacking. In 
2018, we had developed a policy intended to prevent Twitter 
from becoming a dumping ground for hacked materials. We applied 
this policy to the New York Post's tweets and blocked links to 
articles embedding those source materials. At no point did 
Twitter otherwise prevent tweeting, reporting, discussing, or 
describing the contents of Mr. Biden's laptop. People could and 
did talk about the contents of the laptop on Twitter or 
anywhere else, including other much larger platforms, but they 
were prevented from sharing the primary documents on Twitter. 
Still, over the course of that day, it became clear that 
Twitter had not fully appreciated the impact of that policy on 
free press and others. As Mr. Dorsey testified before Congress 
on multiple occasions, Twitter changed its policy within 24 
hours and admitted its initial action was wrong. This policy 
revision immediately allowed people to tweet the original 
articles with the embedded source materials.
    Relying on its longstanding practice not to retroactively 
apply new policies, Twitter informed the New York Post that it 
could immediately begin tweeting when it deleted the original 
tweets, which would have freed them to retweet the same content 
again. The New York Post chose not to delete its original 
tweets, so Twitter made an exception after two weeks to 
retroactively apply the new policy to the Post's tweets. In 
hindsight, Twitter should have reinstated the Post's account 
immediately.
    There is no easy way to run a global communications 
platform that satisfies business and revenue goals, individual 
customer expectations, local laws, and cultural norms, and get 
it right every time. Still, while I was at Twitter, we worked 
hard every day to make Twitter a healthy platform, and 
ultimately, a healthy business.
    Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your 
questions.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you very much. Mr. Roth?

 STATEMENT OF YOEL ROTH, FORMER GLOBAL HEAD OF TRUST & SAFETY, 
                            TWITTER

    Mr. Roth. Thank you, Chairman Comer, Ranking Member Raskin, 
and Members of the Committee, for the opportunity to speak with 
you here today.
    In nearly eight years at Twitter, I worked in and led a 
division called Trust and Safety. Trust and Safety's core duty 
is content moderation, removing tweets that violate Twitter's 
terms of service and suspending users who repeatedly break the 
rules. This work is sometimes dismissed merely as censorship, 
but it represents a key way that Twitter and other companies 
live up to their responsibility to keep the users of their 
products safe.
    Much of this work is uncontroversial, for example, taking 
down accounts that engage in child sexual exploitation or 
promote terrorism. The gray area of this work, though, is when 
Trust and Safety teams have to make decisions about so-called 
``lawful, but awful material,'' content that may be legal in 
many jurisdictions, but isn't something most people would want 
to experience. Think of things like posting someone else's home 
address without their permission or bullying somebody for a 
disability or for how they look. A free speech absolutist might 
say, yes, that kind of content is unpleasant, but it is not 
against the law. What right do you have to remove it? The 
answer is, the need to make Twitter an appealing product for 
millions of people.
    Consistently in its own research, Twitter found that users 
were unhappy with the company's approach to content moderation, 
and that this dissatisfaction drove people away from the 
service. This has consequences for what we mean by free speech 
on social media. Again and again, we saw the speech of a small 
number of abusive users drive away countless others. 
Unrestricted free speech paradoxically results in less speech, 
not more, and it was our job in Trust and Safety to try to 
strike an appropriate balance. But the importance of this work 
goes far beyond Twitter's business prospects and into the realm 
of national security.
    In 2017, I led the team at Twitter that uncovered 
significant interference in an American election by agents of 
the Russian Government. Their mission was to stoke culture war 
issues on social media to try to further divide Americans. My 
team and I exposed hundreds of thousands of these accounts from 
Russia, but also from Iran, China, and beyond. It is a concern 
with these foreign interference campaigns that informed 
Twitter's approach to the Hunter Biden laptop story.
    In 2020, Twitter noticed activity related to the laptop 
that at first glance bore a lot of similarities to the 2016 
Russian hacking leak operation targeting the DNC, and we have 
to decide what to do, and in that moment with limited 
information, Twitter made a mistake. Under the distribution of 
hacked material policy, the company decided to prevent links to 
the New York Post stories about the laptop from being shared 
across the service. I have been clear that in my judgment at 
the time, Twitter should not have taken action to block the New 
York Post's reporting.
    In just 24 hours after doing so, the company acknowledged 
its error, but the decisions here aren't straightforward, and 
hindsight is 20/20. It isn't obvious what the right response is 
to a suspected, but not confirmed, cyberattack by another 
government on a Presidential election. I believe Twitter erred 
in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes 
of 2016. And so, the basic job of trust and safety is to try to 
strike this balance between the harms of restricting too much 
speech and the dangers of doing too little. I will be the first 
to admit that we didn't always get it right. Even rare mistakes 
add up when you are carrying out content moderation at the 
scale of hundreds of millions of unique posts per day.
    While I was head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, I strove 
to do this work with impartiality and with a commitment to the 
fair enforcement of Twitter's written rules. But whether it is 
me, or Elon Musk, or someone else in the future, someone will 
have to make choices about the governance of online spaces. 
Those decisions should not be made behind closed doors or based 
on personal whims.
    I hope that we can work together to find ways to bring 
greater trust and transparency to social media, and I look 
forward to answering the Committee's questions about any of 
these topics to the best of my ability.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you. Ms. Navaroli?

 STATEMENT OF ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI, A FORMER MEMBER OF U.S. 
                  SAFETY POLICY TEAM, TWITTER

    Ms. Navaroli. Good morning, Chairman Comer, Ranking Member 
Raskin, and Members of the Committee. Thank you so much for the 
opportunity to speak with you all today. I am here because 
there is an urgent need for us to understand the impact that 
social media companies are having on our democracy.
    I will be very clear. I was not involved in the decision 
around Hunter Biden's laptop, but I was involved in decisions 
that were made leading up to, during, and after the January 6 
attack on the Capitol. If we are going to talk about social 
media and the government, we need to talk about Twitter's 
failure to act before January 6. I am here to tell you that 
doing nothing is not an option. If we continue to do nothing, 
violence is going to happen again.
    My background is as a trained lawyer and journalist, and my 
expertise over the past decade has been in the areas of media, 
technology, law, and policy with a particular focus on social 
media and free expression. I joined Twitter in 2019, and by 
2020, I was the most senior expert on Twitter's U.S. Safety 
Policy Team. My team's mission was to protect free speech and 
public safety by writing and enforcing content moderation 
policies around the world. These policies included things like 
abuse, harassment, hate speech, violence, and privacy. So, if 
no other algorithm or no other human could decide if a tweet 
violated my team's policies, the Safety Team policy acted as 
the final moderators. If a high-profile individual, like any 
Member of this Committee or President Trump, tweeted something 
controversial, it was sent to my team's desk. Every day, we had 
to decide whether a particular piece of content equated to 
yelling ``fire'' in a crowded theater.
    My work at Twitter and subsequently at Twitch put me in the 
middle of key events in history. What I have learned from them 
is that social media played and continues to play a role in 
these events, and two years after January 6, we still need to 
better understand the role that Twitter played in order to 
prevent it from happening again. So, what do we need to 
understand? First, Twitter's leadership bent and broke their 
own rules in order to protect some of the most dangerous speech 
on the platform. I am going to talk a little bit about what 
happened in the months leading up to January 6.
    During this time, my team worked to try to minimize the 
threat of violence that we saw coming. After President Trump 
instructed the Proud Boys to ``stand back and stand by'' in a 
debate, we considered the danger that that statement would have 
if it was tweeted. So, we crafted what we called a coded 
incitement to violence policy to address dog whistles like 
this. Instead of approving it, management bent over backward to 
find ways to not approve it. On January 5, when the policy was 
still not approved, I led a meeting where one of my colleagues 
asked management whether someone was going to have to get shot 
before we were allowed to take down tweets. Another colleague 
looked up live tweets and read them to management to try to 
convince them of the seriousness of the issue. Still, no action 
was taken. On the morning of January 6, I sent Twitter lawyers 
a message warning them that our team was hamstrung by 
leadership. Two days later when it looked like it was going to 
happen all over again, I asked management whether they wanted 
more blood on their hands. Only then did they act.
    The second problem is that there is way too much power 
concentrated in the hands of too few. With January 6 and many 
other decisions, content moderators like me did the very best 
that we could, but far too often there are far too few of us, 
and we are being asked to do the impossible. For example, in 
January 2020, after the U.S. assassinated an Iranian General 
and the U.S. President decided to justify it on Twitter, 
management literally instructed me and my team to make sure 
that World War III did not start on the platform. No person, 
people, or company should have that kind of unchecked power or 
that kind of responsibility. The modern day public conversation 
should not be susceptible to the whims of any one individual or 
any one company.
    Fixing the systemic issues that lead to bad decisions is 
not going to be easy, but people like me who have been in the 
trenches can help lead the way, but I must say coming forward 
and offering this information is risky, and it is difficult. 
Doxing and harassment are real, and people are afraid to tell 
what they know, so we need to make sure that there are 
protections for those who speak the truth. We need to create 
space to hear from people on the front lines. We need to give 
them protection so they can share their experiences. Only then 
can we begin to understand the full scope of the problem and to 
find solutions. There is far too much at stake for us to do 
nothing. Thank you.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you all. Excellent opening 
statements. Now we will begin with the question portion. We 
will begin by recognizing Mr. Biggs for five minutes.
    Mr. Biggs. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Roth, within just 
mere minutes or hours after the New York Post published its 
story on the Hunter Biden laptop, at 8:51 a.m., you sent a 
message to a team, part of your team, I assume. And you said, 
``It isn't clearly violative of our hack materials policy,'' 
referring to the story, ``nor is it clearly in violation of 
anything else''. Do you remember sending that message?
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question, Congressman. I don't 
recall that message specifically, but that does sound like my 
judgment on that day, yes.
    Mr. Biggs. OK. So, that was early on in the day, and yet, 
shortly thereafter, Kayleigh McEnany, White House Press 
Secretary, her account was locked. So, an inquiry was made the 
next day by a person named Carolyn Strom. Do you know Carolyn 
Strom?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, sir, I do.
    Mr. Biggs. Yes. Carolyn Strom asked what is going on here, 
and somebody named Elaine Onsotto said, ``The user was bounced 
by Site Integrity for violating our hacked materials policy.'' 
Do you remember that incident?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, sir, I do.
    Mr. Biggs. And somebody named Trenton Kennedy said, ``I am 
struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as 
unsafe, and I think the best explainability argument''--now 
that may be a technical term for you, but for me, it looks like 
`we are trying to create a narrative here to cover our butt'--
``the best explainability argument for this, externally, will 
be that we are waiting to understand that this story is the 
result of hacked materials.'' Do you remember Mr. Kennedy's 
communication?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, I do.
    Mr. Biggs. Yes. And so, then we get into a whole series of 
things written by Mr. Baker going back and forth, and he says 
on that same day, now at 9:26, which is about a half an hour 
after your statement that you don't think that anything has 
been violated here, he says, ``I have seen some reliable 
cybersecurity folks question the authenticity of the emails in 
another way.'' But by the way, that is almost inconceivable. I 
mean, it just seems inconceivable that that would have happened 
so quickly that he would have that.
    And then you send out something right after that that said: 
``The key factor in forming our approach is consensus from 
experts monitoring election security and disinformation, that 
this looks a lot like a hack-and-leak that learned from the 
2016 WikiLeaks approach.'' I am wondering if you can name for 
me today any of the experts that seemed to have a consensus at 
10:12 a.m. on the morning of October 14 that you put out saying 
that we are going to rely on some group of experts. Who were 
they?
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question. Twitter did not give 
me access to any of my documents or emails to prepare for this 
hearing, and so, unfortunately, I can't give you a direct 
answer.
    Mr. Biggs. Mr. Roth, were there experts? Were there people 
that you consulted that were cybersecurity experts between 9 
a.m. and 10:15 a.m. on that day?
    Mr. Roth. My recollection is that we were following 
discussions about this incident as they unfolded on Twitter, so 
cybersecurity experts were tweeting about this incident and 
sharing their perspectives, and that informed some of Twitter's 
judgment here. But I want to emphasize, as I said in my 
statement, I didn't think that the evidence or those 
perspectives warranted removal, and I advocated against taking 
that action.
    Mr. Biggs. I understand. Let's look at one other document. 
``Our teams made the determination that the materials fall 
under our hacked materials policy.'' It is my understanding 
from reports and internal sources that normally a hacked 
material policy would require a government official or law 
enforcement determination that there has actually been a hacked 
account before that hack policy were to be in placed or 
imposed.'' Is that accurate?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir, it is not.
    Mr. Biggs. So, the policy did not require that there be any 
kind of official finding by a government source?
    Mr. Roth. No. There were a number of different types of 
evidence that we considered under the policy. Certainly, 
government attribution would be a powerful one, but we also 
look----
    Mr. Biggs. So, that wasn't determinative is what you are 
saying?
    Mr. Roth. In that instance, we did not have any specific 
information from any government source, no.
    Mr. Biggs. OK. I am going to read something that applies to 
this and several other things. From the Twitter stack that you 
guys had, ``This might be an unpopular opinion, but one-off ad 
hoc decisions like this that don't appear rooted in policy are, 
in my humble opinion, a slippery slope and reflect an 
alternatively equally dictatorial problem.'' Quite frankly, 
that is what the essence of all four of your testimony--I 
realize you are trying to fight against it--but you exercised. 
You exercised an amazing amount of clout and power over the 
entire American electorate by even holding them hostage for 24 
hours, reversing your policy, and then hold it, and then they 
are like, well, we want to go back to the originals. That is 24 
hours or two weeks, that you imposed your will on the American 
electorate. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman's time has expired with 30 
seconds over. I will give the Ranking Member an extra 30 
seconds.
    Mr. Raskin. You are very fair minded, Mr. Chairman. Mr. 
Roth, let me start with you. Did I hear you correctly to say 
that there were thousands or even hundreds of thousands of 
counterfeit Twitter accounts set up by Russian propaganda and 
disinformation for Vladimir Putin to pump his poison into the 
bloodstream of American social media? Is that right?
    Mr. Roth. That is right, sir, and that is not just past 
tense. Those accounts are active on social media today. This is 
an ongoing campaign.
    Mr. Raskin. Well, we should have a hearing about that. I 
appreciate your alerting to us what has taken place. Ms. 
Navaroli, you have testified that in the months leading up to 
the November 2020 election and then in the weeks before January 
6, you were growing increasingly anxious about the violent 
rhetoric and incitement that you saw posted on Twitter. Can you 
describe specifically what made you so concerned during that 
period, and did you raise your concerns with people at Twitter?
    Ms. Navaroli. Thank you for that question. As I said in my 
opening statement, after former President Trump and his debate 
said the statement, ``stand back, stand by,'' to the Proud 
Boys, my team, in discussion with other teams at Twitter, 
realized that we had a gap in our policies and that that could 
not be said on the platform because it would have gone too far. 
What we did see continue to happen was those statements, in 
addition to other coded incitement to violence, or dog 
whistles, begin to spring up on the platform, and so, what was 
once fringe ideology or fringe statements that were calling for 
the overthrow of the government became a loud roar. And so, we 
heard individuals beginning to say that they were locked and 
loaded, that they were ready for Civil War part two, that they 
were ready for another revolution, that they were ready for the 
day of the rope in very clear English on Twitter.
    Mr. Raskin. And on the January 6th Committee, we have tens 
of thousands of statements like that being made on Twitter and 
other parts of social media, so we got a little taste of what 
you were experiencing on a daily basis. Now there was this 
meeting on January 5 at Twitter. I don't think it was called 
specifically to look at what was going to happen the next day. 
That just happened to be a regular meeting. But at that 
meeting, you and other employees raised urgently the problem of 
what you saw coming on January 6. How did Twitter management 
respond to the concerns that you raised?
    Ms. Navaroli. That is a great question, and, yes, that 
meeting was a regularly scheduled meeting. Within the meeting, 
I believe I have referred to it in my testimony to the January 
6th Committee as I was at my wit's end. I had argued, I had 
asked questions, I had asked for clarification. We had found 
dangerous tweets within the meeting, and yet the individual who 
was the most senior leader within the team in that meeting told 
us that we were not allowed to take that content down and that 
we were not allowed to use the coded incitement to violence 
policy. The reason that she gave us mirrored what we had been 
told by the former head of Trust and Safety, Del Harvey, that 
individuals might be saying things like ``locked and loaded'' 
or ``stand back and stand by'' in ways of self-protection. That 
was not what we were seeing on the platform.
    Mr. Raskin. So, when you were seeing things like ``locked 
and loaded,'' and ``Civil War part two,'' and ``race war,'' and 
so on, were you wanting your superiors at Twitter to know that 
you thought there was going to be real violence, that this was 
not hyperbole that was being spoken at that point?
    Ms. Navaroli. Absolutely. I specifically told Del Harvey 
herself that someone was going to get shot, as I testified to 
the January 6th Committee.
    Mr. Raskin. You stated that Donald Trump described his own 
tweets as little missiles. Why did that stick in your mind?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes, the quote that you are referring to, I 
don't remember exactly what news article that it was in, but it 
was a news article that I had read in which the former 
President said that he likes to send out his tweets like little 
missiles. To me, that sounded exactly like weaponization of a 
platform, in his own words, and yet Twitter was not concerned.
    Mr. Raskin. All right. Well, again, this bears a complete 
hearing on its own. This is a real issue, unlike something that 
happened a couple years ago for 24 hours that has already 
disappeared in the sands of time, but this is facing us today. 
As you say, those right-wing violent forces are still out 
there, and the social media can still be used as a channel for 
incitement to violent action against state legislatures, school 
boards, the Capitol of the United States, Congress, and so on. 
How do we prevent this from happening in the future, and do you 
think that Twitter is dealing with this problem effectively 
now?
    Ms. Navaroli. As I said in my opening statement, we have to 
do something. There is too much at stake for us to continue to 
do nothing, and this question of how do we prevent it is a big 
one. Unfortunately, I do not believe that we are at a place 
that we can come to solutions because we do not know how these 
companies work. We must continue to hear from individuals like 
myself. We must have a seat at the table to be able to share 
our experiences because our experiences and the ways that we 
have succeeded, the ways that we have failed, hold the key to 
our futures and the key to our democracies.
    Mr. Raskin. All right. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would 
just say I was skeptical about revisiting the whole New York 
Post thing where there have already been congressional hearings 
and they have already apologized for their little lapse, but 
this is a serious issue. And so, I am glad we at least have the 
opportunity to begin to talk about it in public, and I yield 
back to you. Thank you.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. I will recognize 
myself now for questioning.
    The Biden family investigation begins with the story of how 
Big Tech, the media, former intelligence agents, and Biden 
himself suppressed the story of Hunter Biden's laptop weeks 
before the 2020 election. Today we are hearing from Twitter 
executives who buried the New York Post laptop story claiming 
it violated the platform's hacked materials policy. In reality, 
the Twitter executives were hostile toward conservatives and 
biased toward anyone who oppose their points of view. For 
example, Mr. Roth, did you write this tweet?
    Mr. Roth. I regret the language that I used in some of my 
former tweets, but, yes, I did post that.
    Chairman Comer. And I will read the tweet so it is in the 
record. ``Yes, that person in the pink hat is clearly a bigger 
threat to your brand of feminism than actual Nazis in the White 
House.'' Mr. Roth, do you think all conservatives are Nazis?
    Mr. Roth. Certainly not, sir.
    Chairman Comer. What about the hundreds of people that 
worked in the Trump Administration?
    Mr. Roth. Certainly not.
    Chairman Comer. Did Ms. Gadde or any other lawyer at 
Twitter ever tell you to take down that tweet?
    Mr. Roth. No. Twitter did not have a practice of 
restricting employees sharing their personal viewpoints on the 
service.
    Chairman Comer. Turning back to the laptop, Ms. Gadde, are 
you aware of that Hunter Biden's lawyers, as recently as last 
week, wrote the Department of Justice about Hunter Biden's 
laptop?
    Ms. Gadde. I have seen some articles about that.
    Chairman Comer. Yes, they did, and it appears that Hunter 
Biden's attorney is admitting that the laptop and emails on it 
are authentic. Ms. Gadde, on October 14, 2020, did Hunter Biden 
report to Twitter that he was the victim of a hack?
    Ms. Gadde. No, I don't believe he did.
    Chairman Comer. Ms. Gadde, when the New York Post initially 
broke the story about the laptop, did you call Hunter Biden's 
lawyer to ask if it was authentic?
    Ms. Gadde. No, I did not.
    Chairman Comer. Isn't it correct that the Biden campaign 
had contact with Twitter in the run-up to the 2020 election?
    Ms. Gadde. Not to my knowledge.
    Chairman Comer. And you are telling this Committee that you 
didn't ask any Biden representative if the laptop was real or 
for Hunter Biden's attorney's phone number to confirm its 
authenticity?
    Ms. Gadde. We did not speak to anybody related to that.
    Chairman Comer. Mr. Baker, are you aware that the FBI had 
Hunter Biden's laptop since December 2019?
    Mr. Baker. I am sorry. Am I aware of that now?
    Chairman Comer. Well, were you aware then?
    Mr. Baker. Then? No, I don't believe sir. To the best of my 
recollection, I don't think that I was aware.
    Chairman Comer. But you are aware now.
    Mr. Baker. I have heard that now, yes.
    Chairman Comer. Mr. Baker, did you call any of your 
contacts at the FBI to ask whether or not they knew if the 
material had been hacked?
    Mr. Baker. I don't recall contacting them about that on 
that day.
    Chairman Comer. Mr. Roth, Ms. Gadde, and Mr. Baker, it 
appears to me that you failed at your jobs. You were entrusted 
with the highest level of power at Twitter, but when you were 
faced with the New York Post story, instead of allowing people 
to judge the information for themselves, you rushed to find a 
reason why the American people shouldn't see it. In a matter of 
hours, you are deciding on the truth of a story that spans 
years and dozens of complex international transactions. You did 
this because you were terrified of Joe Biden not winning the 
election in 2020. That is what it appeared. I can assure you, 
this Committee will succeed in holding the Bidens accountable. 
So much of the evidence of wrongdoing from this family is 
located in that hard drive that you all led the American people 
to believe was Russian disinformation when, in fact, it was 
not.
    Now I agree with Mr. Baker's opening statement. The concern 
for me is the level of involvement the FBI had with not just 
Twitter, but all of our social media platform companies. And I 
think it kind of goes in the opposite direction whereby my 
friend, the Ranking Member, was trying to take this in his 
opening statement. This is something this Committee should be 
concerned about. The government doesn't have any role in 
suppressing speech, and that is something the media should be 
very concerned about. What if there is a conservative president 
that somehow cleans out our FBI and they put in conservatives 
to suppress liberal speech? That is something that should never 
happen. So, I look forward to more questions, and at this time, 
I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.
    Mr. Jordan. I thank the Chair for yielding. Mr. Baker, you 
said you didn't talk with the FBI that day. Did you talk to the 
FBI about the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to then or after 
that day?
    Mr. Baker. I am trying to make sure I can answer this 
question consistent with the restrictions that I talked about 
in my opening question.
    Mr. Jordan. Simple question. Did you talk to the FBI about 
the Hunter Biden story?
    Mr. Baker. To the best of my recollection, I did not talk 
to the FBI about the Hunter Biden story before that day.
    Mr. Jordan. Did you talk to them after?
    Mr. Baker. I don't recall.
    Mr. Jordan. Your response is real specific to the chairman. 
You said, I did not talk to the FBI about the Hunter Biden 
laptop story that day. I assume that day is October 14. I don't 
know if you talked to them on the 13th or before or if you 
talked to them on the 15th and after.
    Mr. Baker. Sitting here today, I don't recall speaking to 
the FBI at all about the Hunter Biden matter.
    Mr. Jordan. But why did you answer the way you did?
    Mr. Baker. I beg your pardon?
    Mr. Jordan. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Ms. Norton for five 
minutes.
    Ms. Norton. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Like Benghazi before, 
Republicans are on a taxpayer-funded expedition to attack their 
political rivals, and they are feeding the flames of conspiracy 
in the process. With the release of this so-called Twitter 
Files, Donald Trump has seized the moment to further his own 
conspiracies about the 2020 election, writing in December, ``Do 
you throw the Presidential election results of 2020 out and 
declare the rightful winner or do you have a new election? A 
massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the 
termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, and even 
those found in the Constitution.''
    Now it bears repeating that this is the same man who 
incited an insurrection on January 6, and just last week, 
reposted a message on Truth Social that suggested his 
supporters will, and I am quoting it now, ``Physically fight 
for him this time,'' and added, ``They got my six and we are 
loaded, and I mean, loaded.''
    This is a question for Ms. Navaroli. What did the phrase 
``locked and loaded'' mean to you while you were at Twitter 
prior to January 6?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes, thank you for that question. The way 
that I read ``locked and loaded,'' to be interpreted by the 
tweets that I saw coming on Twitter prior to January 6, was 
that individuals were loaded or were armed, excuse me, and that 
they were ready to commit violence.
    Ms. Norton. Are you concerned that the use of this language 
will continue to incite and legitimize political violence 
leading to the next election?
    Ms. Navaroli. Absolutely. We are sitting exactly one month 
in which the exact same playbook was played in Brazil, and we 
saw almost deja vu happening again. As I said in my opening 
statement, unless we do something, this will continue to happen 
again.
    Ms. Norton. Thank you, Ms. Navaroli. Mr. Roth, you are no 
stranger to the conspiracies and their real-world consequences. 
If you don't mind, can you please describe for the Committee 
how the release of the so-called Twitter Files has affected 
your personal safety?
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question, Congresswoman. The 
Twitter Files, I would note first and foremost, didn't just 
affect me, but affected much more junior employees at Twitter. 
Employees as far away as Manila in the Philippines were doxed, 
had their families threatened, and experienced harm equal to or 
greater than what I have experienced. But concurrent with the 
Twitter Files, Elon Musk also made the decision to share a 
defamatory allegation that I support or condone pedophilia. And 
this lie led directly to a wave of homophobic and antisemitic 
threats and harassment against me, of which Twitter has removed 
vanishingly little. And following the Daily Mail's decision to 
publish where I live, ultimately, I had to leave my home and 
sell it. Those are the consequences for this type of online 
harassment and speech.
    Ms. Norton. I must say those are very real consequences. By 
legitimizing unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the deep 
state, Big Tech, and government censorship for political gain, 
Committee Republicans are holding a match to a powder keg. We 
all saw the consequences of this kind of rhetoric on January 6, 
and we continue to see it play out as political violence and 
hate crimes grip communities around the country, and I yield 
back, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. The gentlelady yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Ms. Mace, for five minutes.
    Ms. Mace. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Twitter Files were 
not just about Hunter Biden's laptop. The Twitter Files make it 
apparent Twitter worked overtime to suppress accurate COVID 
information.
    Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at 
Stanford, who once tweeted an article he wrote about natural 
immunity. Thanks to Elon Musk's release of the Twitter Files, 
we learned some of his tweets were tagged with the label of 
``Trends Blacklist.'' Apparently, the views of a Stanford 
doctor are disinformation to you people. I, along with many 
Americans, have long-term effects from COVID. Not only was I a 
long hauler, but I have effects from the vaccine. It wasn't the 
first shot, but it was the second shot that I now developed 
asthma that has never gone away since I had the second shot. I 
have tremors in my left hand, and I have the occasional heart 
pain that no doctor can explain, and I have had a battery of 
tests.
    I find it extremely alarming Twitter's unfettered 
censorship spread into medical fields and affected millions of 
Americans by suppressing expert opinions from doctors and 
censoring those who disagree with the CDC. I have great regrets 
about getting the shot because of the health issues that I now 
have that I don't think are ever going to go away, and I know 
that I am not the only American who has those kinds of 
concerns.
    Another example of what Twitter has done to censor folks is 
from Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard-educated epidemiologist, 
who once tweeted, ``COVID vaccines are important for high-risk 
people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection 
do not need it, nor children.'' The Twitter Files reveal this 
tweet was deemed false information because it ran contrary to 
the CDC.
    So, my first question this morning of Ms. Gadde, may I ask 
of you, where did you go to medical school?
    Ms. Gadde. I did not go to medical school.
    Ms. Mace. I am sorry?
    Ms. Gadde. I did not go to medical school.
    Ms. Mace. That is what I thought. Why do you think you or 
anyone else at Twitter had the medical expertise to censor a 
doctor's expert opinion?
    Ms. Gadde. Our policies regarding COVID were designed to 
protect individuals. We were seeing----
    Ms. Mace. You guys censored Harvard-educated doctors, 
Stanford-educated doctors, doctors that are educated in the 
best places in the world and you silenced those voices. Excuse 
me. I have another chart I want to show you, Ms. Gadde.
    [Chart]
    Ms. Mace. I have another tweet by someone with a following 
of a full 18,000 followers. This person put a chart from the 
CDC on Twitter. It is the CDC's own data, so it is accurate by 
your standards, and you all labeled this as misleading. You are 
not a doctor, right, Ms. Gadde?
    Ms. Gadde. No, I am not.
    Ms. Mace. OK. What makes you think you or anyone else at 
Twitter have the medical expertise to censor actual accurate 
CDC data?
    Ms. Gadde. I am not familiar with these particular 
situations.
    Ms. Mace. Yes, I am sure you are not, but this is what 
Twitter did. They labeled this as inaccurate. It is the 
government's own data. It is ridiculous that we are even having 
to have this conversation today. It is not just about the 
laptop. This is about medical advice that expert doctors were 
trying to give Americans because social media companies like 
Twitter were silencing their voices. I have another question, 
my last one for you, Ms. Gadde. Did the U.S. Government ever 
contact you or anyone at Twitter to pressure Twitter to 
moderate or censor certain tweets? ``Yes'' or ``no.''
    Ms. Gadde. We have a program----
    Ms. Mace. Did the U.S. Government ever contact you or 
anyone at Twitter to censor or moderate certain tweets? ``Yes'' 
or ``no.''
    Ms. Gadde. We received legal demands to remove content from 
the platform from the U.S. Government and governments all 
around the world. Those are published on a third party website, 
and anyone can read from it.
    Ms. Mace. Thank God for Matt Taibbi, thank God for Elon 
Musk for allowing to show us in the world that Twitter was 
basically a subsidiary of the FBI, censoring real medical 
voices with real expertise that put real Americans lives in 
danger because they didn't have that information. I also want 
to thank one of my colleagues, Ro Khanna, because as it turns 
out, censorship isn't just an important issue to conservatives. 
Some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, like Ro, 
found this censorship very concerning and even wrote to you and 
to folks at Twitter that he was concerned about the First 
Amendment being censored. So, I want to thank him for speaking 
up and speaking out about this issue because this should not be 
a partisan issue. This should be an issue that is an American 
issue.
    Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the 
record a Wall Street Journal article from December 9, 2022, by 
Justin Hart entitled: ``The Twitter Blacklisting of Jay 
Bhattacharya'' into the record, please, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Ms. Mace. Thank you, and I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Lynch for five 
minutes.
    Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to go over 
the chronology here. Mr. Roth, back in 2016, Russia and 
Vladimir Putin engaged in what bipartisan Senate Intelligence 
Committee investigators called a, ``aggressive, multifaceted 
effort to influence the outcome of that year's Presidential 
election.'' The campaign included hacking of the systems of a 
major political party and leaking illegally obtained 
information, scanning U.S. election systems for 
vulnerabilities, and exploiting the weaknesses of social media 
platforms to spread disinformation to the American people. 
Again, in a 2017 declassified report, the U.S. intelligence 
community assessed that Russia's 2016 election operations 
signaled a ``new normal'' in Russian influence efforts and that 
the Kremlin would ``apply lessons learned going forward against 
the U.S. and its allies.''
    Mr. Roth, in a December interview with journalist Kara 
Swisher, you state that this declassified assessment was, and I 
am quoting you, ``a watershed moment in the history of content 
moderation and the Internet.'' You also stated in that 
interview that Twitter discussed potential threats to the 
integrity of the 2020 elections, and it was, and I am quoting 
you again, ``obvious to think about the most influential thing 
that impacted the 2016 election, which was the hack-and-leak 
campaign organized by the Russian Government. We would have 
been stupid not to think about that risk.'' Mr. Roth, why would 
Twitter have been stupid to ignore that risk?
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question, Congressman. I think 
Twitter and the entire social media industry were, frankly, 
caught with their pants down in 2016 and missed an opportunity 
to do the critical work of protecting election security. This 
isn't my judgment. This is the judgment of academics and 
researchers who have spent years studying Russian active 
measures, and most of their conclusions suggests that the No. 1 
most influential part of the Russian active measures campaign 
in 2016 was the hack-and-leak targeting John Podesta. It would 
have been foolish not to consider the possibility that they 
would run that play again.
    Mr. Lynch. Right. And so, let me ask, was that top of mind 
for Twitter? You are trying to measure the credibility of 
incoming intelligence. Was that top of mind in regard to the 
company's decision to temporarily limit the distribution of the 
October 14 New York Post story that was delivered by Mayor 
Giuliani?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, that was one of the animating concerns for 
us. For nearly two years, we had engaged in scenario planning 
exercises for potential risks tied to the elections, and one of 
them appeared to be happening that day. Now, again, I think the 
facts were complicated. I do believe Twitter made a mistake 
then, but our judgment was colored by the experience of 2016 
and by the very real Russian activities that we saw play out 
that year.
    Mr. Lynch. Mr. Roth, then in the December 2020 sworn 
declaration to the FEC, you said that starting in 2018, you 
had, ``regular meetings with the Office of the Director of 
National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the 
FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.'' Is that 
correct?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, sir, it is.
    Mr. Lynch. OK. You stated that during these meetings, 
``Federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they 
expected hack-and-leak operations by state actors that might 
occur in the period shortly before the 2020 Presidential 
election, likely in October,'' and that there were ``rumors 
that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.'' Is 
that your recollection today?
    Mr. Roth. It is, but I want to clarify that sentence 
slightly.
    Mr. Lynch. Sure.
    Mr. Roth. I think it actually should have been two separate 
sentences. It is true that in meetings between industry and law 
enforcement, law enforcement discussed the possibility of a 
hack-and-leak campaign in the lead-up to the election, and in 
one of those meetings, it was discussed, I believe by another 
company, that there was a possibility that that hack-and-leak 
could relate to Hunter Biden and Burisma. I don't believe that 
perspective was shared by law enforcement. They didn't endorse 
it. They didn't provide that information in that yet.
    Mr. Lynch. OK. Just to fast forward here, and, in fact, in 
March 2021, four months after the election, the U.S. 
intelligence community assessed that Russian President Putin 
authorized a range of government organizations, conducted 
influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden's 
candidacy in the Democratic Party, supporting former President 
Trump, and undermining public confidence in the electoral 
process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S. 
that obviously reared their head on January 6. Mr. Chairman, my 
time has expired, and I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Mr. Jordan for five minutes.
    Mr. Jordan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Roth, did the 
government tell you that the Biden laptop story was fake?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir, they did not.
    Mr. Jordan. Did they tell you it was hacked?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir, they did not.
    Mr. Jordan. On October 14, 2020, Twitter blocks the New 
York Post story on Hunter Biden and suspends their account. The 
night before FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends you an email. 
The email says this: ``Heads up. I will be sending a Teleporter 
link for you to download 10 documents. It is not spam. Please 
confirm receipt when you get it.'' Two minutes later, 6:24 p.m. 
you respond back, ``Received and downloaded. Thanks.'' What 
were those 10 documents?
    Mr. Roth. Twitter didn't give me access to my laptop, but 
Special Agent Chan has said publicly, and the FBI has 
confirmed, that those documents did not relate to Hunter Biden, 
and that is my recollection of that. That is all.
    Mr. Jordan. What did they relate to?
    Mr. Roth. My interactions with Agent Chan and with the FBI 
almost entirely focused on what the FBI called malign foreign 
interference, things like Russian troll farms and Iranian 
involvement in the elections, not on any type of domestic 
activity.
    Mr. Jordan. Any of the information on there classified?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir, I do not hold a security clearance, and 
so I would not have received any classified information.
    Mr. Jordan. Who does hold a security clearance? I just got 
a second email here. I am just curious about this. ``What I 
propose is that 30 days out from the election''--this is 
another email to you from Mr. Chan--``that we get temporary 
clearances. You pick who they are.'' Who were the people at 
Twitter who had a security clearance?
    Mr. Roth. To be honest, sir, I am not sure, and we never 
ultimately followed through on this plan to get temporary 
clearances.
    Mr. Jordan. Did anyone at Twitter have a security 
clearance?
    Mr. Roth. It is my understanding that at least some current 
or former employees did hold clearances, but I wasn't certain 
about that.
    Mr. Jordan. Ms. Gadde, do you know if anyone took up Mr. 
Chan's offer to hand out security clearances 30 days before the 
2020 election?
    Ms. Gadde. Not that I am aware.
    Mr. Jordan. So, we don't know how many people had security 
clearances at Twitter. Do we know? Mr. Baker, Ms. Gadde, anyone 
know how many people at Twitter had a security clearance in 30 
days prior to the election?
    Mr. Baker. I don't know the answer to that question, sir.
    Mr. Jordan. Ms. Gadde?
    Ms. Gadde. I do not know.
    Mr. Jordan. Mr. Roth, you don't know?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir.
    Mr. Jordan. How about the last one? Ms. Navaroli, do you 
know?
    Ms. Navaroli. No.
    Mr. Jordan. I mean, it seemed like the offer was sort of to 
just hand them out like candy. I was just wondering who had 
them?
    [No response.]
    Mr. Jordan. No one knows. OK. So, the FBI didn't tell you 
that it was fake. They didn't tell you that it was hacked. And 
Mr. Roth, did the story violate your policies?
    Mr. Roth. In my judgment at the time, no, it did not.
    Mr. Jordan. Yes, that is what you said. You said, ``It 
isn't clearly a violation of our hack materials policy, nor is 
it clearly a violation of anything else.'' So, I think what a 
lot of people are wondering is, if it didn't violate your 
policies and they didn't tell you it was fake, they didn't tell 
you it was hacked, why did you take it down?
    Mr. Roth. The company made a decision that found that it 
did violate the policy. It wasn't my personal judgment at the 
time that it did, but the decision was communicated to me by my 
direct supervisor, and, ultimately, I didn't disagree with it 
enough to object to the action.
    Mr. Jordan. You know what I think happened, Mr. Roth? I 
think you guys got played. I think you guys wanted to take the 
tweet down. We saw that the Chairman put up where you said, you 
know, everyone in the White House is a fascist. I think you 
guys wanted to be taken down. I think you meet with these guys 
every week. We know that has been established in the Twitter 
Files. You had weekly meetings with Mr. Chan in the run-up to 
the election. They sent you all kinds of emails. They sent you 
documents on the super-secret James Bond teleporter. You get 
information on that. I think you guys wanted to take it down. I 
think you guys got played by the FBI, and that is the scary 
part.
    I mean, this, to me, is the real takeaway. Fifty-one former 
intelligence officials five days after you guys take down the 
Hunter Biden story and blocked the New York Post account. Five 
days later, 51 former intel officials sent a letter and they 
say the Hunter Biden story has all the classic earmarks of a 
Russian information operation. The information operation was 
run on you guys and then, by extension, run on the American 
people, and that is the concern. And to Mr. Raskin's point that 
you guys aren't bound by the First Amendment because you are a 
private company, OK, maybe so, and your terms of service don't 
have to comply with the First Amendment. Would that be right, 
Mr. Roth? They don't have to. You have said that as much in 
your testimony.
    Mr. Roth. My understanding of the First Amendment is that 
it protects people and businesses from government, not informs 
how----
    Mr. Jordan. I understand. So, here is what I want to know. 
Is this a violation of the First Amendment when the government, 
Mr. Chan again, sending you an email saying we think these 
accounts need to be looked at because they violate your terms 
of service? That is a different standard. So, you got the 
government saying your terms of service, which don't have to 
comply with the First Amendment, but the government is saying 
we don't think these accounts comply with your terms of 
service, please take them down. You see a problem there, Mr. 
Roth?
    Mr. Roth. Mr. Chairman, I am seeing a flashing red light. I 
am happy to answer the question. Do I think that that is a 
valuable use of the FBI's time? No, but I don't see in a 
request for review a problem under the First Amendment. No.
    Mr. Jordan. I sure do. I thank the gentleman. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Connolly for five 
minutes.
    Mr. Connolly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My, my, my, what 
happens when you hold a hearing and you can't prove your point. 
We heard from the Chairman in his opening statement that it is 
wrong for government to call Twitter and say take down a tweet. 
Did I hear that correct, Mr. Roth?
    Mr. Roth. That was my understanding, yes.
    Mr. Connolly. Yes. So, on May 27, 2020, President Donald J. 
Trump tweeted, ``Republicans feel that social media platforms 
totally silence conservatives,'' by the way, something that 
would come as news to you apparently, Mr. Roth, because you are 
still the subject of conservative harassment. ``We will 
strongly regulate,'' he went on to say, ``or close them down, 
before we ever allow this to happen.'' Ms. Navaroli, doesn't 
that sound eerily like a government official telling Twitter 
that there is a threat, we will shut you down if we don't like 
the content?
    Ms. Navaroli. I am not familiar with the tweet that you 
have referenced.
    Mr. Connolly. Well, but if I just told you that quote 
without telling you who said it, might it have some ominous 
overtones from your point of view if you are still at Twitter? 
``We will shut you down. We will regulate you. We will never 
allow this to happen.'' Those are pretty strong words.
    Ms. Navaroli. They are.
    Mr. Connolly. Yes. OK. On September 8, 2019, at 11:11 p.m., 
Donald Trump heckled two celebrities on Twitter, John Legend 
and his wife Chrissy Teigen, and referred to them as ``the 
musician John Legend and his filthy-mouthed wife.'' Ms. Teigen 
responded to that email at 12:17 a.m., and according to notes 
from a conversation with you, Ms. Navaroli, your counsel, the 
White House almost immediately thereafter contacted Twitter to 
demand that tweet be taken down. Is that accurate?
    Ms. Navaroli. Thank you for the question. In my role, I was 
not responsible for receiving any sort of request from the 
government. However, what I was privy to was my supervisors 
letting us know that we had received something along those 
lines or something of a request. And in that particular 
instance, I do remember hearing that we had received a request 
from the White House to make sure that we evaluated this tweet, 
and that they wanted it to come down because it was a 
derogatory statement directly toward the President.
    Mr. Connolly. They wanted it to come down. They made that 
request?
    Ms. Navaroli. To my recollection, yes.
    Mr. Connolly. I thought that was an inappropriate action by 
a government official, let alone the White House, but it wasn't 
Joe Biden about his son's laptop. It was Donald Trump because 
he didn't like what Chrissy Teigen had to say about him. Is 
that correct?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes, that is correct.
    Mr. Connolly. My, my, my. Did you ever think it is 
appropriate for the President of the United States to direct or 
otherwise influence a social media company to take down its 
content?
    Ms. Navaroli. I think it is a very slippery slope.
    Mr. Connolly. Mr. Roth, Ms. Gadde, Mr. Baker, any evidence 
that Joe Biden has ever done that?
    Mr. Roth. Certainly none that I am aware of, no.
    Ms. Gadde. I don't recall anything like that.
    Mr. Baker. I am sorry. That President Biden did what, sir?
    Mr. Connolly. Has Joe Biden ever called Twitter to your 
knowledge or his White House at his behest to take down content 
or urge you to take down content?
    Mr. Baker. I don't know the answer to that question, sir.
    Mr. Connolly. Well, I am going to have to conclude, at 
least from three of the four, you don't know. There is no 
evidence he has ever done that, but there is plenty of evidence 
Donald J. Trump tried to do that. And if we are going to have a 
hearing about the misuse of social media and the intrusion of 
government in the content on social media, we have got an 
environment rich target. But it is not Joe Biden, it is Donald 
J. Trump, and of course we don't want to talk about that. We 
don't want to talk about Russian bots and Russian fabrications 
using fake accounts on Twitter to a political purpose, and it 
is not to help elect Democrats. And we don't want to talk about 
four years of Donald Trump manipulating the truth and trying to 
manipulate social media and threaten it, or directly to try to 
shape it by taking down content because it was critical of him 
personally. And that is what we ought to be talking about as we 
move forward, not the subject of today's hearing. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Mr. Donalds for five minutes.
    Mr. Donalds. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Real quick, Mr. Roth. 
You have stated already that what happened with the New York 
Post story was similar to the hack-and-leak scenarios from 
2016. You also said that you actually were opposed to deleting 
the New York Post story. Who advocated for the removal of the 
New York Post story.
    Mr. Roth. The company's decision to treat it as a 
violation----
    Mr. Donalds. Mr. Roth, who at the company actually went 
over your recommendation, because you are pretty high up. Who 
overrode you?
    Mr. Roth. The decision was communicated to me by my direct 
supervisor.
    Mr. Donalds. Who is that person?
    Mr. Roth. Her name was Del Harvey. She was the vice 
president of Trust and Safety at the time.
    Mr. Donalds. All right. Thank you so much. Ms. Gadde, real 
quick. You said to the Chairman earlier, and I am going to 
paraphrase what I heard earlier, is that Twitter had no contact 
with anybody from the Biden team. Is that correct, to your 
knowledge?
    Ms. Gadde. Not to my knowledge.
    Mr. Donalds. Put that up for me.
    [Chart]
    Mr. Donalds. OK. Over my right shoulder, we have an email. 
This is Saturday, October 24, 5:39 p.m., referencing five 
different tweets, with a Twitter email chain, under the line, 
``It is more to review from the Biden team.'' Does anybody have 
a comment on how much interaction was happening with the Biden 
team at Twitter with respect to tweets that they wanted Twitter 
to review? Ms. Gadde, Mr. Roth?
    Ms. Gadde. I am not familiar with this email.
    Mr. Donalds. So, you are not familiar with this email. Mr. 
Roth, are you familiar with this email?
    Mr. Roth. Only from what has been reported in the Twitter 
Files.
    Mr. Donalds. Did you ever have contact with anybody from 
the Biden team?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir, I did not. We explicitly separated the 
teams that would interact with campaigns from teams like mine 
that were responsible for content moderation.
    Mr. Donalds. How big was the organization in Twitter that 
was actually working with campaigns?
    Mr. Roth. I couldn't say for sure.
    Mr. Donalds. Did you have any contact with the DNC?
    Mr. Roth. Directly? No, I did not.
    Mr. Donalds. Did anybody at Twitter have any contact with 
anybody at the DNC?
    Mr. Roth. I think it is likely that somebody at Twitter 
did, yes.
    Mr. Donalds. And these emails listed, ``These are tweets 
that need to be flagged from the Biden team.'' That is what is 
in the files. You have no idea how many people actually engaged 
with the Twitter team or how frequently that engagement 
happened?
    Mr. Roth. No, and, again, that was by design. We kept those 
functions separate from content moderation so that we could 
impartially assess reports like this.
    Mr. Donalds. Do you know how many tweets were actually 
flagged and taken down at the behest of the Biden team?
    Mr. Roth. I wouldn't agree with the characterization of it 
as being at the behest of them. These tweets were reported, and 
Twitter independently evaluated them under its rules.
    Mr. Donalds. But the email is very clear: ``More to review 
from Biden team.'' The response three hours later at the 
bottom, hold this up real quick, so we can see. The requests at 
the bottom it says, ``Handled these.'' What does ``handled 
these'' mean?
    Mr. Roth. My understanding is that these tweets contained 
non-consensual nude photos of Hunter Biden, and they were 
removed by the company under----
    Mr. Donalds. Hold on, real quick, Mr. Roth. How could you 
know so much about the content of these tweets? I mean, as far 
as I am concerned, these are just web addresses. I don't know 
what is in these tweets. You have these things committed to 
memory that you know the content, but you don't know who you 
talked to at the Biden team?
    Mr. Roth. Sir, I didn't meet with the Biden team, but there 
was extensive public reporting about these tweets specifically 
that uncovered what they were.
    Mr. Donalds. You know the contents of the tweets. It was 
obviously at Twitter, but you have no idea how often people who 
worked in your organization had with the Biden team during the 
end of the 2020 Presidential elections.
    Mr. Roth. I would emphasize that the people who interfaced 
with the campaigns were not part of my team or organization. I 
would know what the interactions were if they were on my team. 
It was a different part of the organization, not mine.
    Mr. Donalds. Let me ask a separate question, and I will ask 
it of you too, Mr. Baker. Have you guys been able to quantify 
the amount of in kind contributions associated with taking down 
the New York Post story because New York Post story was down 
for two weeks, give or take. Do you have any understanding of 
how much that story was limited by Twitter and also by other 
social media companies? What the impact of an in-kind 
contribution that would be to the Joe Biden Presidential 
election in 2020?
    Mr. Baker. I don't know the answer to that question, sir.
    Mr. Donalds. Do you think it is big?
    Mr. Baker. I don't know the answer.
    Mr. Donalds. Do you think it is more than a maximum 
contribution to a campaign?
    Mr. Baker. I wouldn't want to speculate.
    Mr. Donalds. Would you call it $25,000?
    Mr. Baker. I don't know the answer to that question, sir.
    Mr. Donalds. A $100,000?
    Mr. Baker. Sir, I don't know the answer to the question.
    Mr. Donalds. A million?
    Mr. Baker. I don't know the answer to the question.
    Mr. Donalds. Do you think Twitter will be in violation of 
Federal election laws with the size of an in-kind contribution 
to take down a story which is true, by the way, because you 
guys thought you knew something with limited information?
    Mr. Baker. I am not going to speculate on that sitting here 
today, sir. I try not to propound a legal analysis of the 
election laws.
    Mr. Donalds. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you. I appreciate also your 
generosity. I just want to start off right here at the top 
here. This isn't even my line of questioning, but I would like 
to submit to the record a Washington Post article ``Now warning 
about Hunter Biden laptop disinformation: The guy who leaked 
it.''
    Here is the deal. Before I even get into my questions, I 
think that the story here, with The Washington Post reporting, 
is that they are saying right here when New York Post first 
reported October 2020 that it had obtained contents of a laptop 
computer allegedly owned by Joe Biden's son, Hunter. There was 
an immediate roadblock faced by other news outlets that hoped 
to corroborate reporting, as many did. The newspaper wasn't 
sharing what it obtained.
    New York Post had this alleged information and was trying 
to publish it without any corroboration, without any backup 
information. They were trying to publish it to Twitter. Twitter 
did not let them, and now they were upset. I believe that 
political operatives who sought to inject explosive 
disinformation with The Washington Post couldn't get away with 
it, and now they are livid, and they want the ability to do 
that again. They want the ability to inject this again. So, 
they have dragged a social media platform here in Congress. 
They are weaponizing the use of this Committee so that they can 
do it again. A whole hearing about a 24-hour hiccup in a right-
wing political operation. That is why we are here right now, 
and it is just an abuse of public resources and abuse of public 
time. We could be talking about healthcare, we could be talking 
about bringing down the cost of prescription drugs, we could be 
talking about abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights, but 
instead we are talking about Hunter Biden's half-fake laptop 
story. I mean, this is an embarrassment, but I will go into it.
    Ms. Navaroli, let's talk about something real. I would like 
to show you a tweet posted by former President Trump about my 
colleagues and I on July 14, 2019.
    [Chart]
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. It says in part, ``Why don't they go 
back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places 
from which they came then come back and show us how it is done? 
These places need your help badly. You can't leave fast enough. 
I am sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy as quickly to 
work out free travel arrangements.'' A day or two after that, 
Donald Trump publicly incited, you know, violence at a rally, 
targeting four Congresswomen, including myself, saying go back 
to where you came from. And, Ms. Navaroli, as I understand it, 
you were the senior member of Twitter's content moderation team 
when this was posted. As part of your responsibilities, did you 
review this tweet?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes, it was my team's responsibility to 
review these tweets.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And what did you conclude?
    Ms. Navaroli. My team made the recommendation that for the 
first time, we find Donald Trump in violation of Twitter's 
policies and used the public interest interstitial.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. For the first time?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And at the time, Twitter's policy 
included a specific example when it came to banned abuse 
against immigrants as they specifically included the phrase, 
``Go back to your country'' or ``Go back to where you came 
from,'' correct?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes, that was specifically included in the 
content moderation guidance as an example.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And you brought this up to the vice 
president of Trust and Safety, Del Harvey, correct?
    Ms. Navaroli. I did, yes.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And she overrode your assessment, didn't 
she?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes, she did.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And something interesting happened after 
she overrode your assessment. A day or two later Twitter seem 
to have changed their policies, didn't they?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes. That ``Go back to where you came from'' 
was removed from the content moderation guidance as an example.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. So, Twitter changed their own policy 
after the President violated it in order to potentially 
accommodate his tweet?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you. So much for bias against 
right-wing on Twitter. Additionally, Ms. Navaroli are you 
familiar with the account, Libs of TikTok?
    Ms. Navaroli. I have heard of it from the news, yes.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Mr. Roth, are you familiar with this 
account?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, ma'am, I am.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Are you aware that from August 11 to 
August 16, that account posted false information about Boston 
Children's Hospital, claiming that they were providing 
hysterectomies to children?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, I am aware of that and other claims from the 
account.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And are you aware that this lie was then 
circulated by other prominent far-right influencers?
    Mr. Roth. Yes.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And are you aware that all these claims, 
which I have reiterated were false, culminated in a real-life 
harassment and, ultimately, a bomb threat to the Boston 
Children's Hospital?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, I am aware.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And this account is still on that 
platform today, isn't it?
    Mr. Roth. Regrettably, yes, it is.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Despite inspiring a bomb threat due to 
the right-wing incitement of violence against trans Americans 
in this country because they cannot let go of this obsession 
with fixating violence and inciting violence against trans and 
LGBT people, in addition to immigrants, in addition to women of 
color. This is a party that cannot pick on any one their own 
size, and they are trying to co-opt an entire social media 
platform and use the power of this Committee and of Congress in 
order to pursue a political agenda. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The lady yields back. The Chair recognizes 
Mr. Fry for five minutes.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This hearing shows who 
really has been in control of what is said to be the one of the 
world's most widely used websites, Twitter. The American people 
probably didn't know who these witnesses were today, but these 
witnesses were powerful enough to silence an American President 
with just a few clicks from their California office. We are 
also learning that some of those in Washington, DC. have 
forgotten their role and exercise their power to achieve ends 
antithetical to American principles of free speech and 
expression.
    The FBI is the lead Federal Agency responsible for 
investigating foreign influence operations. However, in recent 
years, the FBI has devoted countless amounts of time, taxpayer 
money, and manpower to combatting Russian foreign influence on 
social media. The FBI, as one reporter noted, acted as a 
``doorman to the vast program of social media surveillance and 
censorship, encompassing agencies across the Federal 
Government, from the State Department, to the Pentagon, to the 
CIA.'' Reports suggests that thousands of reports from the FBI 
and the Foreign Influence Task Force were sent to Twitter. This 
isn't what the American people are paying for. This isn't what 
we trust the FBI to do. FBI agents shouldn't be sitting at a 
desk in Washington, DC. scrolling through Twitter and emailing 
with social media companies.
    An email from one Twitter employee to another reads, ``The 
FBI San Francisco Emergency Operations Center sent us the 
attached report of 207 tweets they believed may be in violation 
of our policies.'' Another email revealed that there are, 
``some folks in the Baltimore field office and at headquarters 
that are just doing keyboard searches for violations.'' Mr. 
Roth, Twitter usually found little evidence that the accounts 
the FBI flagged had ties to foreign influence. Is that correct?
    Mr. Roth. In part, but we have received many reports from 
the FBI, particularly related to malign foreign interference, 
that were highly credible and were constructive. So, I would 
say it was a bit of a mixed bag.
    Mr. Fry. And you pushed back to the FBI when they would 
send you a list of American-based accounts. Is that correct?
    Mr. Roth. Politely, but yes.
    Mr. Fry. Mr. Roth, it appears that Twitter employees were 
under pressure by the FBI and other government agencies to 
validate these theories of foreign influence. Would you agree 
with that?
    Mr. Roth. No, I wouldn't agree with the word, ``pressure.'' 
The FBI was quite careful and quite consistent to request 
review of the accounts, but not to cross the line into 
advocating for Twitter to take any particular action.
    Mr. Fry. So, flagging American accounts, in your view, is 
not foreign--or theories of foreign influence. There is not 
pressure there, just by flagging it to you, domestic accounts?
    Mr. Roth. I don't think it is a great use of the Bureau's 
time, but I wouldn't characterize how they communicated with us 
as pressure.
    Mr. Fry. Mr. Roth, you enjoyed these meetings with the FBI, 
it seems based on the tweets behind me, or the communications 
behind me, and internal communications at Twitter. You said, 
``Definitely not meeting with the FBI. I swear.'' Is that 
correct?
    Mr. Roth. I believe I was joking with a colleague at the 
time, but yes.
    Mr. Fry. But I can assume that you were meeting with the 
FBI when you were communicating with your colleague. Is that 
correct?
    Mr. Roth. Yes. One of my job responsibilities was meeting 
with law enforcement about election security.
    Mr. Fry. And just so I am clear, the person you are 
communicating with here says, ``Very boring business meeting 
that is definitely not about Trump.'' I assume that is also 
sarcasm?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, that is my assumption.
    Mr. Fry. And we can assume that Twitter was having these 
meetings with the FBI about President Trump, correct?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir. The meetings that I was a part of with 
the FBI were almost entirely and exclusively focused on malign 
foreign interference, so accounts being operated outside of the 
United States by other governments, not on the accounts of 
Americans.
    Mr. Fry. So, what is the basis of this communication then 
where you talk about not meeting with Trump or not meeting 
about Trump?
    Mr. Roth. Again, I think those comments are sarcasm, but 
the context for this interaction was the need to mark my 
calendar private after another Twitter employee joined one of 
those meetings with the FBI unexpectedly. And so, I had to 
implement additional security measures around my calendar. This 
was a fairly banal interaction with a colleague.
    Mr. Fry. Mr. Chairman, I yield the rest of my time to Mr. 
Jordan.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Jordan.
    Mr. Jordan. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Roth, 
was there ever any visibility filtering that was hard coded by 
Twitter employees into accounts of specific users?
    Mr. Roth. Twitter employees were responsible for building 
the systems that performed visibility filtering, and then that 
filtering would have been applied either automatically----
    Mr. Jordan. And I am asking a very specific question. I am 
asking was the code written in a way that for certain accounts, 
those accounts unique in and of themselves, would be visibility 
filtering, to use your term, so that they wouldn't have as much 
reach or as much influence?
    Mr. Roth. The term ``hard coding'' suggests that it was 
permanent and immutable, and I wouldn't agree with that, no.
    Mr. Jordan. But it did happen is what you are saying. There 
was hard coded into some of these accounts of specific users, 
by Twitter employees, this ability to filter and limit the 
reach of that particular post or that particular tweet, I 
should say.
    Mr. Roth. Again, I wouldn't say that they were hard coded.
    Mr. Jordan. Thank you.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Ms. Brown for five 
minutes.
    Ms. Brown. Thank you, Chairman Comer and Ranking Member 
Raskin, for holding this hearing today. Social media has been a 
revolutionary gift of the 21st century, from helping people 
across the world build meaningful connections to learning a new 
skill set. These platforms have played a significant role in 
creating an interconnected global world. When handled 
responsibly, social media serves as a useful resource with many 
positive outcomes. However, social media is not without its 
flaws, and the challenges are much larger than any specific 
incident or decision by one private company.
    Recently, social media has contributed to the rise in 
amplification of domestic extremist content and organizing. 
This is extremely concerning and, unfortunately, is 
contributing to the division of our society. According to an 
Anti-Defamation League survey, 66 percent of the LGBTQ-plus 
respondents--that is a full two-thirds--experienced harassment 
online. Thirty-seven percent of Jewish respondents and 34 
percent of African Americans respondents said the same. This is 
truly disturbing.
    The power that social media has to inspire real world 
action, both good and bad, is well-known to all of us, and 
sadly, the hate online does not stay online. Social media has 
the power to influence not just here at home, but those who are 
watching us abroad. For example, an online disinformation 
campaign by a hostile foreign power can have the power to sway 
a close election.
    So, Mr. Roth, in a recent interview, you stated, 
``Beginning in 2017, every platform, Twitter included, started 
to invest really heavily in building out an election integrity 
function.'' So, I ask, were those investments driven in part by 
bipartisan concerns raised by Congress and the U.S. Government 
after the Russian influence operation in the 2016 Presidential 
election?
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question. Yes, those concerns 
were fundamentally bipartisan. The Senate's investigation of 
Russian active measures was a bipartisan effort, the report was 
bipartisan, and I think we all share concerns with what Russia 
is doing to meddle in our elections.
    Ms. Brown. Thank you so much. Did those investments include 
a better information sharing mechanism with the Federal 
Government?
    Mr. Roth. Yes. I think one of the key failures that we 
identified after 2016 was that there was very little 
information coming from the government and from intelligence 
services to the private sector. The private sector had the 
power to remove bots and to take down foreign disinformation 
campaigns, but we didn't always know where to look without 
leads supplied by the intelligence community. That was one of 
the failures highlighted in the Senate Intelligence Committee's 
report and in the Mueller investigation, and that was one of 
the things we set out to fix in 2017.
    Ms. Brown. Thank you for that. And, Mr. Roth, were those 
communication channels useful to Twitter as they worked to 
combat foreign influence operations?
    Mr. Roth. Absolutely. I would say they were one of the most 
essential pieces of how Twitter prepared for future elections.
    Ms. Brown. Thank you so much. So clearly, we must come 
together as a committee to stand up and protect our country 
from foreign election interference and disinformation. I 
sincerely look forward to spending more time with this 
Committee working to understand how to fight back against our 
adversaries and strengthen our democracy. And with that, Mr. 
Chairman, I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you very much. The Chair recognizes 
Ms. Greene for five minutes.
    Ms. Greene. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Baker, Ms. Gadde, 
Mr. Roth, and Ms. Navaroli. You can consider your speech 
canceled during my time because you canceled mine. You see, you 
permanently banned my personal Twitter account, and it was my 
campaign account also. So, let's talk about election 
interference, shall we?
    January 2, 2002, you permanently banned my Twitter account. 
This was the account that I would put my campaign ads on, raise 
money on, fight back when attacked with lies, and be able to 
talk to my voters in my district, but you banned it, and then 
let me explain--my account was not reinstated until November 
21, 2022. That was after my election on November 8.
    You know, at your company or your former company where you 
worked, Twitter employees, over 98 percent of them donate to 
Democrats. So, while you coordinated with DHS, the FBI, the 
CIA, our government, and outside groups to permanently shadow 
ban conservative Americans and candidates like me and the 
former President of the United States, President Donald J. 
Trump, you were censoring and wrongfully violating our First 
Amendment free speech rights. Guess what? None of you hold 
security clearances, none of you are elected, and none of you 
represent 750,000 people, like I do.
    Let's explain: 52 United States Law 10101, ``No person 
shall intimidate, threaten, coerce, or attempt to stop any 
other person for the purpose of interfering with their rights 
to vote or to vote as he may choose.'' You didn't shadow ban or 
permanently ban my Democrat opponent. No, you did that to me, 
and that was wrong and it was against the law. You see, not 
only was it me that you violated my First Amendment rights. You 
violated countless conservative Americans' rights. These were 
doctors that were trying to tell the truth about COVID, doctors 
that were having success treating people with Ivermectin that 
you all would not allow to be talked about on your platform.
    These were parents complaining about their school boards, 
teaching gender lies in their schools, biological males 
entering their daughter's bathrooms and sports. These were also 
people questioning the 2020 election. And guess what? That's 
Americans First Amendment Right. These were people talking 
about voting machines. You know what? Democrats did that in 
2019 before the 2020 election. On Twitter, people could 
question elections such as 2016, saying Hillary won, but in 
2020, no one could question elections saying Trump won.
    You abuse the power of a large corporation, Big Tech, to 
censor Americans, and you want to know something? Guess what? I 
am so glad that you are censored down. I am so glad you have 
lost your jobs. Thank God Elon Musk bought Twitter. And you 
know what? Let's talk about something a little bit further. It 
is amazing to me, Mr. Roth, as the Head of Trust and Safety at 
Twitter, your ability, or should I say inability, to remove 
child porn. Now, here is something that disgusts me about you--
in your doctoral dissertation entitled, ``Gay Data'', you 
argued that minors should have access to Grindr, an adult male 
gay hookup app. Minors? Really?
    You know, Elon Musk took over Twitter and he banned 44,000 
accounts that were promoting child porn. You permanently banned 
my Twitter account, but you allowed child porn all over 
Twitter. Twitter had become a platform, you said, connecting 
queer young adults. You also wrote on Twitter in 2010, ``Can 
high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with 
their teachers?'' In 2021, while you were the director of Trust 
and Safety on Twitter, an underage boy and his mother announced 
a lawsuit against Twitter because Twitter was benefiting from 
and refused to remove a lewd video featuring this boy and 
another minor. That is repulsive. But you violated me. What 
were my tweets?
    OK. Let's talk about them. I was talking about the deaths 
being reported on there. By the way, that is on the CDC 
website. I was also saying that I didn't think any entity 
should enforce a non-FDA approved vaccine or mask. Guess what? 
A lot of people agreed with me, but you called that COVID 
misinformation. By the way, I am a Member of Congress and you 
are not. I also said the controversial COVID-19 vaccines should 
not be forced on our military. You want to know something? 
Republicans stopped that in the NDAA.
    Chairman Comer. The lady's time has expired.
    Ms. Greene. And your time is expired. I yield back. Thank 
you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Gomez.
    Mr. Gomez. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Roth, please 
explain to us why Ms. Marjorie Taylor Greene or the 
Representative from Georgia was removed from Twitter.
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question, Congressman. My 
recollection is that her personal account was banned from 
Twitter after repeated written notices due to repeated 
violations of the Twitter rules.
    Mr. Gomez. Can you add a little specificity to the 
violation of the Twitter rules?
    Mr. Roth. Yes. Again, I didn't have access to my twitter 
email, documents, anything that would have let me prepare to 
answer that in more detail. But my recollection is that the 
Congresswoman repeatedly violated Twitter's policies about 
sharing misinformation about COVID-19. She received multiple 
written warnings about that conduct. She received multiple 
timeouts related to that conduct. And then ultimately, 
consistent with the written and published policy, those 
repeated violations resulted in her account being permanently 
suspended.
    Ms. Greene. Mr. Chairman----
    Mr. Gomez. So, in essence----
    Ms. Greene [continuing]. I would like to take a point of 
personal privilege?
    Mr. Gomez. It is still my time.
    Chairman Comer. We will stop the clock----
    Mr. Gomez. It's my time, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. Point of order. Now Mr. Raskin.
    Mr. Raskin. Yes. I don't believe that Members of this 
Committee have the right to interrupt someone's testimony, 
because their name was----
    Ms. Greene. Point of personal privilege. You were 
mentioning my name, Mr. Raskin.
    Mr. Raskin. You know, I understand, but that is not the 
rule, Ms. Green. I don't think a Member----
    Ms. Greene. That is the rule in Congress. We can take a 
point of personal privilege.
    Mr. Raskin. Well, then I would like Parliamentarian to rule 
on whether any Member of this Committee has the right to 
interrupt a witness's testimony because they mentioned the name 
of a Member of Congress.
    Ms. Greene. You mentioned my name, Mr. Raskin.
    Mr. Raskin. Yes, I am not testifying.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Ms. Greene.
    Ms. Greene. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. For your point of privilege, very briefly.
    Ms. Greene. Thank you. For Mr. Roth, who made you in charge 
of what is true and----
    Chairman Comer. Well----
    Mr. Gomez. Does she get to reopen her questions?
    Chairman Comer. We will go back to Mr. Gomez, and, Mr. 
Gomez, please remember the decorum of the Committee. We will 
restart the clock now. You didn't lose any time. The Chair 
recognizes Mr. Gomez.
    Mr. Gomez. Thank you so much. The gentlelady from Georgia 
was suspended from Twitter for knowingly and consistently 
spreading conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines, right, 
which is shameful, shameful, especially in a pandemic where 
millions of people have lost their lives. With that, I yield 
rest of my time to the gentleman from New York, Mr. Goldman.
    Mr. Goldman. Thank you, Mr. Gomez. Let's talk about the so-
called Twitter Files, which my Republican colleagues seem to 
think are God's gift to journalism. In one about the Hunter 
Biden laptop, the author says that every single fact in the New 
York Post story was accurate, and, Chairman Comer, I noticed 
you blew up the cover of that New York Post story, which I 
appreciate you doing that because I would like to dig into this 
article. The very first paragraph says, ``Hunter Biden 
introduced his father to a top executive at an Ukrainian energy 
firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured 
government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who 
was investigating the company.'' That is false, 100 percent 
false.
    Chairman Comer. Is the gentleman sure about that?
    Mr. Goldman. Yes. In fact, I am sure about that. And as the 
lead counsel in the first impeachment investigation, we proved 
that he was actually fired because he was not prosecuting 
corruption, not that he was fired because he was prosecuting 
corruption.
    Chairman Comer. Actually, would the gentleman yield? 
Corruption of the President son's company----
    Mr. Goldman. I would like to reclaim my time.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman is recognized.
    Mr. Goldman. The fact that Joe Biden fired, consistent with 
U.S. policy and every single European country, the prosecutor 
general in Ukraine because he did not prosecute corruption, 
including at companies like Burisma, has been proven over and 
over and over. And if you want to know who actually prosecuted 
Burisma, Chairman Comer, you should talk to the British 
authorities because they were the ones who were prosecuting 
Burisma, and they couldn't get any cooperation from the 
Ukrainian Prosecutor General. So, that's why he was fired. So, 
right off the top, the very first paragraph of this so-called 
bombshell story is completely false.
    Now, what is the allegation that we are hearing from our 
Republican colleagues about the connection to Joe Biden and 
Burisma? It is an email from a Burisma employee thanking Hunter 
Biden for organizing a meeting with the Vice President Biden. 
We know nothing about the substance of that meeting. We know 
nothing about how long they met. It was not on Vice President 
Biden's schedule. And, in fact, I would ask my Republican 
colleagues, do you meet with foreign businessmen? Do you meet 
with foreign diplomats? If we were to say to you every single 
time you met with somebody that you have discussed something 
that you're voting on, how would you react? It is preposterous.
    And, Chairman Comer, you have said in your opening 
statement, that Joe Biden lied to the American people. That is 
a bold, bold accusation, and so far, we have seen no actual 
evidence of any lies or any support for Joe Biden being 
involved in anything having to do with Ukraine, other than 
promoting U.S. former policy. And I hope that you are not 
abusing the power as chairman of this Committee, and that you 
are not wasting taxpayer dollars on a fishing expedition into a 
civilian child of a president for political purposes. I yield 
back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields. Quick question. You 
don't have to. It your choice. You yield?
    Mr. Goldman. Yes, please. I would love to discuss this.
    Chairman Comer. Are you admitting that Joe Biden did get 
the prosecutor in Ukraine fired?
    Mr. Goldman. I think it is very clear that Vice President 
Biden, along with all of our allies in Europe, pressured 
Ukraine to fire a corrupt prosecutor general who was not 
charging corruption cases where that would have included 
potentially Burisma.
    Chairman Comer. Corruption with his son's company?
    Mr. Goldman. Yes. In fact, what he wanted was the 
prosecutor general to prosecute corruption and the allegations 
that you are making and that the Russians are making because 
this is all part of Russian propaganda, is that Burisma was 
corrupt and Joe Biden was trying to stop an investigation into 
Burisma. That is categorically false and there is no evidence 
of it.
    Voice. Mr. Chairman?
    Chairman Comer. We are going to recognize one more speaker. 
We have been requested by the presenters for a brief bathroom 
break. If you will allow us, we have one more questioner and 
then we will take that break. The Chair recognizes Mr. Timmons 
for five minutes, and then we will have a 5 to 10-minute break. 
Mr. Timmons?
    Mr. Timmons. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have a big picture 
problem right now, and we are talking about Twitter, 
specifically, and Hunter Biden's laptop, but it is not just 
that. It is the general trend of the media, social media, the 
FBI, DOJ, doing one side's bidding. That is the issue. There 
are mistakes that have been made, and we keep looking back at 
these mistakes and say, oh, that shouldn't have happened that 
way, we are going to have a new policy to avoid that from 
happening again, but every mistake benefits one side. Every 
mistake benefits one side. Let's go back to 2016.
    The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign 
paid Fusion GPS to fabricate the Steele dossier, which was the 
basis of this entire Russia collusion investigation, special 
counsel. We spent $40 million pursuing it. There was no 
evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia. There was 
none. It was actually fabricated by the Democrats and the 
Clinton campaign to create a narrative to damage President 
Trump, so that was a mistake. We all know that now. That was 
the conclusion of that investigation. And as a side note, that 
is why Adam Schiff is no longer on Intel because he lied about 
that investigation. He said as the Chair of Intel, I have all 
this information. He abused his position, and that is why he 
was removed from Intel.
    So next, we go to 2020. Another mistake. We have something 
that is real labeled as something that is fake. We tell the 
American people that we are going to have an honest, open 
conversation about issues, about challenges that our country 
faces, and everybody has their own facts. The Congressman from 
New York is mentioning his facts. It is just very bizarre that 
Hunter Biden is making tens of thousands of dollars a month 
with no credentials from business in Ukraine, whether they are 
being investigated. Who knows? I mean, these are all 
speculation, and it is something the American people can't 
really digest because we don't know the answers to it. And when 
we are told the answers by our government, by big corporations, 
by Big Tech, and they are repeatedly wrong, it creates a trust 
issue. It creates a trust issue. So, the American people do not 
trust what they are being told. They do not trust what they are 
being told.
    We are going to dig into the Hunter Biden laptop briefly. 
Jack Dorsey has said that he did not make that decision. Ms. 
Gadde, did you make the decision to censor the Hunter Biden 
laptop story?
    Ms. Gadde. Yes, I was involved in that decision.
    Mr. Timmons. Who was the final arbiter because Mr. Roth has 
said he disagreed with that decision. Who was the final person 
that said we are going to do this?
    Ms. Gadde. I ultimately approved that decision.
    Mr. Timmons. OK. Thank you. Mr. Roth, you have said 
previously that you did not believe that the New York Post 
story violated any policy. You have said that multiple times 
today. How many times other than this one did something get 
banned or flagged that you disagreed with? Is this the only 
one?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir. Not at all.
    Mr. Timmons. OK. Twitter repeatedly banned and censored 
material that you thought shouldn't be censored. Is that fair?
    Mr. Roth. These are challenging judgment calls, and I think 
reasonable minds can differ about whether a given piece of 
content does or does not----
    Mr. Timmons. OK. But on this one, you did disagree. I just 
want to say, the American people need to have valid information 
to process decisions. I would argue that denying the American 
people the substance of Hunter Biden's laptop was wrong. You 
got photos and text messages of Hunter Biden committing 
multiple felonies, which was never actually criminal--there 
were no criminal charges. Must be nice. Hunter Biden and James 
Biden were negotiating deals with Chinese Communist Party 
agents, one of whom Hunter Biden classified as the spy chief of 
China.
    We have evidence at least one of Hunter's deals with 
Chinese Communist Party-linked entities. Joe Biden was given a 
10-percent equity stake in the joint venture. We have evidence 
that the Bidens were trying to sell America's natural resources 
to the Chinese. And this is my personal favorite: evidence that 
the Bidens and a Chinese energy company owned by the Chinese 
Communist Party had leased office space no further than three 
miles from where we are sitting right now, and the man running 
for President had his own office in that office space, his own 
personal office. Do you think the American people deserve to 
know that? I do.
    I think that there is a lot of smoke surrounding the 
Biden's relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, there is 
a lot of smoke surrounding the Biden's relationship with 
Ukraine, and they deserve to have the facts to make a decision 
for themselves. You all got it wrong in 2016 with Russian 
collusion. You got it wrong with Hunter Biden's laptop in 2020. 
You got it wrong regarding COVID at every turn. The American 
people deserve better.
    Mr. Raskin. Would the gentleman yield for question?
    Mr. Jordan. The gentleman yield? The gentleman yield?
    Mr. Raskin. Would the gentleman yield for question?
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yield?
    Mr. Timmons. Yes.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Jordan.
    Mr. Jordan. Mr. Baker, did you talk to any of the 51 former 
intel officials who sent the now famous letter on October 19, 
2020, saying that the Russian story in the New York Post had 
all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation? 
Have you talked to any of those 51 prior to that letter being 
sent on the 19th or after?
    Mr. Baker. Sir, I can't remember who is on that group, 
but----
    Mr. Jordan. Clapper, Brennan, Morell.
    Mr. Baker. I have talked to those people during the course 
of my career, yes.
    Mr. Jordan. Have you talked to them in your time at 
Twitter?
    Mr. Baker. I can't remember who is on that list, so I am 
afraid----
    Mr. Jordan. No. How about the three I just mentioned, 
Clapper and Brennan?
    Chairman Comer. OK. All right. Last question.
    Mr. Raskin. Mr. Chairman, regular order. Regular order.
    Chairman Comer. Last question, but feel free to answer, 
then we'll recognize Mr. Raskin.
    Mr. Raskin. Well, I was going to ask the gentleman before 
he left whether he is denying the Russian disinformation 
propaganda campaign that we have heard about from witnesses, or 
he is just denying Russian collusion, which was something that 
Mr. Mueller specifically did not address in his final report. 
He said collusion is not a legal concept he was looking at, 
just a conspiracy. And he said there wasn't substantial enough 
evidence to charge conspiracy, but there were dozens of 
contacts between Donald Trump and the Russians that were 
documented in that report. That is all I wanted to say.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Jordan, then we 
will recess for----
    Mr. Jordan. Just to restate the question that is on the 
table to Mr. Baker. Did he talk with Mr. Clapper, Mr. Brennan, 
or anyone else that he knows of on that who signed that letter?
    Mr. Raskin. Point of order. Mr. Chairman, whose time is 
this? What is going on?
    Mr. Jordan. The Chairman's time.
    Chairman Comer. This was a remaining three seconds of----
    Mr. Raskin. He doesn't have remaining time. He has gone 
over by a minute.
    Chairman Comer. We are over. Mr. Baker, feel free to answer 
the question, if you want, and then we will take a recess.
    Mr. Baker. Mr. Jordan, I don't recall discussing the 
publication that they did about the Hunter Biden laptop with 
any of those people.
    Chairman Comer. We will stand in recess for five minutes. 
When we return, Mr. Garcia will begin our questioning. We are 
in recess for 5 to 10 minutes.
    [Recess.]
    Chairman Comer. Again, I want to thank the witnesses for 
your indulgence, and I know it is a long day. You are doing 
great. We really appreciate it. Now we are resuming 
questioning, and the Chair recognizes Mr. Garcia for five 
minutes.
    Mr. Garcia. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank our 
witnesses. And I just want to just start off also by just 
apologizing to our witnesses, particularly Mr. Roth, for just 
the homophobic rant and comments that were recently just made 
from the gentlelady from Georgia. That was really shameful. And 
I know that we are here to talk about serious issues, and we 
are having conversations about Grindr and other issues, which 
is not really what this hearing is about. So, apologize to all 
of our witnesses.
    I want to note that I am someone that you would probably 
call a Twitter superuser. I use the social platform constantly. 
I communicate regularly, it is what I use to get my news. It is 
how I find out what is happening in popular culture. And I 
admire what Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Christopher Stone 
actually tried to build as a company. I wish I could say the 
same for what the platform is today. I think, to me and to many 
other users, we have seen the site currently degraded. We have 
seen Mr. Musk more interested in attacking journalists and 
uplifting conspiracy theories than actually running a company, 
and I think we can all agree that just, overall, the service is 
substantially degraded. I think just an example is the forced 
For You page mess that I personally don't like, and I think 
most folks don't as well.
    But I want to know more seriously that Mr. Musk and the 
current team has also done damage as far as trust and safety on 
the platform. He has gutted the Trust and Safety teams, have 
been described as eliminated content management systems, and 
the human rights team, which, as we know, has ceased to 
operate.
    I do want to just take a minute to thank Mr. Roth, and 
particularly Ms. Navaroli, and your teams, I know that you are 
trying your best. I want to thank all of the folks that worked 
at Twitter because they believed in its mission, a mission I am 
not sure holds true today completely, but it is one that I know 
a lot of folks worked on, and so just thank you for that work. 
And mistakes were made, and clearly you have actually lived up 
to those mistakes and the issues that have existed.
    But I especially want to thank you for your work around the 
pandemic. The pandemic took over a million American lives, 
1,300 in my own city back home. And your decisions and content 
moderation actually saved countless lives in this country, 
including the work you did by moderating or banning Members 
even of this Committee, who peddled in lies and were actively 
causing death and harm to others. And so, for that work on 
content moderation, I want to thank you.
    And I want to go back to something that Mr. Roth said, 
briefly. You had mentioned earlier in this hearing that you 
thought that currently there is still systemic election 
interference and interference happening. How serious do you 
think the current threat from Russia and other countries is to 
current election interference?
    Mr. Roth. I think we can look to the evidence from the 
midterms to know that these campaigns are ongoing and they are 
serious, and it is not just Russia, Iran and China, though, 
they are the big players. There is now a playbook for how 
election interference works, and it is, unfortunately, all too 
cheap and all too easy for countries to try to carry this out.
    Mr. Garcia. Thank you. I think so. I think it is pretty 
clear what we have learned today. One thing we have learned, 
which hasn't been much by the way, is that there is current 
election interference happening today by Russia and other 
actors, and so that is something that is serious. That is what 
the focus of this hearing should actually be about versus all 
of this kind of nonsense, and lies, and conspiracy theories 
that this Committee is actually focused on today. I want to 
take the remaining balance of my time and yield to Ms. Ocasio-
Cortez.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. I thank the gentleman from California. I 
would like to raise and follow-up on a point that the 
opposition and the other side of the aisle is making, which is 
trying to insinuate that there is something scandalous or 
unusual about Federal agency outreach to social media platforms 
and other organizations such as Twitter. The insinuation here 
is that in the FBI and other agencies reaching out to Twitter, 
that there is something nefarious about this, that this was 
some sort of partisan weaponization or attempt to intimidate. 
But we actually have quite a documented history of 
representatives from the Trump Administration hailing the 
progress that the government had made in working with companies 
like Twitter to counter foreign influence operations and other 
areas of concern.
    In early March 2020, right before the Super Tuesday primary 
elections, several Trump Administration officials, including 
Mike Pompeo, Bill Barr, Chad Wolf, and acting director of 
National Intelligence, Richard Grenell, issued a statement 
praising the government's cooperation with the private sector 
to fend off foreign interference, and said that relationship 
was, ``Stronger than it has ever been.'' This was around this 
whole time where there is this grievance around this. And 
listen to what DHS Secretary Chad Wolf had to say just weeks 
before the 2020 Presidential election: ``We now have direct 
lines of communication with tech, and social media companies, 
and election officials so that both parties can seamlessly take 
action against false information spreading online.'' I would 
argue that this information from the Trump Administration would 
say that they would support your decision in temporarily 
suspending this disinformation that seemed to be coming out 
from the New York Post. So with that, I yield back to the 
Chair.
    Chairman Comer. The gentlelady here yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Mr. Burchett for five minutes.
    Mr. Burchett. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Ms. Gadde, Charlie 
Kirk and Dan Bongino are conservative commentators. Is that a 
fair characteristic? Just ``yes'' or ``no'' would be fine.
    Ms. Gadde. I believe so, but I am not----
    Mr. Burchett. OK.
    Ms. Gadde [continuing]. Familiar with them in detail.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. The posters behind me show the side of 
Twitter that is not available to users. Is that correct?
    Ms. Gadde. This appears to be a view of some of our agent 
tooling, but I did not have access to that, so I am not very 
familiar with that.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Well, Ms. Gadde, the labels identify 
status that have been assigned to these accounts. Is that 
correct?
    Ms. Gadde. I don't know.
    Mr. Burchett. Madam, these are your internal things. You 
are telling me you don't receive these? You don't know what 
they mean?
    Ms. Gadde. Representative, I did not have access to these 
tools, and so I don't know. They look familiar to me.
    Mr. Burchett. As an executive, you did not have access to 
inside information at Twitter? OK. Ms. Gadde, Mr. Bongino's 
account, there are a few words under the verified and active. 
Can you read the first two labels under verified and active 
there, the yellow ones?
    Ms. Gadde. ``Notification spikes.'' ``Search blacklist.''
    Mr. Burchett. All right. Thank you, Madam. Mr. Bongino has 
more than 3.5 million Twitter followers. Is that correct? What 
do you say?
    Ms. Gadde. I am sorry. I don't know the answer to that 
question.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Well, that is correct. Let's look at Mr. 
Kirk's account. Ms. Gadde, can I get you to read the yellow 
labels on Mr. Kirk's account? Can you see those?
    Ms. Gadde. I am sorry. I can't see them from right here.
    Mr. Burchett. All right. Do you know that Mr. Kirk has 
almost 2 million followers?
    Ms. Gadde. I was not aware of that.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Let me ask you, what is a search 
blacklist?
    Ms. Gadde. I do not know specifically what that is, but I 
could make a guess, if that would be helpful.
    Mr. Burchett. Why don't you make a guess for me, please?
    Ms. Gadde. When I was at Twitter, there was an ability to 
prevent something from appearing in one of the tabs of search 
results.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Thank you. What does ``do not amplify'' 
mean?
    Ms. Gadde. To the best of my recollection, when I was at 
Twitter, it would mean that we would not recommend or amplify 
that content in the parts of Twitter where Twitter was making 
recommendations.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Thank you, Madam. In 2018, you said that 
Twitter does not shadow ban. Twitter did, however, engage in 
what is called visibility filtering. One Twitter employee 
described visibility filtering as a way for us to suppress what 
people see to different levels. Do you agree with that 
characterization?
    Ms. Gadde. I am sorry. Can you please repeat the question?
    Mr. Burchett. OK. They engaged in what is called visibility 
filtering. One Twitter employee described visibility filtering 
as a way for us to suppress what people see to different 
levels. Do you agree with that characterization?
    Ms. Gadde. I agree that visibility filtering does give an 
ability to change.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Shadow banning, ma'am, is understood that 
the practice is limiting the visibility of a user's post 
without their knowledge. How is visibility filtering any 
different?
    Ms. Gadde. Representative, I believe there are different 
definitions of ``shadow banning.''
    Mr. Burchett. OK. But you said that Twitter in 2018 does 
not shadow ban. Was that a truthful statement, ma'am? Was that 
a lie?
    Ms. Gadde. At that time, I specifically defined ``shadow 
banning'' to mean something different----
    Mr. Burchett. OK.
    Ms. Gadde [continuing]. Than visibility filtering.
    Mr. Burchett. You also said that Twitter does not shadow 
ban based on political viewpoints or ideology. Do you stand by 
those comments?
    Ms. Gadde. While I was at Twitter, to the best of my 
knowledge, we did not do that.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Mr. Roth, on January 22, 2017, you 
tweeted that there were actual Nazis living in the White House. 
Do you still stand by that comment? Yes or no?
    Mr. Roth. Sorry. I regret the language I used. No, I do 
not.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Mr. Roth, earlier in your testimony, you 
said you regretted tweeting that, ``Actual Nazis are living in 
the White House.'' However, Iran's ayatollah sent antisemitic 
tweets, one stating, ``Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor 
that has to be removed and eradicated.'' ``Yes'' or ``no,'' did 
Twitter ever ban the ayatollah, removed this hateful 
antisemitic tweet? ``Yes'' or ``no.''
    Mr. Roth. To the best of my knowledge, Twitter did not 
remove that, no.
    Mr. Burchett. The answer is no. Mr. Chairman, it is clear, 
conservative voices are being silenced on social media and the 
mainstream. I appreciate this hearing. I might also suggest we 
look into holding one on DirecTV, Newsmax, and OAN. I give the 
rest of my time to Mr. Jordan.
    Mr. Jordan. I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his 
good questions. So, the user knows when their account has been 
suspended or blocked, but they don't know when they have some 
of these gold terms that were under Mr. Bongino and Mr. Kirk. 
Is that right, Mr. Roth?
    Mr. Roth. As of the time that I worked at Twitter, yes, 
that is correct.
    Mr. Jordan. So, they don't know if they are on the search 
blacklist. They don't know if they are on the do not amplify. 
They don't know that?
    Mr. Roth. That is correct. Twitter did not disclose that.
    Mr. Jordan. So, you did that to these two accounts. What I 
want to know was did you know, Mr. Roth, if that was at the 
prompting of anyone from the government.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman's time has expired, but 
please answer the question.
    Mr. Roth. No, sir. I am not aware of any requests or orders 
or demands or anything from the government requesting that 
visibility filtering be applied to those accounts or any 
others.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Frost for five 
minutes.
    Mr. Frost. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Look, I mean, I have 
been sitting here for over two hours, and I am still not really 
seeing the point of this hearing. Is it to solve the problems 
of the American people, what people are struggling with? No. We 
get it. My Republican colleagues wish that the Hunter Biden 
story would have helped them win the 2020 election, and that 
didn't happen, and so they are angry about it, and that is the 
point of this hearing. You know, it was the actually the 
foundation of the Chairman's opening statement. It is why he 
brought up that poll on the 2020 election. That is what this is 
all about. And so, I want to say to my colleagues, don't worry, 
there are still many platforms, you can spread disinformation 
on--Parler, Truth Social--that have questionable editorial 
policies, but aren't here today.
    There was no collusion, as the witnesses have said under 
oath. There was no pressuring from the U.S. Government, as we 
heard under oath. We are wasting our time here bullying former 
Twitter employees. It is calling the ref. So that way in the 
future, when they want disinformation to be put on the 
internet, social platforms will be scared to call them out down 
the road. It is called calling the ref. But let's talk about 
the root of this hearing.
    My Republican colleagues would have folks believe that 
Democrats are preparing for some sort of major culture war, and 
there is a difference between a culture war and how culture 
naturally changes, culture change. Some on this Committee are 
very resistant to culture change. I mean, just yesterday, we 
heard a Member equate immigration negatively to changing our 
culture, Black and Brown folks coming into our country. The 
reality is that culture changes and adopts. It welcomes more 
people, it becomes more understanding, and it also decides to 
reassess what is acceptable behavior and rhetoric. It could be 
different now than it was in say, the 1950's. In this supposed 
culture war, they often conflate the right to free speech with 
the nonexistent right to not be criticized or held accountable 
for what you say on the internet or even in real life. And just 
because it is legal to say something and the government won't 
throw you in jail for it, doesn't mean the rest of the world 
and sometimes even your own family have to associate themselves 
with you or your comments.
    Mr. Roth, you help set up content moderation policy at 
Twitter. What type of user tweets were more likely to get 
limited? Did it have to do with racism, sexism, homophobia, 
violence, or were you all looking for people who were 
supporting President Trump and limiting those?
    Mr. Roth. Our policies were built fundamentally to be 
viewpoint neutral. They were focused on harm reduction, looking 
to things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a 
focus on protecting people's safety, people's right to free and 
fair elections, people's rights to free speech, and we built, 
concern with those rights, into our policy.
    Mr. Frost. So, being a decent human being?
    Mr. Roth. That is certainly what we try to----
    Mr. Frost. OK. Got you. Ms. Navaroli, earlier, you 
testified about a 2019 tweet that was about President Trump, 
and I think it was from Ms. Teigen. What was the tweet about?
    Ms. Navaroli. Would you like me to give the direct quote?
    Mr. Frost. Yes.
    Ms. Navaroli. Please excuse my language. This is a direct 
quote, but Chrissy Teigen referred to Donald Trump as a ``pussy 
ass bitch''.
    Mr. Frost. OK. Free speech. And what happened after Ms. 
Teigen posted her tweet? What did the White House do? What did 
the Trump White House do?
    Ms. Navaroli. From my understanding, the White House 
reached out to ask that this tweet be removed. It was my team's 
job--this fell underneath the policy for abusive behaviors--and 
then we evaluate it underneath our insults policy at that time 
up to three insults were allowed. And so, it was our job to 
determine how many insults were included within that phrase.
    Mr. Frost. So, the Trump White House reach out to not an 
agency, but the White House reached out and requested that you 
remove the tweet.
    Ms. Navaroli. From my understanding, yes.
    Mr. Frost. OK. Mr. Roth, you mentioned a serious problem 
with foreign interference in our elections. Did you see that 
mass interference work more in support of right-wing candidates 
like President Trump in 2016 or President Biden in 2020?
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question. It is an important 
one, and I don't think there is a clear or easy answer to this. 
We saw Russian operatives playing both sides and often playing 
them against each other. One of the most enraging interactions 
that my team saw were accounts operated out of the same Russian 
troll farm arguing with each other.
    Mr. Frost. Got you.
    Mr. Roth. And they were manufacturing drama, both on 
Democratic sides and on the Republicans.
    Mr. Frost. So, it's still a huge issue.
    Mr. Roth. Absolutely. A hundred percent.
    Mr. Frost. Well, there you have it. There are issues of Big 
Tech. There are serious issues we need to litigate. Hunter 
Biden's laptop is not one of them. And like many of my 
colleagues have said, we need to talk about these issues, how 
January 6 maybe could have been prevented if Twitter had taken 
action due the hateful speech and how we have foreign 
interference in our elections. Why are folks on this Committee, 
so obsessed with Twitter's editorial decision on Hunter Biden's 
laptop? Would they hold the same hearings of the editorial 
decisions of Fox News and Newsmax? Free speech is about the 
government limiting speech about the public.
    My Governor, Ron DeSantis, is doing that right now. I have 
a venue in my district that he is revoking the liquor license 
of, trying to close because they had a drag show. We have 
teachers who are not able to teach the curriculum that they 
want because they disagree with Ron DeSantis and his view of 
the world. That is limiting free speech. And I would love to 
see this Committee bring in some of these Governors who are 
abusing their power, like Governor DeSantis in my state of 
Florida, to limit the free speech of people. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair now 
recognizes Mr. Gosar for five minutes.
    Mr. Gosar. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this important 
hearing, and thank you for our witnesses for appearing as well. 
I want to be clear. Despite claims and witness testimoneys, 
government cannot deputize the private sector for actions that 
would be otherwise be restricted by the Constitution, in this 
case, the censorship of lawful speech.
    Now, I want to direct you to a tweet over my shoulder sent 
by President Trump on October 5, 2020, before Twitter banned 
him from the platform. This was after President Trump has 
become infected with COVID and received treatment at Walter 
Reed Medical Center. It says in part, ``Don't be afraid of 
COVID. Don't let it dominate your life.'' Do you see that, Mr. 
Roth?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, sir, I do.
    Mr. Gosar. Close to an hour later, you received an email 
from James Baker at Twitter, reproduced behind me, as well 
saying, ``Why isn't this POTUS tweet a violation of our COVID-
19 policy, especially, `don't be afraid of COVID' statement?'' 
Isn't that correct, Mr. Roth?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, I believe that is the email displayed.
    Mr. Gosar. Now, Mr. Baker, was it your understanding that 
the Twitter COVID-19 policy was people should be afraid of 
COVID?
    Mr. Baker. Sir, my recollection----
    Mr. Gosar. ``Yes'' or ``no?''
    Mr. Baker. Could you repeat the question, sir?
    Mr. Gosar. Was it your understanding that Twitter's COVID-
19 policy was ``people should be afraid of COVID''?
    Mr. Baker. At that point in time, I did not fully 
understand what Twitter's COVID misinformation policy was, so I 
was trying to understand.
    Mr. Gosar. I am recapturing my time. So, maybe you thought 
that Twitter's policy was that it should dominate people's 
lives? Is that what you thought?
    Mr. Baker. I am sorry. I have been having a hard time 
hearing you, sir.
    Mr. Gosar. So, is it the fact that Twitter doesn't dominate 
people's lives? Is that the problem with that tweet?
    Mr. Baker. At that point in time, I did not understand 
fully. I was relatively new at Twitter, and I was trying to 
understand what the policy was and, therefore, I was----
    Mr. Gosar. OK. OK. I am recapturing my time. I just want to 
ask you--the other two were asked. Where did you go to medical 
school?
    Mr. Baker. I beg your pardon?
    Mr. Gosar. Where did you go to medical school?
    Mr. Baker. I did not go to medical school.
    Mr. Gosar. OK. Now I would like to have a ``yes'' or ``no'' 
from each of the witnesses on these following questions. Did 
you or others at Twitter communicate with government officials 
by means of disappearing messaging systems like Signal, 
Snapchat, or Wickr? Mr. Baker, ``yes'' or ``no.''
    Mr. Baker. Have I ever communicated with a government 
official using those?
    Mr. Gosar. ``Yes'' or ``no?''
    Mr. Baker. I don't recall.
    Mr. Gosar. Ms. Gadde?
    Ms. Gadde. Not to the best of my recollection.
    Mr. Gosar. Mr. Roth?
    Mr. Roth. Yes.
    Mr. Gosar. Ms. Navaroli?
    Ms. Navaroli. Not to my recollection. No.
    Mr. Gosar. Once again, did you or others at Twitter receive 
requests from Federal law enforcement to allow criminal 
activity or content whose distribution is criminal to proceed 
on Twitter? Mr. Baker?
    Mr. Baker. I am sorry. I don't understand the question, 
sir.
    Mr. Gosar. Ms. Gadde?
    Ms. Gadde. Can you please repeat the question, sir?
    Mr. Gosar. Mr. Roth?
    Mr. Roth. If I understood the question correctly it is 
whether we received requests to allow unlawful activity?
    Mr. Gosar. Yes.
    Mr. Roth. The answer is no.
    Mr. Gosar. OK. Ms. Navaroli?
    Ms. Navaroli. Not to my knowledge, no.
    Mr. Gosar. Now, I would like to submit for the record an 
article by the New York Post titled, ``Twitter Refused to 
Remove Child Porn Because it Didn't Violate Policies.'' Ms. 
Gadde, who was involved in this determination?
    Ms. Gadde. I am not familiar with this situation.
    Mr. Gosar. Mr. Roth, are you familiar with this?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir, I am not.
    Mr. Gosar. Once again, I would like a ``yes'' or ``no'' 
from each of the witnesses. Did you apply labels to users with 
an administrative tool to downrank them? Mr. Baker?
    Mr. Baker. I am sorry, sir. I am having a very hard time 
hearing your questions.
    Mr. Gosar. Ms. Gadde?
    Ms. Gadde. I am having the same problem, sir. Can you 
please repeat the question?
    Mr. Gosar. Mr. Roth?
    Mr. Roth. I am not sure I understood the question, sir.
    Mr. Gosar. Well, I am asking you did anybody use an 
administrative tool to downrank users?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, sir. That is a part of Twitter's content 
moderation capabilities.
    Mr. Gosar. Mr. Baker?
    Mr. Baker. Well, I will rely on Mr. Roth.
    Mr. Gosar. OK. Ms. Gadde?
    Ms. Gadde. Yes. We are very public about our recommendation 
systems and how they work.
    Mr. Gosar. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, today's witnesses 
played a central powerful and disturbing role in limiting not 
only free speech, but even people's good faith inquiries and 
research regarding their own health. The internet is 
increasingly where my constituents go to engage in civic 
discourse. Our liberties as Americans will be diminished if we 
do not recognize our speech is increasingly virtual and right 
now subject to hostility and threatened through bans and 
deplatforming. The suggestions by witnesses that all of the 
removal of ``lawful, but awful speech'' was done in favor of 
users is bunk. You could just as easily provide a content 
filter option to allow lawful speech letting users decide what 
lawful materials they do or don't want to engage with, but you 
didn't. You censored and manipulated millions of people.
    Do not allow people like this sitting in front of us today, 
to be the arbiters of truth. I urge my colleagues to support my 
Section 230 Reform, Stop the Censorship Act, which empowers 
users with the editorial contract. As private businesses, you 
always have a contract with your customers. Allow them to pick. 
I yield back my time.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Ms. Balint.
    Ms. Balint. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to say as a 
former history teacher, I care a lot about the facts and the 
details, so let's dive in.
    On December 4, then Ranking Member Comer appeared on Fox 
News and alleged that what Elon Musk's Twitter File showed was 
``evidence that the Biden campaign colluded with Big Tech to 
suppress a story that we now know is 100 percent true.'' That 
is simply not true. It is not true based on what we knew then. 
It is not true based on what we know now. Mr. Roth, in a 
declaration to the FEC in December 2020, you stated, ``I did 
not receive any communications from or have had any 
communications with representatives of Biden for President, the 
Democratic National Committee, or any of their agents regarding 
the New York Post articles before Twitter implemented the 
enforcement actions on October 14, 2020.'' Mr. Roth, do you 
stand by that statement?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, absolutely.
    Ms. Balint. It is also worth noting that your colleague, I 
believe Lauren Culbertson told the FEC the same thing. Ms. 
Gadde, did anyone from the Biden campaign or the Democratic 
National Committee direct Twitter to remove or take action 
against the New York Post story?
    Ms. Gadde. No.
    Ms. Balint. Mr. Baker, same question to you, please.
    Mr. Baker. Not to my knowledge, no.
    Ms. Balint. So, the evidence is clear. Neither the Biden 
campaign nor the DNC had anything to do with Twitter's 
decisionmaking about the New York Post story. My Republican 
colleagues are using what are otherwise innocuous emails to 
suggest that there was somehow collusion between Twitter and 
the Biden campaign. For example, in one email, and this is the 
same one mentioned in Mr. Donalds' questioning earlier. In one 
email selectively used by Elon Musk, one Twitter executive 
sends another a series of hyperlinks on October 24, 2020, with 
the comment, ``More to review from the Biden team.'' For the 
record, this is Tweet Number 8 in the first installment of the 
so-called Twitter Files. So, Ms. Gadde, are you familiar with 
this email?
    Ms. Gadde. No, I am not.
    Ms. Balint. OK. So, just to be clear, this email has 
nothing to do with the New York Post story. It is dated October 
24, 2020, after Twitter had both made and reversed its 
decisions about the New York Post story. Mr. Baker, do I have 
that right?
    Mr. Baker. Based on, I think, the exhibit that was shown 
earlier. That sounds correct, yes.
    Ms. Balint. So, Ms. Gadde, can you clarify for the record, 
if you are able, to what is happening here?
    Ms. Gadde. Can you please be more specific about----
    Ms. Balint. With this email?
    Ms. Gadde. I don't believe I was a recipient of that email 
or reviewed it during my time at Twitter, so I am sorry. I 
don't have familiarity with that.
    Ms. Balint. That is OK. Mr. Baker?
    Mr. Baker. To the best of my understanding, these were 
tweets that the campaign had concerns about. I don't know the 
details of those, and they were referred to Twitter, well, I am 
not sure exactly why, but I can't get inside their heads, but 
they were referred to Twitter, and Twitter reviewed them, and 
someone, again, going off the exhibit, said they were handled. 
I don't know what that means in terms of whether they took any 
action or didn't take any action, but at least they addressed 
the matter, so that is what I construe from that email.
    Ms. Balint. Thank you, Mr. Baker. I appreciate that. So, 
from my understanding of everything that we have heard today, 
it is really not uncommon for outside entities, including, as 
we have heard, Mr. Trump's campaign, to request that Twitter 
remove content that violates the company's terms of service. Is 
that correct? Ms. Gadde?
    Ms. Gadde. That is very common globally.
    Ms. Balint. Thank you. So, to the best of your ability to 
answer, Ms. Gadde, were any decisions approved or acted upon 
based on the political party making the request?
    Ms. Gadde. No. Our teams were trained to enforce our rules 
consistently and fairly without regard to any sort of political 
ideology.
    Ms. Balint. Thank you. So, I believe that what is happening 
here is my Republican colleagues know that the premise of this 
whole hearing is misleading. There is no evidence that the 
Biden campaign had anything to do with the Hunter Biden, the 
New York Post story. And the evidence we do have simply shows 
that the Biden campaign did what the Trump campaign and 
millions of Twitter users do routinely: flag content and ask 
Twitter to conduct its own review to determine whether it 
violates Twitter's own rules and policies. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The lady yields. The Chair recognizes Mr. 
Palmer for five minutes.
    Mr. Palmer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to submit 
a June 22 study conducted by Princeton University called 
``Powered by Twitter: The Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan.''
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Mr. Palmer. This study covers the timeframe of April to 
September 2021, which is the 4-5 month period between President 
Biden's official announcement of America's intentions to 
withdraw and the chaotic end of the American troop presence in 
Afghanistan. The study found that the Taliban weaponized 
Twitter and that Twitter's moderation policies failed. There 
were more than 126,000 accounts in the Taliban support network, 
and 83 percent of these Taliban associated accounts were 
created before 2021, well before Twitter could claim that these 
accounts represented a government. These accounts shared 
graphic images and videos depicting dead and decomposing bodies 
and rampantly spread disinformation about the facts on the 
ground in direct violation of Twitter's public policies. 
Taliban tweets were shared millions of times in the summer of 
2020.
    The study also found that three quarters of Taliban content 
was produced by only 20 accounts, which suggests to me that 
moderation efforts would have been relatively straightforward. 
By the way, U.S. Government classifies the Taliban as an 
insurgent group, in case some of my colleagues don't understand 
what real insurgencies are.
    Mr. Roth, why wasn't Twitter more effective at curtailing 
the clear-cut content violations by Taliban Twitter accounts?
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question, sir. At the time that 
you referenced, I wasn't responsible for Twitter's work on 
counterterrorism.
    Mr. Palmer. Do you have any idea of why Twitter would allow 
clear-cut violations by an insurgent group? And by the way, 
they carried out multiple suicide attacks during the timeframe. 
They were sending out these tweets, killing dozens and injuring 
hundreds.
    Mr. Roth. It is my understanding that Twitter's policies at 
the time distinguished between some of the more violent 
portions of the Taliban and some of the more political portions 
of it. I am not rendering judgment on this.
    Mr. Palmer. We still have that stuff. That is still up on 
Twitter, and I just wonder how many content moderators were 
assigned, if any, to check on these accounts? Additionally, it 
appears that Twitter was profiting from Taliban's presence on 
the platform in the lead-up to the overthrow of the Afghan 
Government. Twitter placed ads from U.S. companies, including 
Amazon, Disney, McDonald's, and on the Twitter accounts of the 
Taliban news organization, and their spokespersons, and their 
senior leaders. Ms. Gadde, did Twitter make money off placed 
ads on Taliban Twitter accounts on August 26, 2021, when 13 
U.S. men and women died in a suicide bombing?
    Ms. Gadde. I have no knowledge of this matter.
    Mr. Palmer. You don't have any knowledge about whether or 
not these ads were up?
    Ms. Gadde. I do not.
    Mr. Palmer. According to Twitter, the decision to ban 
President Trump was after a close review of his tweets and the 
context surrounding them, specifically, how they are being 
received and interpreted on and off Twitter. On June 3, 2018, 
the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini----
    [Technical glitch - loss of electricity]
    Voice. Now, did Twitter do that?
    Mr. Palmer. Sounds like a green new deal to me.
    Chairman Comer. Set the clock back.
    Voice. Mr. Chairman? Mr. Chairman, let me say that in six 
years, I haven't seen this happen, and it happened today----
    Mr. Raskin. Mr. Chairman, we have got no power in the back 
either.
    Chairman Comer. They don't have any power back there 
either.
    Mr. Palmer. Well, I don't think we want to continue this 
without our audio and visual.
    Chairman Comer. We will stand at ease for a couple of more 
minutes, and if this doesn't get resolved, then we may recess 
for five minutes or so, but hopefully, it will be resolved in 
the next minute or two.
    Mr. Raskin. Mr. Chairman?
    Chairman Comer. Mr. Raskin.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you. Could we use this moment to do some 
unanimous consent introductions of materials?
    Chairman Comer. Sure.
    Mr. Raskin. Is that OK? I would like to introduce a March 
27, 2019, article by Lori Robertson entitled, ``The Dossier Is 
Not What Started All of This.'' This is just an answer to one 
of our colleagues who said that the dossier is what started the 
Russia investigation and that has been disproven by the 
Department of Justice Inspector General.
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Any other Member have anything to add to the record?
    [No response.]
    Chairman Comer. OK. Since the microphones work and we can 
see, the Ranking Member and I have discussed this, the biggest 
issue will be the timer, right? So, we are going to have to 
manually time it. Would you agree, Mr. Palmer, to----
    Mr. Palmer. I think I have to----
    Chairman Comer. Yes. Why don't you all work with us on 
that. You have 2 1/2 minutes left. Does that sound right, Gary?
    Mr. Palmer. I thought it was, like, four.
    Chairman Comer. I think it was 2 1/2 minutes and something.
    Mr. Palmer. All right.
    Chairman Comer. So, if everyone's OK?
    Mr. Palmer. Mr. Chairman, I am going to have to repeat a 
statement so----
    Chairman Comer. OK.
    Mr. Palmer. Two-forty-five. Fair enough?
    Mr. Raskin. Well, let's give him three minutes.
    Chairman Comer. All right. We will give you three minutes.
    Mr. Palmer. OK.
    Chairman Comer. The TV camera is not working. That might be 
a problem, the C-SPAN camera. We will stand at ease for a 
moment. The C-SPAN camera is not working. OK. For how long?
    OK. So, we have been informed the whole quadrant 
electricity is out. We can't have the hearing if C-SPAN is not 
on, so we are going to take a 10-minute recess, and I apologize 
for this. This is beyond our control. So, we will take a 10-
minute recess and if any of the witnesses need a break or 
anything, we will help you get through the crowd. We stand in 
recess for 10 minutes.
    [Recess.]
    Chairman Comer. We will call the meeting back to order, and 
I apologize. We have never had this happen when the electricity 
went out. The computer is flickering, but the C-SPAN is 
working, so we are being recorded again, according to the 
rules. Where we left off, Mr. Palmer had three minutes 
remaining, so I now yield three minutes to Mr. Palmer.
    Mr. Palmer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let's try this again.
    According to Twitter, the decision to ban President Trump 
was after a close review of his tweets and the context around 
them, specifically how they are being received and interpreted 
on and off Twitter. On June 3, 2018, the Iranian Ayatollah 
Khomeini tweeted, ``Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in 
the West Asian region and has to be removed and eradicated. It 
is possible and it will happen.'' This tweet remains on Twitter 
to this day. Mr. Roth, how do you believe this tweet from the 
leader of Iran calling for the eradication of Israel was 
received and interpreted on and off Twitter?
    Mr. Roth. I couldn't say for sure how that tweet was 
interpreted.
    Mr. Palmer. You would have a pretty good idea, though, of 
how many retweets and the amount of traffic it got?
    Mr. Roth. Only from what I can see in that illustration.
    Mr. Palmer. Why does the Iranian leader who has explicitly 
pledged to eradicate the Jewish State of Israel get to remain 
on Twitter? Mr. Roth?
    Mr. Roth. Like all of Twitter's users, the Ayatollah is 
subject to the same set of rules. And while I can't speak for 
Twitter's decisions today, I can say that Twitter took a number 
of enforcement actions against the Ayatollah's account the same 
way that we would against anybody.
    Mr. Palmer. That is still up. You understand how 
hypocritical this is, right? You banned a sitting U.S. 
President and a sitting Member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor 
Greene, while a man who has pledged death to America and can 
openly call for the death of millions of Jewish people, and yet 
not be removed from Twitter. Do you understand how that looks, 
how hypocritical that is? I am asking Mr. Baker, Ms. Gadde, Mr. 
Roth, Ms. Navaroli. That is amazing, but it shows hypocrisy at 
Twitter.
    I want to pivot here, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Goldman made a very 
troubling statement claiming that as Vice President, Joe Biden 
fired the attorney general of Ukraine. Since he had knowledge 
of this prior to becoming a Member of Congress, Mr. Goldman 
should provide to the Committee documentation about this 
action. We should know who authorized Vice President Biden to 
take this action against the Ukrainian attorney general. We 
need to know was there an investigation to justify the firing 
of the Ukrainian attorney general, and if yes, who conducted 
it. He needs to provide all details involving this action, 
including Vice President Biden's threat to withhold a billion 
dollars of U.S. funding if the Ukrainian AG was not fired. And 
who authorized Vice President Biden to make that threat? I 
would request that the Committee look into this, and I yield 
back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair now 
recognizes Ms. Lee for five minutes.
    Ms. Lee. Thank you, Mr. Chair. This has been an incredibly 
electric hearing. It would be funny if it weren't real life. I 
understand my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to 
be victims so very badly, but, Ms. Navaroli, if I understand 
you correctly, public criticism and allegations of anti-
conservative bias are actually making Twitter and other social 
media companies less willing to enforce their own policies 
against political conservatives, correct?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes, that was my understanding based on 
research that was done at Twitter.
    Ms. Lee. Meaning the same Republicans insisting on making 
themselves a victim is working?
    Ms. Navaroli. Could you repeat the question?
    Ms. Lee. The same Republicans, folks on this panel who are 
insisting on making themselves victims in this conversation 
about Twitter censorship and other accusations they have made, 
is this working because of the conservative bias and the 
implications of it or the allegations of conservative bias?
    Ms. Navaroli. I----
    Ms. Lee. In other words, are the allegations of 
conservative bias making it harder for those in Twitter or 
those who are working there to enforce these policies against 
folks who incite hate speech or make it?
    Ms. Navaroli. Thank you for rephrasing that question, and 
thank you for asking it. Yes, these allegations are very much 
having an impact on the leadership within every social media 
company as they hope to not receive allegations of being biased 
or in any way being politically leaning.
    Ms. Lee. Thank you. I am not the only lawyer in the room. 
So, you all know that while the Constitution does provide us 
the right to free speech, there are, of course, limitations. As 
Ms. Navaroli pointed out, we cannot yell ``fire'' in a crowded 
theater. Compromising freedom of speech may seem dangerous 
until we weigh that compromise against the men and women 
massacred in Buffalo, for instance, or the many other places 
where radicalized violent extremists found their motivation to 
kill on social media. This isn't about oppression. It is about 
public safety. This isn't about censorship. It is about 
protecting our democracy from misinformation.
    Ms. Navaroli, it was your job to decide whether someone was 
yelling fire in the theater. Could you describe the coded 
incitement to violence policy Twitter did not implement?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes, thank you for that question. The coded 
incitement to violence policy was an incredibly nuanced policy 
that was created in order to fill the gaps that were existing 
in the already existing policies around violence. The policies 
around violence were explicit, so these were calls that said I 
am going to, I want to, I plan to, I wish to, those sorts of 
incitements would have come down. Things like ``stand back, 
stand by,'' things like ``I am locked and loaded and ready for 
a civil war,'' or dog whistles, that were not covered 
underneath the policy.
    Ms. Lee. Thank you. Could it have saved lives if it were 
implemented on January 5, 2021, or possibly in November 2020?
    Ms. Navaroli. I can't speculate as to what might have 
happened, and I do wish we would have acted.
    Ms. Lee. Thank you. Ms. Gadde, the very same words that 
were plastered across Twitter were shouted at the January 6 
insurrection. What threats do Americans face now that Elon Musk 
has removed all guardrails and welcomed back Donald Trump to 
the platform?
    Ms. Gadde. Thank you for the question. I am actually not 
really familiar with what the content moderation policies of 
Twitter are today.
    Ms. Lee. OK. Thank you. Social media platforms like Twitter 
must own up to their responsibility in spreading violence and 
chaos. I would argue so, too, the Members of this panel and 
institution. Thank you, I yield the balance of my time to Mr. 
Raskin.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you very much. Mr. Roth, I want to go 
back to the whole question of your finding hundreds of 
thousands of fake accounts set up by Vladimir Putin and the 
Russian Internet Research Agency, I think they call it, which 
was the propaganda arm in 2016 and I suppose to this day. Some 
have been suggesting on the other side of the aisle that it is 
illegitimate for the FBI or any representative of the Federal 
Government, presumably even Donald Trump, who did a lot of 
this, to contact private media entities in order to apprise 
them of anything, whether it might be the penetration of 
organized crime or child pornography or foreign malign 
influence. And I am just wondering if you would give us a sense 
of how much work is actually being done, and I was going to 
check with you and Mr. Baker about that. How much work does 
Twitter and other social media entities do that relies on the 
FBI and other national security agencies?
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question. There is a 
considerable amount of work to address foreign disinformation 
at Twitter and also at other companies, and this work was 
reliant, in part, on intelligence shared with companies by law 
enforcement and by the intelligence community. I would regard 
that work as essential. At Twitter, we had dozens of people 
working just on these questions of election interference. Those 
teams no longer exist under Mr. Musk.
    Mr. Raskin. And Mr. Baker, if you could.
    Mr. Baker. Thank you, sir. Just generally, I mean, it is a 
matter of public record that the FBI has worked with the 
public, including private entities for decades. Indeed, they 
have had for some number of years now, I think it is called 
Office of Public Sector Engagement. This is part of what they 
do in order to fulfill their responsibilities and to do their 
jobs to protect the country.
    Mr. Raskin. OK. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Armstrong for five 
minutes.
    Mr. Armstrong. Thank you. Mr. Roth, I am going to continue 
down that line of questioning. So, you were just talking about 
working very hard to keep foreign troll farms from using 
Twitter and to engage in malign foreign interference. This 
sounds like a fairly robust undertaking, you said, between 2016 
and 2020. You had different teams stood up to do this constant 
vigilance?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, sir. That was the phrase that we used.
    Mr. Armstrong. Yes, and these types of attempts are 
constantly evolving. They are trying to find new ways to 
penetrate your system, so you have to be engaging with it and 
being willing to adapt on a constant basis?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, sir. That is right.
    Mr. Armstrong. And now we forward to 2020, and earlier you 
had testified that you were having regular interactions with 
national intelligence, Homeland Security, and the FBI?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, I did.
    Mr. Armstrong. And primarily to deal with foreign 
interference?
    Mr. Roth. Primarily, but I would say almost exclusively.
    Mr. Armstrong. Also misinformation in all of that, but you 
had said earlier that your contact with Agent Chan was 
primarily with foreign interference?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, that is right.
    Mr. Armstrong. All right, and these were emails. Were there 
meetings?
    Mr. Roth. Yes. Twitter met quarterly with the FBI Foreign 
Interference Task Force, and we had those meetings running for 
a number of years to share information about malign foreign 
interference.
    Mr. Armstrong. Agents from Homeland Security, or 
intelligence, or just primarily the FBI?
    Mr. Roth. Our primary contacts were with the FBI, and in 
those quarterly meetings, they were, I believe, exclusively 
with FBI personnel.
    Mr. Armstrong. And you had multiple former FBI agents on 
the payroll. I mean, Mr. Baker, you have 10 years' experience 
with FBI, DOJ?
    Mr. Baker. Well, but DOJ, it is two decades roughly. Just 
for the record, I was never an FBI agent.
    Mr. Armstrong. OK.
    Mr. Baker. Yes.
    Mr. Armstrong. And Twitter has such a close relationship 
with at least one FBI agent. That agent could start emails 
with, ``Hey, Twitter folks,'' and could actually advise your 
company about violations of your own terms of service. Mr. 
Roth, I think it is safe to say that you had a consistent 
dialog with the FBI for the weeks and months prior to the New 
York Post, is that fair?
    Mr. Roth. I had ongoing conversations with the FBI for 
years, I would say, about election security.
    Mr. Armstrong. And in response to Mr. Fry earlier, you said 
you would not categorize the FBI communications as pressure.
    Mr. Roth. No, I would not.
    Mr. Armstrong. However, Twitter's director of policy wrote 
to you in 2020 that Twitter has seen a sustained effort by the 
intelligence community to push Twitter, and that Twitter should 
keep a solid front against these efforts. He specifically cited 
Elvis Chan, an FBI agent in San Francisco. Now, on August 11, 
2020, Agent Chan sent you three documents in prep for a meeting 
and said the documents pertain to APT28, a hacking unit 
connected with Russian military intelligence. Agent Chan 
arranged for having security clearance for Mr. Baker and 
facilitated encrypted networks for the FBI to share information 
with Twitter employees. And on October 14, 2020, you stated 
that this feels a lot like somewhat of a subtle leak operation. 
Earlier today you testified that you were following national 
security experts on Twitter as a reason to take down the New 
York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop.
    Mr. Roth. Yes, sir, I did.
    Mr. Armstrong. So, after 2016, you set up all these teams 
to deal with Russian interference, foreign interference. You 
were having regular meetings with the FBI. You have connections 
with all of these different government agencies, and you didn't 
reach out to them once?
    Mr. Roth. Is that question in reference to the day of the 
New York Post article?
    Mr. Armstrong. Yes.
    Mr. Roth. That is right. We generally did not reach out to 
the FBI to consult on content moderation decisions, especially 
where they related to domestic activity. It is not that we 
wouldn't have liked that information. We certainly would have. 
It is that I don't believe it would have been appropriate for 
us to consult with the FBI.
    Mr. Armstrong. So, in December 2020, you did a declaration 
to the Federal Election Commission that the intelligence 
community expected a leak and a hack operation involving Hunter 
Biden. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the FBI warned 
Meta that there was a high effort of Russian propaganda, 
including language specific enough to fit the Hunter laptop 
Biden's security story. You are talking to these people for 
weeks and months, years prior to this leaking. They have 
specifically told you in October that there is going to be a 
leak potentially involving Hunter Biden's laptop. They 
legitimately and literally prophesized what happened, and you 
didn't contact any of them?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir, I did not.
    Mr. Armstrong. Did they reach out to you?
    Mr. Roth. On and around that day, to the best of my 
recollection, no, they did not.
    Mr. Armstrong. So, after the story was taken down and you 
guys did it, and you personally disagreed with it--Ms. Gadde, 
you said you did--did you contact them and say, hey, is this 
what you were talking about?
    Mr. Roth. If that question was directed to me, no, I did 
not----
    Mr. Armstrong. Ms. Gadde, did you talk to anybody from the 
FBI?
    Ms. Gadde. Not to the best of my recollection.
    Mr. Armstrong. So, I guess my question is, what is the 
point of this program? You have constant communication, they 
are set up for foreign interference, they have legitimately 
warned you about this very specific thing, and then all of a 
sudden everybody just walks away? Like, this is what you 
planned for. This is what you prepared for. This is the 
information. They told you exactly what was going to happen. 
And then you want--I don't care, Members of Congress--you 
legitimately want the American people to believe we just 
completely cutoff contact with all of the people who we were 
supposed to defend against? I don't think it passes the smell 
test, and neither to the American people. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Casar for five 
minutes.
    Mr. Casar. I am honored to be a new Member of Congress 
where our purpose is to listen to the people, and represent 
their voices, and lift up our communities. After talking to 
thousands of people across Texas, asking them what do you want 
me to work on for you as a new Member of Congress, not a single 
person told me they were concerned about a New York Post story 
on Twitter about Hunter Biden. Is that really what we are 
dedicating this Committee's time to? Is that really what we are 
going to dedicate the next two years to? Our constituents of 
all political backgrounds are worried they are getting pushed 
out of their neighborhoods by spiking housing costs. They see 
their public schools suffering because we aren't supporting our 
teachers. In my state, our rural hospitals are closing. We have 
more uninsured people than anywhere in the country. We have the 
highest number of food insecure kids, and reproductive rights 
have been stripped away. We are talking about none of that.
    It seems to me that we are having these hearings so that 
people can beat their chest about Hunter Biden, maybe do some 
fundraising, get some headlines, and ironically post those on 
Twitter. If that is what House Republicans want to spend their 
time on, then that is their prerogative, but to me, it is a 
damn shame. We are here for a bigger purpose than that.
    Under the leadership of the legendary chairman, Jack Brooks 
from Texas, this Committee implemented the Great Society 
through the creation of Head Start and the creation of 
Medicare. They investigated Watergate. They built the U.S. 
space program. Anything is possible if we all come together to 
work on what our constituents demand, if we make sure that we 
say to our constituents that your voice matters here. We could 
be ensuring that the historic investments in infrastructure and 
domestic manufacturing create good union jobs where we need 
them the most. We could take on free speech and civil liberties 
issues at home and across the world. We could be investigating 
and taking a look at these real threats of domestic terrorism 
and civil unrest. We could be making sure that our 
constituents' lives are better, but instead, we are focusing 
today on Twitter. The American people deserve better. I yield 
back my time to Mr. Raskin.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you very much, Mr. Casar. Let's go back 
to this point about the Russian disinformation campaign. And 
just to refresh everybody's recollection, Mr. Roth, you 
learned, was it before 2016 or after 2016 that Vladimir Putin 
had commanded an entire campaign to try to invade the American 
election with social media messages on Twitter, Facebook, and 
so on? Was that before the election you learned or after?
    Mr. Roth. Well, there was some public discussion of it 
before the election. Most of the confirmed information was only 
declassified after Election Day.
    Mr. Raskin. OK. So, there was this powerful, massive 
campaign unleashed by a malign foreign actor interested in 
undermining American democracy with a specific electoral 
objective, right? Did you find that? Was he just trying to 
create chaos, or did he want to put the thumb on the scale with 
his intervention for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?
    Mr. Roth. A bit of both, honestly. I think there was a 
significant amount of the troll activity on social media, in 
particular, that wasn't tilted one way or the other. It played 
both sides, and it played them off of each other, and I think 
that is bad for America and it is bad for democracy. I think 
the hack-and-leak campaign was a bit more skewed because that 
focused very specifically on the DNC and on John Podesta.
    Mr. Raskin. OK. And so, the hack-and-leak campaign against 
the DNC and Hillary Clinton was one meant to damage Hillary 
Clinton's campaign. Is that right?
    Mr. Roth. That is what most research concludes was the 
objective, yes.
    Mr. Raskin. All right. So, some people were suggesting that 
if the U.S. Government finds out about a malign foreign 
influence, disinformation, or propaganda campaign in our 
elections at any level, the government shouldn't say anything 
to the public or the news media about it. Well, what do you 
think about that proposition?
    Mr. Roth. I believe that would be a profound failure. I 
think there is a collective responsibility across the private 
sector and the public sector to address our shared threats, and 
Russian interference in American democracy is one of those 
shared threats.
    Mr. Raskin. OK. And Ms. Gadde, do you agree with that?
    Ms. Gadde. Yes, I do.
    Mr. Raskin. OK. And just back to you, Ms. Navaroli, for a 
moment. Did you follow the attempt to overthrow the official 
election result in Brazil?
    Ms. Navaroli. I was not working at Twitter at the time, but 
I paid attention to the news, yes.
    Mr. Raskin. OK. And were you struck by any of the 
resemblances between what happened in Brazil and what happened 
here on January 6?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes. It was the exact same playbook that was 
played on January 6 in which a ruling party claims that an 
election was stolen and that misinformation continued to spread 
and lead to political violence.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Fallon for five 
minutes.
    Mr. Fallon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know, if there is 
ever a time where our government becomes the sole arbiter of 
truth, then we have lost the United States. Twitter has become 
the virtual town square. It now has the power to transform 
public opinion like no other medium in history, with their 
algorithms shaping and molding the public mind to their own 
ends. Mr. Roth, to the best of your knowledge, what percentage 
of your colleagues, when you worked at Twitter, donated to 
Democratic causes or candidates in 2020?
    Mr. Roth. I don't know, sir.
    Mr. Fallon. We have it here. It was 98.4 percent of Twitter 
employees gave to Democratic candidates or causes in the 2020 
election cycle. And believe it or not, those numbers actually 
went up in the 2022 cycle to 99.7 percent of Twitter employees 
donating to Democratic candidates and causes, so clearly 
Twitter as a whole had a political bias. Mr. Roth, do you 
personally think that you have a political bias, and did you 
have one when you worked at Twitter, a personal political bias?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir.
    Mr. Fallon. You didn't. That is remarkable because it is 
pretty obvious you did have strong biases when you compared, 
ironically, using Twitter, people that worked in that Trump 
White House to Nazis. They were good folks that you simply 
disagreed with politically in our representative republic. And 
you compared them to the most evil people on the planet that 
murdered 60 million people, or at least were responsible for 
those deaths. You think that was a little bit hyperbolic?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, I do. As I said, I regret the language----
    Mr. Fallon. Yes, I agree. I agree with you. It was, and so 
your political opinion spilled over into censorship work at 
Twitter. I think your bias has had consequences, which you 
intentionally expressed through your propaganda and censorship 
role at Twitter. Additionally, you may have collaborated with 
U.S. intelligence community regarding stories that you all 
didn't want the public to see, so namely, what we refer to is 
the Hunter Biden laptop story that ran in the New York Post. 
So, I will ask you, Mr. Roth. Did you receive 10 confidential 
documents from special agent of the FBI, Elvis Chan, the night 
before the Hunter Biden laptop story ran?
    Mr. Roth. Yes.
    Mr. Fallon. You did. See, because it is interesting. The 
immediacy with which you all acted to censor the New York Post 
Hunter Biden laptop story seems to be very indicative of 
foreknowledge. Then the story was seismic, and it was rushed to 
be suppressed knowing full well it was not Russian 
disinformation as some here said. It was truth that was denied 
the American voter. And the Media Research Center polled 
Democratic voters in 2020 swing states and found that 70 
percent would have changed their vote if they had known the 
contents and evidence of the New York Post story. President 
Trump lost key states--Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and 
Wisconsin--by collectively just over 100,000 votes. And if this 
is accurate, this poll, 3.2 million votes could have swung, and 
he only needed a teeny fraction of those 3.2 million. That 
decision almost certainly changed the result of the 2020 
Presidential election. Did you have any idea of the contents of 
the New York Post story, Mr. Roth?
    Mr. Roth. Only what I read in the New York Post that day.
    Mr. Fallon. And then it was killed by Twitter, and the 
mainstream media followed. So, I find this interesting, in 2019 
candidate for President Joe Biden said, ``I have never spoken 
to my son about his overseas business dealings.'' And yet, the 
evidence in that story and on that laptop revealed that two of 
Hunter's Mexican business associates, Miguel Magnani and Miguel 
Velasco, visited the White House in February 2014, and he was 
later photographed. Joe Biden was photographed with them at the 
White House.
    Also, on October 2015, Hunter arranged a video conference 
with his dad, Joe Biden, sitting Vice President, and Carlos 
Slim, the Mexican billionaire. And then, unbelievably, in 2015, 
Hunter introduced his father, then Vice President, to Vadym 
Pozharsky, an executive at the now infamous Burisma Holdings 
company where Hunter would later magically make millions as a 
board member, despite having no experience whatsoever in the 
energy sector.
    Joe Biden lied. He created the firewall and then he was 
exposed because of this story and other information. He lied to 
the American people, and, Mr. Roth, you withheld information on 
the eve of a Presidential election, and you protected that lie. 
And I hope for the sake of the country that men like you that 
do those things, men and women, never get to put in such 
positions of power again.
    Mr. Jordan. Would the gentleman yield?
    And, Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask unanimous consent to 
enter into the record a tweet from Ranking Member Raskin. The 
tweet reads, ``It is horrifying to see images of Border Patrol 
agents whipping Haitian refugees at the Texas border. Not 
exactly the feeling I get from the''----
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Mr. Fallon. Thank you. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. Does the gentleman yield back? Does the 
gentleman yield?
    Mr. Fallon. Well, I just think that is misinformation or at 
least it was a mistake, and Twitter left it up for a week, or 
not a week, a year. A full year.
    Mr. Jordan. Does the gentleman yield?
    Mr. Fallon. I yield.
    Mr. Jordan. Mr. Baker, in the top of page two in your 
written testimony, you said, ``I did not destroy or improperly 
suppress''----
    Mr. Raskin. Whose time is this?
    Mr. Jordan [continuing]. ``Any documents at Twitter 
regarding information important to the public dialog.'' The way 
you worded that, it sounds like there is some----
    Voice. Mr. Chairman, how much extra time is he going to get 
during this hearing? He finished the question----
    Chairman Comer. He had time. Let him repeat the question, 
and then his time will be expired.
    Voice. It expired before he started.
    Mrs. Luna. Clearly, it is up to the Chairman, so why don't 
you let him answer?
    Mr. Jordan. Mr. Baker, on top of page two of your written 
testimony, you said, ``I did not destroy or improperly suppress 
any documents at Twitter regarding information important to the 
public dialog.'' The use of the term ``improperly suppressed'' 
suggests there was some kind of suppression done in a proper 
way. I just want to know what that was, and is this referring 
to your work at Twitter when the Twitter Files were first 
released just a few months ago?
    Mr. Baker. Unfortunately, sir, I think I am constrained 
from answering that question any more fully than in my 
testimony because of attorney-client privilege. So, 
unfortunately, I am just going to have to leave it at that.
    Mr. Jordan. I thought that has been waived.
    Mr. Baker. Not the privilege. Not the privilege. The 
nondisclosure agreement, my understanding has been waived, but 
not the attorney-client privilege.
    Mr. Jordan. I understand.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman's time has expired.
    Mr. Baker. I do not have anything in writing to indicate 
that Twitter has waived privilege with respect to that matter.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Ms. Crockett for----
    Ms. Crockett. Thank you, Mr. Chair. MAGA Republicans Can't 
Let go. That should be the name of this hearing. I am glad that 
seemingly we have now accepted that President Joe Biden won the 
election even though now we are blaming President Trump's loss 
on Twitter. Can we finally let it go? This is why Democrats are 
reinforcing that in this hearing we should be talking about the 
threats to our democracy. That is the real threat, not an old 
article that seemingly couldn't reach the viewership it sought 
through its own platform to disparage an attempt to skew the 
election in favor of a twice impeached former President who 
lost a secure and fair election.
    As a Texan who served in the House and fled the state as 
MAGA Republicans there pushed an agenda just as insidious as 
the foreign interference we experienced in the 2016 election, 
we should be talking about what they don't want to talk about 
as they continue to cut you off as you try to talk about things 
such as interfering with our democracy and how there has been 
an inciting of political violence against individuals as well 
as our democracy as a whole.
    We are supposed to live in the land of the free, and when 
some people are afraid of losing power, they engage in 
conspiracy theories and distractions such as Joe Biden, a 
candidate at the time, not a government actor at the time, 
colluded with social media to win. So, let me say thank you for 
showing up for this political theater. Unfortunately, the 
American people deserve better of its leaders. They deserve a 
robust conversation around the very real and very present 
threats to our democracy, the greatest democracy in this world.
    So, with that being said, let me be clear. I believe that 
there has been testimony previously by Ms. Navaroli--I hope I 
am not just killing your name right now--at some point, you 
stated, if January 6 and anything like it, that language, ``If 
we would have seen that happen in any other country, with any 
other leader, Twitter would have acted completely 
differently.'' It is my understanding from this statement, and 
correct me if I am wrong, that you almost felt as if Trump was 
treated differently, in fact, that you may have been of the 
impression that he was treated with more difference than other 
world leaders. Is that true?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes. As I testified earlier today, Twitter 
bent and broke its own rules in order to protect dangerous 
speech, like the tweets that were directed toward 
Representative Ocasio-Cortez.
    Ms. Crockett. And when we talk about bending, it is my 
understanding from another deposition that there were actual 
alarms that would go off if someone would access Trump's 
Twitter account other than, I believe, the CEO.
    Ms. Navaroli. It was my understanding that alarms would 
ring within Twitter if the account was accessed outside of a 
select group of individuals who had access to that account.
    Ms. Crockett. Are you aware of this being an ongoing 
practice for other individuals' Twitter accounts?
    Ms. Navaroli. At my time at Twitter, the former President 
Donald Trump's account was the only account that I did not have 
access to.
    Ms. Crockett. OK. So, we know that there weren't individual 
actors running around Twitter setting off alarms every other 
day. Is that correct?
    Ms. Navaroli. Not to my knowledge, no.
    Ms. Crockett. OK. Now, as we talk about January 6, because 
I think that is the only thing we should be talking about --
what I want to talk about, and anyone can answer this question, 
did you see a correlation between a rise in homegrown domestic 
white supremacy online, as it correlates to leading up to 
January 6?
    Ms. Navaroli. I can answer that. So, some of the things 
that we were seeing specifically on Twitter related to white 
supremacy fan-fiction. I mentioned earlier in my testimony that 
we saw things like people wishing that ``The Day of the Rope'' 
would occur. That comes from things like ``The Turner 
Diaries,'' which are, again, white supremacy fan-fiction.
    Ms. Crockett. You would also agree with me that it was 
clear that white extremists were seemingly triggered and 
activated to take action against our very democracy here at 
home by some of the activity that was going on, on Twitter, 
correct?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes, I believe so.
    Ms. Crockett. Now, just to make sure that we can summarize 
what we allegedly are here to talk about, you all would agree 
with me when I say that there was no physical damage or 
destruction to structures, limb or life, as it relates to this 
article, yet we do know that there was actual harm, physical 
harm as well as destruction that occurred as a result of 
January 6, correct?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes. People died on January 6.
    Ms. Crockett. Thank you. With that, I will yield the 
remainder of my time to Chairman Raskin, or Ranking Leader 
Raskin.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I would just use the 
second to ask unanimous consent to submit for the record an 
extraordinary article just published called, ``Twitter Kept 
Entire Data base of Republican Requests to Censor Posts,'' 
published on February 8, that was just published by Rolling 
Stone. So, for everybody's reading enjoyment, if people think 
it was biased against conservatives, this would lead us to 
believe it was definitely biased against liberals and 
progressives.
    Chairman Comer. I didn't have you pegged for a Rolling 
Stone reader, but without objection, so ordered.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Grothman.
    Mr. Grothman. First of all, just a comment. When we talk 
about the Pledge of Allegiance, one of the lines in there is 
``to the Republic for which we stand.'' Ben Franklin, when he 
was asked about our Constitution, he said, ``We give you a 
republic, if you can keep it,'' just two lines that maybe some 
people around here haven't heard. Now, this is kind of little 
story for the three of you on the left here. In January 2021, 
the Christian magazine, called The Daily Citizen, tweeted about 
President-elect Joe Biden's announcement that Dr. Rachel Levine 
was his nominee for assistant secretary of health. They 
commented that Dr. Levine is a transgender woman. This was 
banned from Twitter. Are you familiar with this story?
    Mr. Baker. I am not familiar with it, sir.
    Mr. Grothman. Do you have any reason why it would have been 
banned?
    [No response.]
    Mr. Grothman. OK. There are local talk radio hosts in my 
area, well-known media hosts out of the Madison/Milwaukee/Green 
Bay media market widely listened to. They were shadow-banned on 
Twitter. There are some very prominent doctors in the area that 
didn't agree perhaps with everything CDC or NIH said that were 
banned on Twitter. I would like you to comment on that because, 
you know, normally I think when people make a major health 
decision, they always like to get two separate opinions. And 
some of these doctors are wildly well respected, probably two 
of the most prominent doctors in Wisconsin, I thought outside 
the mainstream, and I think for thinking outside the 
mainstream, they were taken off your platform. Could you 
comment on why you would take somebody off a platform or why a 
distinguished doctor would be considered something that the 
public as a whole couldn't hear their version of events?
    [No response.]
    Mr. Grothman. No, you are not aware that anybody, any 
doctors who commented outside the mainstream version of what 
was going on with COVID, going on with the vaccine, going on 
with treatments, that there were people who disagreed with the 
NIH recommendations and you took them off of Twitter. You are 
not familiar with that?
    [No response.]
    Mr. Grothman. None of you are familiar with that?
    [No response.]
    Mr. Grothman. I will yield some time to Jim Jordan then.
    Mr. Jordan. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Baker, 
Mr. Roth earlier said he thought it was a waste of time for the 
FBI to be sending you accounts that they thought violated 
Twitter's terms of services and Twitter's policy. I was just 
curious. Did you ever tell Twitter executives or FBI 
acquaintances that the FBI had no legitimate interest in 
enforcement of Twitter's policy?
    Mr. Baker. Sir, again, I am going to give you the same 
answer I gave before. I think the advice that I was giving 
internally to folks would be covered by the attorney-client 
privilege, and as----
    Chairman Comer. Let me stop. Mr. Baker, although you are 
testifying today by subpoena, you nonetheless have raised 
attorney-client privilege to avoid answering this Committee's 
question. Congress does not recognize the common law attorney-
client privilege. With that, I am going to allow Mr. Jordan to 
ask the question again.
    Mr. Jordan. Well, there has been two questions I have asked 
that he has refused to answer. So let me, if I could, Mr. 
Chairman----
    Chairman Comer. Proceed.
    Mr. Jordan [continuing]. I will ask both again. I will go 
back to the one asked a couple minutes ago. Top of page two of 
your testimony, you said, ``I did not destroy or improperly 
suppress any documents at Twitter regarding information 
important to the public dialog.'' I would like to know what you 
are referring to that, you, in your mind, properly suppressed, 
and when that took place, specifically if it took place during 
the time that the Twitter Files were first being released just 
a few months ago?
    Mr. Baker. Again, sir, I think we have notified the 
Committee, and we have had these conversations with Twitter as 
well to try to resolve this issue prior to coming up here 
today. I don't have anything in writing that clears me in my 
ethical responsibilities to my former client with respect to 
answering questions that I think fall squarely within the 
attorney-client privilege. So, unfortunately, I don't think I 
can go beyond what I have said there already, sir.
    Chairman Comer. Unfortunately, Mr. Baker, your assertion 
that the attorney-client privilege, it is overruled as to this 
particular question and answer. So, would you please answer the 
question by Mr. Jordan?
    Mr. Raskin. And a point of order, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. State your point?
    Mr. Raskin. Well, as I understand it, because we just went 
through this in the January 6th Committee where multiple 
witnesses asserted attorney-client privilege, including people 
who weren't covered by it at all, ultimately, that is for a 
court to decide. So, I don't think there is anything we can do 
within this Committee at this point, unless I am missing 
something.
    Chairman Comer. We will give you one more chance to answer 
the question. If you don't answer it, then we will have to deal 
with it after the Committee hearing. Mr. Baker, could you 
answer the question?
    Mr. Baker. Yes, sir. I apologize, but I believe I have 
ethical responsibilities to my former client, and I don't think 
I can go beyond what I have said already, unfortunately.
    Mr. Jordan. Mr. Baker, you did suppress documents then 
that, in your language, was important to the public dialog?
    Chairman Comer. I am going to give you an extra minute, Mr. 
Goldman. You are next.
    Mr. Goldman. Oh, thank you very much.
    Mr. Baker. I am sorry, sir. Could you repeat the question?
    Mr. Jordan. Again, going on your written testimony. So, you 
did suppress documents at Twitter regarding information that 
was important to the public dialog? That is a ``yes'' or 
``no.''
    Mr. Baker. I am going to answer the question with the 
following sentence, which is right after that: ``At all times I 
sought to help my client understand and comply with its legal 
obligations.''
    Chairman Comer. OK. The gentleman's time has expired. I 
recognize Mr. Goldman for six minutes.
    Mr. Goldman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I understand that Mr. 
Palmer was asking some questions about some of my assertions 
about the removal of the Ukrainian prosecutor general. First, 
let's be clear. I did not say that Vice President Biden fired 
Mr. Shokin. It was official U.S. and European policy to 
encourage Ukraine to fire him, which they did. But he is right 
about one thing. What I say is not evidence, and neither is 
what any of our Republican colleagues say on the other side of 
the aisle. They may not like what these witnesses say, but the 
testimony of the witnesses is the evidence, not baseless 
statements without firsthand knowledge.
    But I urge Mr. Palmer, if he wants to understand what 
actually happened, to read the 300-page report that we 
published on the first impeachment investigation. There is a 
lot in there about Mr. Shokin. Luckily, though, he doesn't even 
have to do that. You can just read the New York Post story 
itself because in that story Shokin admitted that he never 
opened an investigation into Burisma. He claims to have had 
``specific plans to do so.'' Yes, sure.
    For two years, Rudy Giuliani had been peddling Viktor 
Shokin's bogus story, including with agents of Russian 
intelligence, and, Chairman Comer, if you question that, I urge 
you to look up Andrii Derkach. So, who was the sole source of 
the hard drive to the New York Post? Rudy Giuliani, and for 
these reasons, many journalists were highly skeptical. One 
reporter at the New York Post itself refused to put his name on 
the story. Fox News' Bret Baier said, ``The whole thing is 
sketchy,'' and both Giuliani and the Post refused to give the 
laptop to other journalists to verify and analyze it. In fact, 
Giuliani told The New York Times that he hoped that it would be 
published before it could be verified.
    So, what is the so-called authentication for this laptop? 
Well, Chairman Comer said in his opening statement that it is a 
subpoena to the computer repair shop owner, which happened over 
about a year before the New York Post story. But that is not 
the same hard drive that Rudy Giuliani received months later 
from that repair shop owner and passed along to the New York 
Post after he was in possession of it for several months.
    Now, Mr. Baker, based on your understanding of Russian 
malign influence campaigns, does Russian intelligence have the 
capacity to manipulate a hard drive?
    Mr. Baker. Yes.
    Mr. Goldman. So, it is possible that some of the materials 
on a hard drive could be authentic, and some could be altered, 
manipulated, or even added to the hard drive. Is that right?
    Mr. Baker. I believe so, yes.
    Mr. Goldman. Mr. Roth, you have testified today that 
Twitter was keenly aware of the hacking efforts by Russia in 
connection with the 2016 election, is that right?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Goldman. And those efforts, I believe you said, and 
correct me if I am wrong, by Russian intelligence to interfere 
in our electoral process continued up through and including the 
2020 election. Is that right?
    Mr. Roth. Russian efforts certainly continued through the 
2020 election and even through the midterms. I couldn't say 
specifically if it was military intelligence as was the case in 
2016, but certainly the Russian Government was involved.
    Mr. Goldman. So, let's run down what Twitter knew about 
this hard drive and this story when it was published. First, 
the sole source of the hard drive was Rudy Giuliani, who had 
been working closely with Russian intelligence agents 
throughout 2022. Second, Russian intelligence interfered in the 
2016 election and was actively trying to do it again, and 
third, numerous journalists, including at the New York Post and 
Fox News, raised suspicions about the hard drive, and they 
refused to allow an independent analysis and verification of 
it. Now, Mr. Baker, based on your experience in law 
enforcement, wouldn't this give anyone concerned about Russian 
interference in our elections serious pause?
    Mr. Baker. Well, I think, as reflected in the public 
record, at the time I thought there were great concerns on that 
side of the equation because, in part, with respect to all the 
things that had happened since 2016 with respect to the hack-
and-leak, or hack-and-dump issues. There were facts that 
indicated that the computer might have been abandoned and so 
on, which made it a very difficult case, which is why we are 
sitting here today talking about it.
    Mr. Goldman. Right, and there was a 24-hour delay in 
continuing to spread the publication of it. Isn't that right?
    Mr. Baker. Yes.
    Mr. Goldman. OK. You know, that is exactly what 51 former 
intelligence officials, many from Republican administrations, 
even the Trump Administration, said in that letter that is 
being distorted by Mr. Jordan and others at this hearing. Let 
me quote one paragraph of what they say: ``We want to emphasize 
that we do not know if the emails provided to the New York Post 
by President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani are 
genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian 
involvement, just that our experience makes us deeply 
suspicious that the Russian Government played a significant 
role in this case.'' And unless Twitter, like Special Counsel 
Mueller concluded about the Trump campaign in 2016, wanted to 
welcome Russian interference in an election, all of you sitting 
here today were entirely correct to be highly concerned about 
the legitimacy of this story. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Higgins for five.
    Mr. Higgins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to be 
yielding some time to my colleague, Mr. Jordan, here 
momentarily. But for the record, Mr. Baker, Ms. Gadde, Mr. 
Roth, Ms. Navaroli, are you here under the advice of counsel, 
and do you have counsel present?
    Mr. Baker. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Higgins. That was a yes?
    Mr. Baker. Yes, sir.
    Ms. Gadde. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Roth. Yes, I do.
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes, I was subpoenaed to appear.
    Mr. Higgins. That is good to know. I am glad you all have 
counsel present. Mr. Chairman, for the submission for the 
record I would like consent to submit the Twitter Files, dated 
December the 8th, posted by the New York Post regarding the 
suppression of conservative commentators. I would like that 
submitted.
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Mr. Higgins. Mr. Chairman, thank you. I would like to also 
submit for the record a timeline of events with cited sources 
outlining strong evidence of the Biden family organized 
criminal actions that would certainly indicate that we have 
crossed the threshold of reasonable suspicion. I would like 
this timeline submitted for the record.
    Mr. Raskin. Excuse me, Mr. Chairman. Where is that from, 
that timeline?
    Mr. Higgins. The timeline in my hand? I will get it to you 
shortly.
    Chairman Comer. Without objection.
    Mr. Higgins. Bottom line is that the FBI had the Biden 
crime family laptop for a year. They knew it was leaking. They 
knew it would hurt the Biden campaign. So, the FBI used its 
relationship with Twitter to suppress criminal evidence being 
revealed about Joe Biden one month before the 2020 elections. 
You ladies and gentlemen interfered with the United States of 
America 2020 Presidential election, knowingly and willingly. 
That is the bad news. It is going to get worse because this is 
the investigation part. Later comes the arrest part. Your 
attorneys are familiar with that.
    Mr. Chairman, I would like to spend five hours with these 
ladies and gentlemen doing depositions, surely yet to come, but 
for right now I yield the balance of my time to my colleague, 
Mr. Jordan.
    Mr. Jordan. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I think he 
made the right point, and I would just respond to our colleague 
from New York. You know, who knew the laptop was real? It was 
the FBI. They had it for, or maybe they had it for a year and 
just said, you know what, we are going to put it on the shelf, 
we are not going to look at it, but if anyone knows it is real, 
it is them. That is why I asked the question. Again, back to my 
colleague from New York when he was talking about it, that is 
why I asked the question earlier. I said, did anyone at the FBI 
or Mr. Baker know. Did Mr. Baker talk to any of those 51 former 
intel officials who sent the letter saying this has all the 
classic earmarks of a Russian misinformation operation? Maybe 
they could have checked with the FBI because the FBI had the 
actual laptop in their possession. So, I appreciate the 
gentleman from Louisiana. I think it is a great point that he 
made.
    Mr. Roth, I am going to come back to you on something we 
were at a few hours ago, and we are talking about this 
visibility filtering, which, in my mind, I understand to be 
something short of suspending and blocking the account which 
the user then knows has happened because there is a 
notification in a public way, like you did to Ms. Greene when 
you suspended her account. But there are other things, this 
search blacklist, that do not amplify that some kind of 
filtering that account that the user doesn't know about. And I 
asked the question earlier was there any bit of this visibility 
filtering that was hard-coded by Twitter employees into the 
account of specific users, and you hesitated for a while, and 
you said, well, you wouldn't use the term ``hard-coded,'' ``but 
it seemed to me like something like that went on.'' Can you 
elaborate?
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question. Twitter's visibility 
filtering system, as has been reported in the Twitter Files, is 
based on applying labels to user accounts. And so, in that 
sense, if the application of a label is what you meant by hard-
coded, yes, Twitter's systems did apply those designations to 
those accounts, but it was seldom the case that Twitter staff 
would manually individually go in and apply those labels 
directly to a specific account.
    Mr. Jordan. Were those labels and, therefore, that 
filtering done to any government officials, any elected 
officials where the user wouldn't know about?
    Mr. Roth. I don't know, sir. I didn't have access to my 
Twitter computer to any Twitter systems to prepare me to answer 
that question, so I----
    Mr. Jordan. I am just talking to your time there. In your 
experience there, do you know if that happened?
    Mr. Roth. It would not surprise me to know that visibility 
filtering labels had been applied to the accounts of elected 
officials.
    Mr. Jordan. So, visibility-filtered labels apply to the 
accounts, but the user doesn't know.
    Mr. Roth. Yes, so it was not Twitter's practice to notify 
users of the----
    Mr. Jordan. But you think that happened to elected 
officials and government officials?
    Mr. Roth. Again, I couldn't say for sure.
    Mr. Jordan. I appreciate it. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Mfume for five 
minutes.
    Mr. Mfume. Well, Mr. Chairman, it has been a long morning 
and afternoon, and at this point in time, there is an adage 
that says, everything that can be said has been said, except 
that not everyone has said it. So, if you will indulge me for a 
few minutes, I would just like to reflect on some observations 
having sat here and gone through this. And I am hoping and 
praying that this is not a problem in search of a solution 
because we are dedicating an awful amount of time here, and I 
don't want a few things to escape us.
    But having said that, I want to first associate myself with 
the remarks of Mr. Raskin, the Ranking Chair, his opening 
remarks, succinctly, I think, encapsulated, and put in place 
what many of us on this side of the aisle are feeling. And I 
also, as a point of personal privilege, would like to just 
express how many of us share the concern of the gentlewoman 
from South Carolina who indicated to her ongoing medical 
condition which she said she might have to live with the rest 
of her life. That just got me for a moment, and I wanted to 
make sure that that is on the record.
    Now, I disassociate myself with her remarks when she said, 
as did the gentlewoman from Georgia, ``God bless Elon Musk,'' 
and for me it is God bless my country, God bless my family, God 
bless my friends. Mr. Musk can take care of himself. I would 
also caution, if I might, all of us, but particularly the 
gentleman from South Carolina who said earlier that there is 
proof that Hunter Biden committed multiple felonies. The 
gentleman said that without offering anything for the record. 
And I know we are all covered by congressional immunity in 
terms of when we are on the floor and when we are in these 
committees, but sometimes we probably do not want to feed into 
hot rhetoric. I mean, we campaign in that kind of poetry, but 
we are elected to govern in prose, and when you do that, there 
is a different sense of responsibility that goes with all of 
us.
    Mr. Roth, I listened to you, and I feel bad that you were 
attacked, and, you know, you had to sell your home. You had to 
move your family. And I just want to remind you and remind 
myself that there are Members of this Committee who are also 
always under attack because of their race, or because of their 
surname, or because of their political affiliation. That kind 
of reckless incitement, I think, is best dealt with when you 
have content moderation. Otherwise, we gin up the rhetoric, the 
people who can't control themselves oftentimes don't, and then 
we see violence occurring against, whether it is Members of 
Congress through threats, or persons like yourself in the 
private sector.
    Ms. Navaroli, you in your testimony stated that on the 
morning of January the 6, that you sent lawyers a message 
warning them that your team was hamstrung by leadership. And 
two days later, when it looked like that might happen again, 
you asked management whether or not they wanted more blood on 
their hands. What was their response, and what did they do?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes, thank you for that question. On the 
morning of January 6, I did send that message to a Twitter 
lawyer specifically because I believed that Twitter was going 
to be facing liability for what was going to occur that day. I 
do not remember their exact response, but I do remember a 
response of confirming that the information had been received. 
Would you repeat the second question that you asked?
    Mr. Mfume. I wanted to know what was their response. What 
did they do?
    Ms. Navaroli. Nothing.
    Mr. Mfume. OK. You went on to say that in January 2020, 
after the United States assassinated an Iranian general, that 
the President at that time, Mr. Trump, decided to justify it on 
Twitter, and management literally instructed you to make sure 
that we were not about to start World War III on that platform. 
Is that correct?
    Ms. Navaroli. Yes, that did occur.
    Mr. Mfume. And what happened after that?
    Ms. Navaroli. It was up to me and my team to create what we 
called enforcement guidance, so a document that explained how 
we would apply our policies specifically related to content 
moderation in that specific instance. I believe the document 
was relating to foreign policy discourse.
    Mr. Mfume. So, my point here about content moderation on 
the front end prevents some of the crazy things we see on the 
back end. Mr. Chairman, I have from the Anti-Defamation League 
their latest report on murder and extremism in the United 
States, oftentimes fueled by the lack of content moderation, 
and I would ask unanimous consent to be entered into the 
record. And I also have the National Threat Assessment done by 
the Secret Service of our country. This was just released, and 
it talks about how 25 percent of all of these acts are being 
conducted by people who are not moderated, but who, in fact, 
end up breaking the law and threatening the lives of people. 
And I would ask unanimous consent that also be----
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Mr. Mfume. Thank you, sir.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Sessions for five 
minutes.
    Mr. Sessions. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. So, I will 
say God bless Elon Musk because I think I feel that way. It was 
Elon Musk that revealed data that uncovered a disturbing cabal. 
Let's be clear. We are here today because Twitter got caught, 
not because people want to admit mistakes got made, or perhaps 
because they got bought. If not for the Twitter Files released 
by Mr. Elon Musk, this activity we are discussing today would 
still be going on. It is no secret that the political bias of 
Twitter and their previous leadership bled into politics and 
merged that with practices of the company, and that is a big 
concern.
    But a bigger concern is where our government on a political 
basis by law enforcement becomes engaged in things that a 
timeline would show were not truthful. That is the concern. The 
fact that Twitter was working hand-in-glove with the Federal 
Bureau of Investigation and the intelligence community to 
suppress free speech and things that were not true is 
disturbing. That is why we are here today.
    So, Mr. Roth, I would engage you, if I could, for a minute. 
By the way, I want to compliment all four of you. You have been 
here all day. This is hard to do. You have kept your cool. To 
the best of your ability, you are expressing honesty. I admire 
that. Mr. Roth, can you please tell me about the meetings with 
the FBI? How many? Where did they take place? How do they 
accomplish what they wanted?
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question.
    Mr. Sessions. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Roth. Twitter met with the FBI, I would estimate, 
several dozen times over the course of multiple years. These 
meetings happened in person, in the Twitter office, in the 
offices of other technology companies, and at times, they 
happened virtually. We issued press releases about these 
meetings. They were not happening in secret. They were not 
anything that the public sector or the private sector strove to 
hide from anybody. But in these meetings, we used it as an 
opportunity to discuss the shared threats of foreign malign 
interference, to discuss the preparations that the public and 
private sector were implementing, and to use that as an 
opportunity to make sure that we were having open channels of 
communication about those malign interference threats.
    Mr. Sessions. Mr. Roth, did you at any time believe that 
the Bureau might not be honest about the things they knew and 
the information that they shared and passed to you?
    Mr. Roth. I would say I have a personal healthy skepticism 
about any type of law enforcement, but no, it was never my 
experience that representatives of the FBI were anything but 
forthright in those discussions.
    Mr. Sessions. Do you believe that they, today and looking 
back, misled you?
    Mr. Roth. I don't believe so, no.
    Mr. Sessions. So, you believe that the things which they 
told you, and looking back, are truthful even today?
    Mr. Roth. To the best of my recollection, yes.
    Mr. Sessions. So, the chance for FBI numerous times, dozens 
of times to meet with you, did you put out information of the 
substance when you said you provided the public with 
information? Did you discuss what those meetings were about?
    Mr. Roth. I believe the public statements were fairly high 
level and talked about preparations for upcoming elections in 
the United States. Any internal records or meeting minutes 
would be on my Twitter computer, which I don't have access to.
    Mr. Sessions. And does that reside, to the best of your 
knowledge, currently at Twitter?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, sir. I have returned all Twitter property to 
the company when I chose to leave.
    Mr. Sessions. Yes, and that would be a requirement, 
generally speaking.
    Mr. Roth. Yes.
    Mr. Sessions. So, you believe that the Bureau met with you, 
they did not mislead you, that you were as forthright as you 
could be to the public, and that you were playing the role that 
you felt like was responsible. Is that your testimony today?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, sir, it is.
    Mr. Sessions. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I yield 
back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back.
    Mr. Moskowitz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know, I am 
beginning to feel like a little bad for the Majority. Like, I 
just feel guilty because you guys have come today to try to 
prove that the Biden Administration, in coordination with 
Twitter, is impugning free speech, and the problem is, is that 
Donald Trump, he is just this thing that hangs around your neck 
because at every turn he undermines whatever credibility you 
want to have on this subject.
    I mean, Donald Trump and his Administration, it has been 
proven, reached out to Twitter to take down tweets that got 
under his skin. The tough guy, Donald Trump, right? He got 
called the ``B'' word. Let's reach out to Twitter. Let's get 
the tweet taken down. You guys have no credibility. You have 
none. Your own guy taking free speech off of Twitter. You know, 
I also don't understand this bipolar thing that you are doing 
with Joe Biden. So, every day you guys tweet out Joe Biden is 
boring. He is sleepy. Every day you say it on TV. Now you want 
to tell the American people Joe Biden is an international super 
mastermind along with his son Hunter. I mean, it is just 
bananas.
    You know, the Trump family is getting billions of dollars 
of loans from foreign governments by using their White House 
relationships. Any questions? Any questions on that? No, I 
didn't think so. You want to know if the Trump family made any 
money selling PPE during the pandemic out of the West Wing? Any 
questions about that? No, I didn't think so.
    But let's move on to Hunter Biden's laptop. Your leaker, I 
always love this by the way, you guys are against leakers 
unless they are leaking things you like. Your leaker, Matt 
Isaac, and I love it, you know. Have you seen this guy? I mean, 
he is like a RadioShack-dot-Matrix guy who copied files off a 
private citizen's hard drive, OK? That is who your entire 
theory is based off of, but I want to use his words.
    This is his own words, your guy, your leaker, the guy who 
gave you the information. ``There have been several attempts by 
several individuals to modify and insert fake data. I do know 
there has been multiple attempts over the past year-and-a-half 
to insert questionable material into the laptop to pass off 
information or disinformation as coming from the laptop.'' He 
continued. ``This is a major concern of mine because I fought 
tooth and nail to protect the integrity of the drive, and to 
jeopardize that is going to mean everything I sacrificed will 
be for nothing.'' Your guy, your leaker questioning the 
integrity of the information you guys are peddling. By the way, 
why isn't he here? Bring him here. Let's ask him questions. And 
why haven't we seen the hard drive? You guys aren't shy. Why 
won't you show it to the American people?
    Let's talk about Twitter. Let's talk about God bless Elon 
Musk. See these? God bless the guy who is allowing Nazis and 
anti-Semitism to perpetrate Twitter. We're in a 66-percent 
increase of anti-Semitism on Twitter since Elon Musk set it 
free. Mr. Chairman, I agree with you. It is not fair to say all 
conservatives are Nazis. That is preposterous. That is not 
true. But your Lord and Savior Donald Trump is having tea and 
dinner with them at Mar-a-Lago. Nick Fuentes right here, who is 
a picture that is tweeted at me all the time, saying Jews are a 
virus in response to my tweets, Donald Trump is having dinner 
with him, Nazis at Mar-a-Lago.
    And so, no, not all Republicans are Nazis, but I got to 
tell you, Nazis seem really comfortable with Donald Trump. So, 
I have questions about that, Mr. Chairman. Why is that? Why do 
I get these tweets? Let us talk about Kanye West, right, the 
Chairman of the Judiciary Committee for three months praising 
Kanye West. We love Kanye, right? A Nazi, clearly now. It took 
months for that tweet to come down. How come? I mean, these are 
things I would love to know. Is it because maybe they are your 
voters? I mean, they certainly aren't voting for me. I yield 
back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Langworthy for 
five minutes.
    Mr. Langworthy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Twitter files 
revealed the unrestricted power and censorship regularly 
exercised by the three witnesses in front of us today, Mr. 
Roth, Ms. Gadde, and Mr. Baker. Now, Ms. Navaroli, in your 
opening, you stated that too few people in companies have too 
much power. Well, I think you are right. The witnesses here 
today, they had too much power at Twitter, and they tried to 
play the role of God as they interfered with the natural right 
of the people to a free and fair election. Twitter knowingly 
suspended the New York Post's account, one of the most reliable 
conservative voices in the country, in fear that an honest 
story would swing the most divisive election in American 
history into the hands of their enemy, former President Donald 
Trump.
    Now, Mr. Roth, you were part of the secretive SIP-PES 
censorship team at Twitter, correct?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir. I am not sure what that refers to.
    Mr. Langworthy. Mr. Roth, the Twitter files reveal that you 
rarely adhered to company policy in making your censorship 
decisions. One reporter from the Twitter files called your 
group ``a high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing 
content rulings on the fly, often in minutes, based on guesses, 
gut calls, and even Google searches, in cases even involving 
the President.'' Do you recall making decisions in this manner?
    Mr. Roth. No, I do not.
    Mr. Langworthy. Can you explain the process for these quick 
decisions?
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question. I think the core of 
content moderation, whether it is fast or slow, begins with a 
written set of rules and policies, and that was the primary 
responsibility of my group at Twitter. It wasn't about making a 
one-off decision in the moment. It was about having a written 
and codified set of laws for the platform that we followed in 
each instance. In the vast majority of cases, content 
moderation decisions were not made by me, or by another 
executive, or even by a member of my direct team. They were 
made by hundreds of content moderators enforcing those rules 
again and again and again. The situations in which decisions 
would be escalated to senior executives were few and far 
between and largely related to the really hard gray area calls.
    Mr. Langworthy. So, Mr. Roth, as part of the ``Supreme 
Court of moderation at Twitter,'' did you have the final call 
over political censorship decisions?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir, I did not.
    Mr. Langworthy. Then who had the final call on these 
decisions?
    Mr. Roth. There was a team of people, some of whom are 
represented on this panel today, others not, who were involved 
in trying to make these decisions. But a portrayal that any one 
person held sort of supreme or ultimate authority over these 
decisions would misrepresent what the process was.
    Mr. Langworthy. So, your team labeled high-profile accounts 
as VITs, standing for ``very important tweeters.'' What was the 
threshold for being labeled as a VIT?
    Mr. Roth. That is an excellent question for which there is 
not a consistent answer. I don't think Twitter was particularly 
well put together on that definition.
    Mr. Langworthy. So, was the New York Post labeled a VIT?
    Mr. Roth. I believe the New York Post's account is 
verified, and verification conferred some of that status of 
being a VIT, but, again, the definitions here are a little 
squishy.
    Mr. Langworthy. Now, is it true that the Twitter comms 
director, Trenton Kennedy, said in regard to the Post story, 
``I am struggling to understand the policy basis for marking 
this unsafe?''
    Mr. Roth. Yes, it is my understanding that Mr. Kennedy said 
that.
    Mr. Langworthy. Was the New York Post story regarding 
Hunter Biden's laptop marked unsafe regardless of uncertainty?
    Mr. Roth. It is true that Twitter marked links to that 
story as unsafe in a number of our systems, which resulted in 
restricting people's ability to tweet it. That was the decision 
that Twitter reversed 24 hours later.
    Mr. Langworthy. Well, it is clear from this panel that too 
few people had too much power. The New York Post Twitter 
account was suspended in an attempt by Democrats and Big Tech 
to go ahead and play God and interfere in a natural, free, and 
fair election and the free flow of information. In this country 
the censorship is unbounded. The New York Post has been a 
reliable source for decades, including their coverage of the 
nursing home scandals in New York during the pandemic. Now that 
you and many others are gone from the company, there is hope 
that this platform will once again be a place where voices can 
be heard and respected, and it can return to be a town hall for 
all points of view, no matter if you agree with them or not, 
sir, and that our elections will never again be controlled by 
Big Tech. I yield back.
    Mr. Jordan. Will the gentleman yield?
    Chairman Comer. Will the gentleman yield to Jordan?
    Mr. Jordan?
    Mr. Langworthy. Yes.
    Mr. Jordan. OK. Thank you.
    Mr. Roth. In Missouri v. Biden, in your declaration to the 
FEC, you said, ``I also learned in these meetings with the 
government that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter 
Biden.'' Mr. Chan has testified in his deposition in that same 
case: ``In my estimation, we never discussed Hunter Biden 
specifically with Twitter.'' Who told you about Hunter Biden in 
these meetings?
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman's time has expired, but you 
can answer the question.
    Mr. Roth. My recollection is that a representative of 
another tech company may have mentioned it, but those meetings 
were several years ago. I truly don't recall.
    Chairman Comer. OK. The Chair recognizes Ms. Stansbury for 
five minutes.
    Ms. Stansbury. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to 
just start this afternoon by thanking our panelists who have 
been sitting here all afternoon, and many of the members of the 
public who are with us. I see a lot of tired faces out there, 
and I want to thank you all for spending your day with us. But 
I also want to start out by asking, what are we doing here in 
this Committee today? Why are we here? Why is this Committee 
devoting a day-long hearing to a political conspiracy theory 
that was planted in the media by Rudy Giuliani to support 
Donald Trump's reelection campaign?
    Of all the topics we could be focused on in this Committee 
to support the American people--how people are going to put 
food on their table at the end of the day, how we are going to 
address the economy, how we are going to address critical 
issues that are on people's minds every day--we are devoting an 
entire day to this conspiracy theory involving Twitter. Now, 
the mission of this Committee is to root out waste, fraud, and 
abuse, and to conduct oversight on behalf of the American 
people. And if you need any evidence of waste, fraud, and 
abuse, how about the use of this Committee's precious time, 
space, and resources to commit to this hearing? You know, I 
don't even understand why we are here right now. But I do want 
to clarify some key facts about what we have heard today, so I 
am going to get into it for just a few moments.
    Ms. Gadde, thank you for being here today. Mr. Baker. You 
have already stated publicly that Twitter's handling of this 
issue was a mistake. Is that correct? ``Yes'' or ``no'' is 
fine.
    Ms. Gadde. Yes, that is correct.
    Mr. Baker. I don't think I have stated that publicly yet, 
but that is what the CEO of the company said.
    Ms. Stansbury. Yes. And at the time, only weeks before, one 
of the most consequential elections of our lifetime, in 2020, 
Twitter made a decision based on policies put into place to 
protect the public from political disinformation and from 
foreign interference. Is that correct, Mr. Roth?
    Mr. Roth. Yes.
    Ms. Stansbury. In fact, the failure of Twitter and other 
social media companies to moderate political disinformation not 
only fueled its use in election tampering in 2018 but allowed 
for election denialism to run rampant in 2020, and that is 
exactly what led to the insurrection here on January 6 in the 
Capitol. So, Ms. Navaroli, I want to ask you--thank you for 
sitting here all day answering these questions--do you believe 
that Twitter has put into place policies that would adequately 
protect free speech but also protect the American people from 
another violent insurrection and the kind of hate speech that 
we are seeing run rampant right now on the platform?
    Ms. Navaroli. Thank you for that question. I cannot speak 
to Twitter's current policies because I have not worked there 
in quite some time, but I can say that my job at Twitter was to 
balance free expression and safety. And one of the things that 
I constantly pushed for was for us to include more analysis 
within that simple balancing act, and instead of asking just 
free expression versus safety to say free expression for whom 
and safety for whom. So, whose free expression are we 
protecting at the expense of whose safety, and whose safety are 
we willing to allow to go to the wind so that people can speak 
freely?
    Ms. Stansbury. Exactly right, because Twitter refused to 
sanction Donald Trump's account long before it was actually 
banned when violent rhetoric and other rhetoric was already 
being used on the platform. And, in fact, since the latest 
acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, the company's Trust and 
Safety Council, as represented here today, has been dissolved, 
and the accounts of individuals like Donald Trump who incited 
violence in the capital have been restored. And we are seeing 
anti-Semitism, hate speech, dangerous rhetoric, violence being 
put on Twitter every single day, election tampering, 
disinformation, violence, the attack on our Capitol. Mr. 
Chairman, that is what we should be holding oversight hearings 
on in this Committee.
    I have traveled to every corner of my district, and New 
Mexicans are depending on us to defend our democracy and to 
ensure that we are holding not only those who are committing 
waste, fraud, and abuse accountable, but ourselves. So, let's 
not waste the precious taxpayers' time and dollars holding 
hearings about Four Seasons' Landscaping-style conspiracy 
theories, and actually get to work for the American people.
    Chairman Comer. Would the gentlelady yield to a question?
    Ms. Stansbury. Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. All right. The Chair recognizes Mrs. 
Boebert for five minutes.
    Mrs. Boebert. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Matt Taibbi, a 
respected reporter who published much of the Twitter file said, 
``Twitter's contact with FBI was constant and pervasive as if 
it were a subsidiary.'' Now I want to better understand why he 
would suggest that. Mr. Roth, while at Twitter, how many 
meetings did you have with the FBI?
    Mr. Roth. I couldn't say for sure, but I----
    Mrs. Boebert. More than 10?
    Mr. Roth. That is a reasonable estimate.
    Mrs. Boebert. More than 20?
    Mr. Roth. I couldn't say for sure.
    Mrs. Boebert. More than 50?
    Mr. Roth. That seems a bit high.
    Mrs. Boebert. Many meetings with the FBI. Well, how many 
FBI agents worked at Twitter while you were there?
    Mr. Roth. I don't believe any active FBI agents.
    Mrs. Boebert. Former FBI agents, how many worked there 
while you were there?
    Mr. Roth. I am aware of perhaps two.
    Mrs. Boebert. Well, we know of at least nine because they 
started the BU group chat, BU for ``Bureau.'' Now, Mr. Roth, 
did the FBI ever ask you to share information, like users' 
communication data, without going through proper legal 
channels?
    Mr. Roth. No, they did not, and I would have refused if 
they had.
    Mrs. Boebert. That is correct. I see that you denied Agent 
Chan's request for access to Twitter's data feed. What's sick 
isn't that you would deny it. It is that the FBI would even ask 
you for the private data of American citizens without going 
through legal channels of the law. Now, I want to remind you, 
Mr. Roth, that you are under oath. Did the FBI ever ask you to 
do anything that was illegal or questionable legal?
    Mr. Roth. I am not a lawyer, but certainly not to the best 
of my recollection or knowledge.
    Mrs. Boebert. Now, from the hearing that I have been a part 
of today, it is almost impossible to tell where the FBI ends 
and where Twitter begins. We have Mr. Baker here, a former FBI 
agent, and there seems to be a revolving door between the FBI 
and Twitter itself. Even Mr. Baker said that there was no 
collusion with the Federal Government and Twitter, but, Mr. 
Baker, that is you. You are the collusion between the Federal 
Government and the FBI, and now this is such a problem because 
we are seeing censorship all over. Mr. Roth and Ms. Gadde, did 
either of you approve the shadow banning of my account, 
@laurenboebert? ``Yes'' or ``no.''
    Mr. Roth. No, I did not.
    Ms. Gadde. Not to the best of my recollection.
    Mrs. Boebert. Well, let me refresh your memory because on 
March 12, 2021, and, Mr. Roth, I know you looked at it because 
fascist Twitter 1.0 had a public interest exceptions policy, 
which means for Members of Congress to be shadow banned, it had 
to go before you, Mr. Roth. So, I will ask again, did you 
shadow ban my account? ``Yes'' or ``no.''
    Mr. Roth. Again, not to the best of my recollection.
    Mrs. Boebert. So, the answer is, Mr. Roth, yes, you did. I 
found out last night from Twitter staff that you suppressed my 
account for this tweet. It is a freaking joke about Hillary 
Clinton being angry that she couldn't rig her election. It is a 
joke. But in response, being the sinister overlords that you 
all are, you placed a 90-day account filter so I could not be 
found. And now we see here that Twitter staff said the 
visibility filter on my account excluded me from top searches, 
prevented notifications for non-followers, and much more. This 
is considered an aggressive visibility filter. You silenced 
Members of Congress from communicating with their constituents. 
You silenced me from communicating with the American people 
over a freaking joke.
    Now who the hell do you think that you are? Election 
interference? Yes, I would say that that was taking place 
because of you four sitting here. The Hunter Biden laptop story 
was suppressed. A sitting Member of Congress was suppressed. A 
sitting President was banned from Twitter. You know, I bet that 
Putin is sitting in the Kremlin wishing he had as much election 
intervention, interference as you four here today.
    We have heard about threats to democracy, well, about 
shutting down a duly elected Member of Congress. This is 
fundamental to our Nation's governance, and you all attacked 
that very foundation. 230 protections. Well, those are for 
publishers, not for editors, and it is clear you were not 
acting as publishers. You were acting as editors. And, Mr. 
Chairman, I think it is far past time that we remove 230 
protections for Big Tech platforms who are abusing this 
protection.
    And let me just say I am not angry for myself. I am not 
angry because I was silenced. I can reach out to Elon and to 
his staff, and I can see what's happened, and I can sit here 
today and hold you all in account. I am angry for the millions 
of Americans who were silenced because of your decisions, 
because of your actions, because of your collusion with the 
Federal Government. They can't reach out to Elon. They can't 
sit here today and hold you into account. We don't know where 
the FBI ends and Twitter begins, but I do want to thank Elon 
Musk----
    Mr. Raskin. Mr. Chairman, we're over 17 seconds.
    Mrs. Boebert [continuing]. For firing you four and saving 
free speech, and even Twitter. Mr. Chairman, I yield.
    Chairman Comer. The lady yields. She went over 24 seconds. 
I will give Ms. Porter 24 extra seconds.
    Ms. Porter. Well, I appreciate your indulgence, Chairman 
Comer, but I won't need it.
    So, today's hearing gaveled in at 10 a.m. For nearly six 
hours,----
    Voice. Power outage.
    Ms. Porter [continuing]. We have been going back and forth 
about this supposed suppression of a single news story from a 
single outlet for a single day. This hearing has been in its 
length nearly one-quarter of the amount of time that Twitter 
users could not share the link. We are spending almost as much 
time screaming about this as this was ever a problem. Look, 
criminal activity is always a concern. But if there is criminal 
wrongdoing on Hunter Biden's laptop, that is a matter for the 
FBI and our law enforcement agencies.
    Today's hearing is merely an exercise in misinformation and 
disinformation, a free-for-all hellscape. That is what now CEO, 
Elon Musk, said Twitter would become if the platform became a 
place where anyone could say anything with no consequences. It 
is unbelievable to me that I am quoting Elon Musk, but that is 
how ridiculous this hearing has become. The Oversight 
Committee, like Twitter or any other social media company for 
that matter, cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where 
anything goes. With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The lady yields back. Thank you.
    Mrs. Boebert. Mr. Chairman?
    Chairman Comer. Mrs. Boebert.
    Mrs. Boebert. I ask unanimous consent to submit two 
documents into the record, both from Twitter.
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Mrs. Boebert. Thank you.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mrs. Luna for five 
minutes.
    Mrs. Luna. Thank you, Chairman. Mr. Roth? Mr. Roth, have 
you communicated with government officials ever on a platform 
called Jira? ``Yes'' or ``no.'' Real quick answer. We are on 
the clock. ``Yes'' or ``no.''
    Mr. Roth. Not to the best of my recollection.
    Mrs. Luna. Not to your recollection? Great. If you did, in 
the event, communicate, who would have had access to this 
platform?
    Mr. Roth. That is the nature of my confusion.
    Mrs. Luna. OK.
    Mr. Roth. Jira is----
    Mrs. Luna. Did you ever speak to government officials on 
Jira regarding taking down social media posts?
    Mr. Roth. Again, not to the best of my recollection.
    Mrs. Luna. Can you explain to me why the Federal Government 
would ever have interest in communicating through Jira, mind 
you, a private cloud server, with social media companies 
without oversight to censor American voices? I want to let you 
know that this is a violation of the First Amendment, and the 
Federal Government is colluding with social media companies to 
censor Americans.
    Mr. Chairman, I ask for unanimous consent to submit these 
graphics into record.
    And Mr. Roth, I am going to refresh your memory for you. 
This flowchart behind me----
    [Chart]
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Mrs. Luna. Thank you, Chair. This flowchart shows the 
following Federal agencies, social media companies, Twitter, 
leftist, non-profits, and organizations communicating regarding 
their version of misinformation using Jira, a private cloud 
server. On this chart, I want to annotate that the Department 
of Homeland Security, which has the following branches: 
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, also known as 
CISA, Countering Foreign Intelligence Task Force, now known as 
the Misinfo, Disinfo, and Malinformation, MDM, this was, again, 
used against the American people; the Election Integrity 
Partnership, EIP, which includes the following: Stanford 
Internet Observatory, University of Washington Center for 
Informed Public, Graphika, and Atlantic Council's Digital 
Forensic Research Lab, and potentially, according to what we 
found on the final report by EIP, the DNC, the Center for 
Internet Security, CIS, a nonprofit funded by DHS; the National 
Association of Secretaries of state, also known as NASS; and 
the National Association of State Election Directors, NASED, 
and in this case, because there are other social media 
companies involved, Twitter.
    What do all these groups, though, have in common, and I am 
going to again refresh your memory. They were all communicating 
on a private cloud server known as Jira. Now, the screenshot 
behind me, which is an example of one of thousands, shows on 
November 3, 2020, that you, Mr. Roth, a Twitter employee, were 
exchanging communications on Jira, a private cloud server with 
CISA, NASS, NASED, and Alex Stamos, who now works at Stanford 
and is a former security officer at Facebook, to remove a 
posting. Do you now remember communicating on a private cloud 
server to remove a posting? Yes or No?
    Mr. Roth. I wouldn't agree with the characterization that 
this----
    Mrs. Luna. I don't care if you agree. This is your stuff. 
``Yes'' or ``no,'' did you communicate with a private entity, 
the government agency on a private cloud server? ``Yes'' or 
``no.''
    Mr. Roth. The question was if I communicated----
    Mrs. Luna. ``Yes'' or ``no.'' I am on time. ``Yes'' or 
``no.''
    Mr. Roth. Ma'am, I don't believe I can give you a ``yes'' 
or ``no''----
    Mrs. Luna. Well, I am going to tell you right now that you 
did, and we have proof of it. This, ladies and gentlemen, is 
joint action between the Federal Government and a private 
company to censor and violate the First Amendment. This is also 
known, and I am so glad that there are many attorneys on this 
panel, joint state actors, it is highly illegal. You are all 
engaged in this action, and I want you to know that you will be 
all held accountable.
    Ms. Gadde, are you still on CISA's Cybersecurity Advisory 
Council? ``Yes'' or ``no.''
    Ms. Gadde. Yes, I am.
    Mrs. Luna. OK. For those who have said that this is a 
pointless hearing, and I just want to let you guys all know, we 
found that Twitter was indeed communicating with the Federal 
Government to censor Americans, I would like to remind you that 
this was all in place before January 6. So, to say that these 
mechanisms weren't in place and to make it about January 6, I 
want to let you know that you guys were actually in control of 
all of the content, and clearly we have proof of that. Now, if 
you don't think that this is important to your constituents and 
the American people, from those saying that this was a 
pointless hearing, I suggest you find other jobs. Chairman, I 
yield my time.
    Mr. Mfume. Mr. Chairman, point of order.
    Chairman Comer. Sure.
    Mr. Mfume. Yes, I just want to call to the attention of the 
Chair and Members----
    Chairman Comer. Mr. Mfume, yes, you are recognized.
    Mr. Mfume [continuing]. We are getting awfully close to 
witness intimidation, and I would ask the Chair to intervene.
    Chairman Comer. I am sorry. I didn't hear what you said, 
Mr. Mfume.
    Mr. Mfume. I said I would caution all Members that we are 
getting very close to witness intimidation, right on the verge 
of it, and I would ask that the Chair and the Ranking Member 
agree how we will proceed from this point on. It was the 
threats that were just made.
    Chairman Comer. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman. And in 
follow up to that, I am curious about the Committee's rule or 
the Committee's disposition. Accusing witnesses of a crime, 
discussing arrest, you know, making these allusions and 
threats, I want to clarify for the record what is the 
Committee's policy around threatening a witness?
    Chairman Comer. We have the Member decorum.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And around the rules of decorum, can 
we----
    Chairman Comer. Yes.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez [continuing]. Agree that threatening a 
witness comes close to broaching general decorum? It does 
broach general decorum of the Committee?
    Chairman Comer. With all due respect, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, we 
don't agree that there was any witness threatening.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. When we discuss arrest, when we discuss 
a potential arrest of a witness and alluding to a witness or 
suggestion of a witness committing a crime without evidence and 
without documents being supported to the record.
    Chairman Comer. Can you be more specific?
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. When we talk about arresting a witness 
or when we talk about, insinuating that a witness is lying 
without documentation, I fear that this constitutes threatening 
a witness and that will broach the rules of decorum of this 
Committee, and I would like to ask that we request witnesses be 
treated with respect. Thank you.
    Chairman Comer. I appreciate that, and I will remind 
everyone of the Member decorum and witness decorum, to treat 
everyone with respect. Thank you, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Do you 
have anything to add?
    Mr. Raskin. No, thank you. I agree with you, Mr. Chairman. 
I have a separate point of order I just wanted to raise, which 
is it seems as if several Members now seem to have access to 
some information from Twitter that people on our side don't 
have, and I would just hope that anybody who has communicated 
directly with Twitter or received any information relating the 
witnesses who has that, who plans to use it, distribute to the 
Committee in advance. If that is OK.
    Chairman Comer. I think a lot of the quotes and emails are 
on the laptop.
    Mr. Raskin. But I think that at least one Member 
indicated----
    Chairman Comer. And the Twitter Files that Elon Musk had--
--
    Mr. Raskin. Well, one Member had indicated that she had 
received information directly from Twitter.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Edwards for five 
minutes.
    Mr. Edwards. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and to our witnesses, 
thank you for being with us today. I know it has been a long 
one. Just so that we are clear and to stage my next line of 
questioning, in December 2019, we have established that the FBI 
subpoenaed Hunter Biden's laptop from a computer store owner. 
And then we have established that nearly a year later in 
October 2020, the Hunter Biden laptop story is published by the 
New York Post. Within hours, Twitter and other social media 
companies began limiting the distribution of the Hunter Biden 
story. My question is for Mr. Roth. In September 2020, a few 
weeks before the New York Post published the first story on the 
Hunter Biden trading on his name, you participated in an 
exercise hosted by the Aspen Institute with other media 
outlets, social media companies, and national security 
reporters. Isn't that correct?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, I did.
    Mr. Edwards. And, Mr. Roth, that event was hosted 
specifically by the Aspen Digital Hack and Dump Working Group. 
Is that correct?
    Mr. Roth. I know it was hosted by the Aspen Institute. I 
couldn't say who specifically within that.
    Mr. Edwards. Mr. Roth, this event was before the release of 
the Hunter Biden laptop story, correct?
    Mr. Roth. That is my recollection, yes.
    Mr. Edwards. And during that event, a scenario that was 
discussed was a hypothetical, October 2020, release of records 
related to Hunter Biden. Is that correct?
    Mr. Roth. Again, that is my recollection of the event, yes.
    Mr. Edwards. And Mr. Roth, did you participate in the 
design of this hypothetical scenario?
    Mr. Roth. Not to the best of my recollection, no.
    Mr. Edwards. Are you telling me that you never had any 
conversation with anyone regarding the contents of this 
scenario?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir, I didn't say that. I met with the Aspen 
Institute on a number of occasions. I wouldn't say that I was 
involved in the development of the scenario in a specific way, 
no.
    Mr. Edwards. So, you are telling me that I will find no 
witnesses that would testify they had conversation with you 
regarding the development of this scenario?
    Mr. Roth. I genuinely could not say what other witnesses 
might or might not say.
    Mr. Edwards. Why was Hunter Biden chosen as the subject of 
this scenario just weeks before the October 14, 2020, 
publication of the first Hunter Biden story?
    Mr. Roth. I don't know.
    Mr. Edwards. But you participated in the conversation?
    Mr. Roth. I was invited to and joined an event hosted by 
the Aspen Institute, yes.
    Mr. Roth. And so surely there had to be some level of 
conversation as to why Hunter Biden was the topic in that 
scenario.
    Mr. Roth. Not that I can specifically recall.
    Mr. Edwards. Mr. Roth, representatives from Facebook 
attended this event also, correct?
    Mr. Roth. To the best of my recollection, yes.
    Mr. Edwards. OK. And, Mr. Roth, the FBI had Hunter Biden's 
laptop nearly a year before it was uncovered by the New York 
Post and before the Aspen Institute event. Did members of the 
U.S. Intelligence Community participate in the September 2020, 
Hunter Biden hack-and-dump exercise?
    Mr. Roth. I don't recall.
    Mr. Edwards. Mr. Roth, I would like to point you to a sworn 
statement that you previously made. I believe this was to the 
FEC. You have given a sworn declaration stating that ``Federal 
law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected hack-
and-leak operations by state actors might occur in the period 
shortly before the 2020 Presidential election, likely in 
October.'' Is this your statement?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, it was.
    Mr. Edwards. And, Mr. Roth, you said since 2008, in 2018, 
you had been meeting with the Office of the Director of 
National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the 
FBI, and industry peers regarding election security, correct?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Edwards. OK. And, Mr. Roth, you were told there would 
likely be a hack-and-leak operation occurring in October. Is 
that correct?
    Mr. Roth. I believe the FBI has objected to the word 
``likely'' or ``expected,'' but we certainly discussed that 
possibility with them.
    Mr. Edwards. All right. Thank you. Mr. Chair, I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Ms. Bush, for five minutes.
    Ms. Bush. St. Louis and I are here today to talk about the 
crisis posed by the power of private companies that operate 
social media platforms. Republicans are holding this hearing 
because of their ridiculous politically motivated obsession 
with Hunter Biden. This is a distraction from their inability, 
again, to govern, and it hides the shared concerns raised by 
Republicans and Democrats alike about the vast power, impunity, 
and lack of accountability of social media platforms.
    There are so many examples of these companies responding 
inadequately or inappropriately in crisis that we have come to 
understand misconduct as the norm for social media giants and 
not an aberration. Social media played a key role in fanning 
the flames of violence on January 6, that attack on our U.S. 
Capitol. The impact has spread all over the world. Last fall, 
after Reuters reported that disinformation about Chile's 
proposed constitutional referendum was traveling three times 
faster on social media platforms than facts, several Members of 
this Committee wrote to Meta, Twitter, and TikTok demanding 
further action to reduce the dissemination, reduce the lies, 
reduce the hate. They did nothing.
    Ms. Gadde, you were at Twitter on January 6 and asked 
repeatedly for a retrospective meeting to discuss what happened 
in the lead-up to that day. Management told you, ``It wasn't a 
priority for the company.'' Why was it not a priority for 
Twitter to learn lessons from January 6?
    Ms. Gadde. I don't believe you are referring to me. 
Apologies. I am the chief legal officer. I did not make that 
statement.
    Ms. Bush. OK. Ms. Navaroli?
    Ms. Navaroli. Would you mind repeating the question?
    Ms. Bush. Sure. On January 6, you were at Twitter and asked 
repeatedly for a retrospective meeting to discuss what happened 
in the lead-up to that day. Management told you it wasn't a 
priority for that company. Why was it not a priority for 
Twitter to learn the lessons from January 6?
    Ms. Navaroli. I can't speak to leadership's motivations or 
why it would not have been a priority for them. What I can say 
is myself and individual members of my team repeatedly asked 
that we do a retrospective to understand not just what happened 
on January 6, but leading into January 8 in the permanent 
suspension of the President.
    Ms. Bush. And what can you say is Twitter's top priority?
    Ms. Navaroli. I can't speak to Twitter's top priority at 
this moment. I can say that, again, my team's responsibility 
was to balance free expression in safety and to ensure the 
safety and lack of harm for people on the ground.
    Ms. Bush. Thank you. Twitter's top priority seems to be to 
maximize its profit. The people on this panel were among the 
top experts moderating content for equity and safety at 
Twitter, and your concerns were consistently steamrolled by 
executives pursuing profit. We know the situation must change, 
but I would argue that the structure of these corporations 
ensures this malpractice will continue. These social media 
companies have shown themselves unfit to maintain a digital 
public square with almost universal usage and vast power. Their 
purpose is not to facilitate healthy, fact-based discourse. It 
is to aggressively pursue profit for their billionaire 
executives and shareholders. Even when they make a good 
decision about removing a post or a user, it is only to make a 
profit.
    This existential problem will not be solved by asking these 
for-profit corporations to tweak their approach around the 
edges. We need to re-envision what the internet can be. Digital 
platforms, including social media, are here to stay, but we 
need to make sure that they operate for the public good and not 
the private interests. We need to invest in better alternatives 
to Big Tech, and we need to establish public ownership and 
control to ensure these platforms serve everyone fairly. Thank 
you, and I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Perry for five 
minutes.
    Mr. Perry. I thank the Chairman, and I thank the witnesses. 
It has been a long day. Mr. Roth, going back to your statement 
Mr. Edwards talked about, I want to just kind of revisit that a 
little bit where it was communicated to you, at least for your 
statement by the FBI, that there was expected hack-and-dump or 
hack-and-leak operations and that they would occur before the 
election. And at the bottom here, the meetings that were 
rumored that the hack-and-leak operation wound involve Hunter 
Biden. Well, first of all, who told you that? Can you tell us 
where you got that information, if you know?
    Mr. Roth. The subject of possible hack-and-leak was raised 
by a number of representatives of the FBI.
    Mr. Perry. Was one of them Mr. Chan?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, Mr. Chan was a part of that.
    Mr. Perry. OK. So, are you familiar with the fact that in 
his testimony in November 2022, that he says we did not see any 
similar competing intrusions to what happened in 2016. And of 
course, you have been talking to intelligence agencies and law 
enforcement agencies for some time, and they were referring to 
the 2016 hack-and-dump operation. Are you familiar that he said 
that subsequent to you saying this, that they didn't have any 
evidence?
    Mr. Roth. I was not aware of----
    Mr. Perry. OK. That is fair. That is fair.
    Mr. Roth [continuing]. Mr. Chan's deposition, no.
    Mr. Perry. Did they ever give you any evidence of the hack-
and-dump operation that happened in 2016? And what I think I am 
referring to is the allegation that the Clinton campaign, the 
DNC server was hacked and that that information was spread 
about through WikiLeaks or other information channels. Did they 
ever give you any evidence of that occurrence during these 
discussions?
    Mr. Roth. That information was made public by the 
intelligence community in the Mueller report and by the Senate 
Intelligence.
    Mr. Perry. Yes, evidence. Did they ever give you evidence 
because as far as we know, CrowdStrike looked at the servers. 
Did the FBI ever look at the servers from the DNC, to your 
knowledge?
    Mr. Roth. I think that would be a question better directed 
at FBI.
    Mr. Perry. Fair enough, but the point is, you never saw any 
evidence, right? You are just taking it on, and I am not 
blaming you because a lot of people want to believe the FBI. I 
have always wanted to believe the FBI. The question is, did 
they ever give you any evidence to believe that because they 
are making the case. They are making the case that there is a 
hack-and-leak operation coming, and it is going to be about 
Hunter Biden right before the election. Did they ever give you 
any evidence?
    Mr. Roth. It didn't come up.
    Mr. Perry. OK. I didn't figure it did, and then you all set 
up a secret channel between Twitter and the FBI. Who did that 
from the FBI? Was that Roth? You are Roth. Was that Elvis? I am 
sorry.
    Mr. Roth. Mr. Chan was part of that work, yes.
    Mr. Perry. Yes, he was part of that, and you actually set 
up a war room as well, right?
    Mr. Roth. I believe the FBI operated a war room.
    Mr. Perry. OK. Fair enough.
    Mr. Roth. I didn't join.
    Mr. Perry. And you participated in that?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir, I did not.
    Mr. Perry. You did not. Did Twitter participate in it?
    Mr. Roth. I believe Twitter may have sent a representative.
    Mr. Perry. OK. OK, fair enough. And then you did this 
tabletop exercise about Hunter Biden, and about a leak, about 
Hunter Biden that would come out right before the election, 
essentially 10 days, and that happened in September, right, 
before the election. And you participated in that right?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, I did.
    Mr. Perry. Who facilitated that exercise? I know the Aspen 
Institute, but who facilitated the exercise proper? Was anybody 
from a government agency facilitating any part of that? Were 
they involved in the discussions during the exercise?
    Mr. Roth. No. I don't believe so, no.
    Mr. Perry. So, they were just spectators?
    Mr. Roth. I wasn't aware that they were spectators either, 
but I don't recall exactly who was there.
    Mr. Perry. I know you don't recall who was there. Then who 
facilitated. Do you recall that?
    Mr. Roth. My recollection is that the event was facilitated 
by Garrett Graff, who was a member of the Aspen Institute and 
Aspen Digital.
    Mr. Perry. All right. Do you find it odd now after the 
fact? And I know you have already testified here to Mr. 
Sessions that you didn't see that you were misled or 
potentially duped. It sure seems highly coincidental. Would you 
agree, at least, it seems highly coincidental? Knowing that the 
FBI had the laptop, that the FBI set up the war room in the 
channel, and told you per your statement that this was going to 
happen, do you find it highly coincidental that it actually 
happened and it was Hunter Biden at all?
    Mr. Roth. I want to be clear that my statement to the FEC 
does not suggest that the FBI told me it would involve Hunter 
Biden. That is a popular reading of that declaration, but it 
was not my intent. I think there is a coincidence there, and I 
really can't speak as to how that came about.
    Mr. Perry. Yes, it is really coincidental. One last 
question. Did the CIA or the other governmental agency ever 
asked Twitter to look at something that violated Twitter's 
policy?
    Mr. Roth. I don't recall specific outreach by the CIA 
specifically.
    Mr. Perry. Other government agencies, what it was called in 
the Twitter files?
    Mr. Roth. Yes. Twitter regularly received reports from 
government requesting review under our own rules.
    Mr. Perry. So, the other government agency, that one, did 
they ever request information regarding violations of Twitter's 
policies, the CIA?
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman's time has expired, but 
please answer the question.
    Mr. Perry. I thank the Chair.
    Mr. Roth. Again, I don't recall specific contact from the 
CIA, no.
    Chairman Comer. OK. The Chair recognizes Mr. Burlison for 
five minutes.
    Mr. Burlison. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have sat here 
listening. I am glad to be last in rank. I get to listen to all 
the testimony. And what has become clear to me, there are a few 
things, and that is that the censorship efforts of the Big 
Tech, the intelligence community, and the media were all 
working in concert to affect the 2020 election. I find it 
unbelievably ironic, and I hope others do, too, see the irony 
that people who are so concerned, and hell bent, and worried 
about the interference of outside groups on the 2016 election, 
became willing participants to interfere in the following 
Presidential election.
    These three groups work together and, it is clear, works 
hand-in-hand to hide the truth from the American people. The 
fact that the FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop, it was in their 
possession for a year before the election, is appalling, but 
that didn't stop them from spreading a lie and a bogus claim 
about it being Russian interference again. And, you know, it is 
clear to me why they reached out to you because they knew you 
would buy the lie. They knew that an organization with 99 
percent of its employees donating to Democratic candidates and 
efforts would absolutely not look at any information with a 
jaundiced eye. You would take it as the gospel truth. And so, 
they knew that because it was clear from your tweets before 
that you have an opinion about the President. You have an 
opinion about the Republican Party. And so, all of that leading 
up to the October 14, 2020, when the New York Post published 
its story, everything was already in place.
    So, Mr. Roth, my question to you is when 51 intelligence 
officials told us that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian 
disinformation, the Democrats, the mainstream media, the 
President all repeated this lie. Now that you know what you 
know, years later, do you still believe that the Hunter Biden 
laptop is not real or do you believe it is real?
    Mr. Roth. Sir, I never held that belief.
    Mr. Burlison. Do you believe that the story is Russian 
disinformation?
    Mr. Roth. No, sir. I didn't then and I don't now.
    Mr. Burlison. OK. I have a question, Mr. Baker. You started 
your role as a Twitter's deputy general counsel in June 2020, 
correct?
    Mr. Baker. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Burlison. Who hired you for that role?
    Mr. Baker. Who specifically hired me? My boss was a person 
named Sean Edgett, who was the general counsel.
    Mr. Burlison. Sean Edgett?
    Mr. Baker. E-d-g-e-t-t.
    Mr. Burlison. And that is who you interviewed with?
    Mr. Baker. I interviewed with numerous people, but Sean was 
my boss.
    Mr. Burlison. Anyone that comes to mind outside of Sean?
    Mr. Baker. Ms. Gadde, I interviewed with. You are saying 
other people that I interviewed with at Twitter?
    Mr. Burlison. But ultimately the hiring agent was Sean 
Edgett?
    Mr. Baker. I am not sure exactly who made the decision to 
be frank with you, but Sean was my boss.
    Mr. Burlison. OK. My next question is when you were fired 
from Twitter in December 2022 after the release of the first 
installment of Twitter Files, did you destroy any internal 
communications related to that first batch on the Twitter 
files?
    Mr. Baker. As I said in my testimony, I didn't destroy any 
documents, period.
    Mr. Burlison. What reason were you fired?
    Mr. Baker. You will have to ask Mr. Musk about that.
    Mr. Burlison. You were not given any information?
    Mr. Baker. He made a public statement about it in a tweet, 
but I think you would have to ask him for the precise reason.
    Mr. Burlison. OK. Thank you. Back to Mr. Roth. Is it true 
that Twitter whitelisted accounts for the Department of Defense 
to spread propaganda about its efforts in the Middle East? Did 
they give you a list of accounts that were fake accounts then 
asked you to whitelist those accounts?
    Mr. Roth. That request was made of Twitter. To be clear, 
when I found out about that activity, I was appalled by it. I 
undid the action, and my team exposed activity originating from 
the Department of Defense's campaign publicly. We have shared 
that data with the world, and research about it has been 
published.
    Mr. Burlison. Was that only in efforts against foreign 
entities or were there any efforts against citizens of the 
United States?
    Mr. Roth. I think the nature of public social media 
activity means that anybody might have seen it, but my 
understanding was the activity was predominantly focused 
outside of the United States.
    Mr. Burlison. OK. Thank you. And, Mr. Chairman, I want to 
just say thank you for this hearing. I would hope that we would 
be asking for documents and communications, whether it is on 
personal devices or private devices, between these individuals 
and government officials.
    Chairman Comer. So noted. Very good. Thank you. The Chair 
recognizes Mrs. McClain, for five minutes.
    Mrs. McClain. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all 
for being here today. It is a long day. I am going to try and 
make this quick and easy. Mr. Roth, part of your job at Twitter 
dealt with assessing dis-and misinformation, correct?
    Mr. Roth. Yes.
    Mrs. McClain. Wonderful. How did you determine what 
disinformation and misinformation was? What is your criteria 
for making that decision?
    Mr. Roth. Twitter had established policies covering each of 
those areas, and I will take them in turn. We actually 
generally didn't use the term ``disinformation,'' but we 
focused on platform manipulation. So, behaviors like running 
inauthentic accounts out of a Russian troll farm we would 
address as the behaviors that they are, and we would look for 
technical signs of that type of manipulation, and we would 
remove those accounts.
    Mrs. McClain. So, it was all technical?
    Mr. Roth. On that side of things, yes.
    Mrs. McClain. OK.
    Mr. Roth. When it comes to misinformation, which broadly is 
a question of the content of tweets, Twitter would establish 
written policies.
    Mrs. McClain. Which was?
    Mr. Roth. I am sorry?
    Mrs. McClain. Which was?
    Mr. Roth. Which policies did Twitter maintain?
    Mrs. McClain. Yes. I mean, I think the problem with America 
is we have one set of rules for this team and another set of 
rules for this team, so we are trying to look at what is the 
equal playing field. I am under the assumption that when we use 
disinformation and we use criteria, the criteria is the same 
for both sides. So, I am trying to figure out what is the 
criteria that you had in place to determine which information 
was misinformation, and did you apply that equally, equitably, 
inclusively, so to speak to all sides. So, what is the 
criteria?
    Mr. Roth. Thank you for the question. We used a three-part 
test across all of our misinformation policies.
    Mrs. McClain. OK.
    Mr. Roth. The first is whether the tweet advances a claim 
of fact stated definitively, not an opinion, not a viewpoint, 
but a claim of fact stated definitively.
    Mrs. McClain. OK.
    Mr. Roth. The second part of that test is whether the claim 
of fact is provably false, not iffy, not maybe, not gray area, 
definitely provably by multiple experts' sources, false. And 
then finally, and this is a really important part, we looked 
for evidence that those claims of fact could cause harm. So, if 
a tweet met all three parts of that test, that it is a claim of 
fact, that it is provably false, and that it is dangerous, 
Twitter might intervene under its policies. No part of that 
test is viewpoint based.
    Mrs. McClain. And in your opinion, was that applied to all 
tweets?
    Mr. Roth. No.
    Mrs. McClain. Thank you. Mr. Roth, you are familiar with 
reports that the Biden Administration was considering 
establishing a disinformation governance board under the 
Department of Homeland Security?
    Mr. Roth. I am aware of public reporting about that, yes.
    Mrs. McClain. Thank you, and that board was never 
established, correct?
    Mr. Roth. That is my understanding.
    Mrs. McClain. That is correct. It seems to me that the 
Federal Government had far more powerful disinformation 
governance board in its relationship with Twitter. Again, Mr. 
Roth, question. How often were you meeting with people from the 
Federal Government while you were at Twitter? Weekly, daily, 
monthly?
    Mr. Roth. I would estimate somewhere between weekly and 
monthly.
    Mrs. McClain. OK. And were you aware that Mr. Baker was 
also taking these meetings with the Federal Government as well?
    Mr. Roth. I was not aware of Mr. Baker's calendar, no.
    Mrs. McClain. So, you had no idea that he was meeting? You 
just worked in silos?
    Mr. Roth. Mr. Baker and I were in some of the same meetings 
together, but no, I did not know the ins and outs of what he 
was doing.
    Mrs. McClain. OK. What did you understand Mr. Baker's role 
to be at Twitter besides offering general legal advice?
    Mr. Roth. Mr. Baker supervised the primary legal team that 
advised the Trust and Safety team. He was the supervisor of the 
supervisor of the attorneys who advised my team.
    Mrs. McClain. OK. And how about Ms. Gadde's role at Twitter 
besides offering general legal advice?
    Mr. Roth. For the final, I believe, year-and-a-half of my 
tenure at Twitter, Ms. Gadde was my direct supervisor.
    Mrs. McClain. OK. What was her role? Just to supervise you? 
To make sure you followed those three claims?
    Mr. Roth. Ms. Gadde supervised what my team's goals and 
objectives were. She made sure I was doing my job. She made 
sure that if there was conflict in the workplace, she guided me 
on how to address that. She did the job of a manager.
    Mrs. McClain. OK. And she oversaw you and the Trust to make 
sure that your three claims of fact--provable, false, and would 
cause harm--she oversaw that?
    Mr. Roth. Yes. Ms. Gadde ultimately oversaw Twitter's 
policies and enforcement decisions.
    Mrs. McClain. Thank you. Mr. Roth, in Ms. Navaroli's 
testimony, she states that her expertise is in media 
technology, law, and policy. How often per week did you meet 
with Ms. Navaroli to discuss these areas while you were both at 
Twitter?
    Mr. Roth. We did not.
    Mrs. McClain. You did not. OK. Thank you so much.
    Chairman Comer. The gentlelady's time has expired.
    Mrs. McClain. Thank you.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. LaTurner, for five 
minutes.
    Mr. LaTurner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Based on everything 
I have seen regarding this issue, it is clear to me that 
government officials colluded with Twitter employees to censor 
the New York Post's legitimate reporting of the Hunter Biden 
laptop story. Democrats on this Committee have so far 
characterized this hearing is unnecessary and a waste of time. 
I would invite any of my colleagues across the aisle to talk to 
folks in Kansas because I can promise you, they do not feel 
that way. In fact, my constituents are very concerned and 
rightfully so, that a social media company collaborated with a 
government entity and a political party to suppress certain 
social media accounts and filter news ahead of an election 
cycle. Americans deserve answers on this outright attack on our 
First Amendment rights, and I look forward to gaining clarity 
from our witnesses.
    Mr. Baker, your testimony focuses heavily on the fact that 
Twitter acted lawfully in its reaction to the Hunter Biden 
laptop story, but this isn't a criminal trial. It is a 
congressional hearing. I am here because my constituents are 
genuinely concerned that they will be kicked off these 
platforms for any statement that managers at those companies 
disagree with. They feel that social media companies, like 
Twitter, are forcing them to play a game that they don't know 
the rules to. I want to know your opinion on if you think it is 
appropriate for people in positions of power to determine what 
information gets shared. If not, what criteria is acceptable 
for making those determinations?
    Mr. Baker. That is a very broad question on people in 
power. I am not sure I can answer that effectively and address 
your----
    Mr. LaTurner. Could you try?
    Mr. Baker. Well, I mean, the Congress is in power. Congress 
is restricted by the Constitution of the United States. 
Congress passes laws. Those laws impact how, for example, 
private sector actors exercise their power or spend their 
money, that type of thing. Government agencies have to act in 
accordance with the Constitution. The laws you pass, internal 
regulations, executive orders, there are a whole panoply of 
ways that people in power, writ large, are held accountable and 
have to comply with rules and regulations, and laws, and the 
Constitution.
    Mr. LaTurner. Mr. Chairman, I would like to yield the rest 
of my time to Mr. Jordan.
    Chairman Comer. Yield to Mr. Jordan.
    Mr. Jordan. I thank the gentleman. Mr. Roth, I want to go 
back to your statement in your declaration of the FEC, ``I 
learned that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter 
Biden.'' Who did you learn that from?
    Mr. Roth. My recollection is it was mentioned by another 
technology company in one of our joint meetings, but I don't 
recall specifically whom.
    Mr. Jordan. You don't know the person's name?
    Mr. Roth. I don't even recall what company they worked at, 
no. This was a long time ago.
    Mr. Jordan. And you are confident that it was from a tech 
company, not from someone from the government?
    Mr. Roth. To the best of my recollection, yes.
    Mr. Jordan. Did anyone from the government in these 
periodic meetings you have, did they ever tell you that a hack-
and-leak operation involving Hunter Biden was coming?
    Mr. Roth. No.
    Mr. Jordan. Did Hunter Biden's name come up at all in these 
meetings?
    Mr. Roth. Yes, his name was raised in those meetings, but 
not by the government, to the best of my recollection.
    Mr. Jordan. OK. Mr. Baker, I want to go back to the 
question we had a few hours ago, but I want to frame it in a 
way I think you can answer. Did you ever tell the FBI that they 
had no legitimate interest in enforcement of Twitter's 
policies?
    Mr. Baker. I don't think I understand the question. I don't 
recall ever having such a conversation with the FBI.
    Mr. Jordan. OK. Did you think there was a problem with the 
FBI sending you a list of names and accounts and saying, hey, 
these violate your policies? Did you see that as some kind of 
potential concern?
    Mr. Baker. I was always concerned that the FBI adhere to 
the Constitution and laws of the United States, period.
    Mr. Jordan. And you didn't think that crossed the line?
    Mr. Roth. What crossed the lines, sir?
    Mr. Jordan. What I just asked you, the idea they are 
sending you a list of account that they want--they say these 
violate your terms of service.
    Mr. Baker. Again, I am making sure that I can answer the 
question. Had I thought that they were doing something 
unlawful, I would have taken appropriate steps to address it.
    Mr. Jordan. OK. Mr. Roth, based on what I read in the 
Twitter files, why were you reluctant to work with the GEC?
    Mr. Roth. It was my understanding that the GEC, or the 
Global Engagement Center of the State Department, had 
previously engaged in at least what some would consider 
offensive influence operations. Not that they were offensive as 
in bad, but offensive as in they targeted entities outside of 
the United States. And on that basis, I felt that it would be 
inappropriate for Twitter to engage with a part of the State 
Department that was engaged in active statecraft. We were 
dedicated to rooting out malign foreign interference no matter 
who it came from, and if we found that the American Government 
was engaged in malign foreign interference, we would be 
addressing that as well.
    Mr. Jordan. Yes.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman's time has expired. In 
closing, I want to, again, thank our panelists for being here. 
I know it has been a long day. We apologize for the electricity 
going out. That has never happened in my six years in Congress. 
But before we close, the Ranking Member and I are going to have 
very brief closing statements.
    I yield to the Ranking Member.
    Mr. Raskin. Well, thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman. Thank you 
to the witnesses for your endurance and patience today. I hope 
you don't feel as bad about the day as you seem to look right 
now, but it is going to be over soon.
    I want to start with a simple point that I hope will be 
sympathetic to you, and I began the long day with this. It is 
even more important now that we have Members who are actually 
threatening witnesses with arrest and prosecution for clearly 
imaginary offenses, really offenses that might make sense in 
their minds, but I don't quite know what they would be. But 
Twitter is a private First Amendment protected media entity, 
and you make your own decisions, like Fox News makes its 
decisions. And I might get kicked off of Fox News, or they 
might not cover me, or Wall Street Journal, or MSNBC. I have 
got no constitutional right to go there, so I think there is 
just a fundamental legal fallacy and logical fallacy that 
pervades most of the questioning today.
    And my friend, the Chairman, and my friend, Mr. Jordan, 
certainly know that under our First Amendment, there is a state 
action requirement. There is no state action here. Now, there 
is 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?
    Well, today's witnesses, each and every one, testified that 
no U.S. Government official directed any of them to censor, 
remove, or take down the New York Post story. That was their 
mistake. Two, today's witnesses all testified that 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 that the FBI directed Twitter to take down the New 
York Post story to protect Biden, but, once again, not a single 
witness testified that the FBI even communicated with Twitter 
about the New York Post story.
    So, to me, 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, who said that the 
violence and the chaos that was reaped 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 Twitter, at least, the brass there 
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 is a serious 
problem that we are going to have to deal with at some point at 
a serious hearing. Mr. Chairman, I yield back to you.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields. I will conclude by 
reminding my friend, the Ranking Member, that you have gone 
through quite the transition. At the beginning of the hearing, 
you as well as many of your colleagues said this was a 
conspiracy theory. After listening to the witnesses, now you 
say it is a simple mistake they made in suppressing the laptop 
story. Twitter is a private company, but they enjoy special 
liability protections, Section 230. They also, according to the 
Twitter Files, receive millions of dollars from the FBI, which 
is tax dollars, I would assume, and that makes it a concern of 
the Oversight Committee.
    The reason that we had this hearing is because the laptop 
has been mislabeled by many in the mainstream media as being 
Russia disinformation, and that started with Twitter, as well 
as being tampered with, and you had several people, including 
Mr. Goldman, that implied that it had been tampered with, even 
though CBS News and other credible media outlets----
    Mr. Raskin. What do you mean, mainstream outlets?
    Chairman Comer. CBS?
    Mr. Raskin. Yes.
    Chairman Comer. You don't think CBS is credible?
    Mr. Raskin. No, I thought you were just calling them 
``mainstream media.'' Oh, OK.
    Chairman Comer. No, no, CBS News. CBS News has done a 
forensic audit that shows that the hard drive is legitimate, 
and it was not tampered with. So, these are misconceptions that 
are out there, and they started because of the suppression of 
the laptop story. The reason the laptop is important is because 
there is evidence on there that should concern every American 
about potential corruption, as well as evidence that would 
suggest that there is a possibility that this Administration 
could be compromised because of the millions and millions of 
dollars that they have received from our adversaries around the 
world. And we believe that is worth investigating. We believe 
national security is important.
    We had a hearing yesterday on our border. We believe there 
is a crisis at the border, and it threatens our national 
security. We had a hearing today. We believe that we need to 
make sure that this Administration is not compromised because 
of the millions of dollars that they have received from our 
adversaries around the world. Much of that evidence is 
contained in the laptop.
    So, I think this was a very successful hearing. I 
appreciate the witnesses' time. I know it was a very long day, 
and, again, we have never had the electricity go out before, 
but we appreciate your sincere testimony.
    And with that, and without objection, all Members will have 
five legislative days----
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Mr. Chair? Mr. Chair? Mr. Chair? I 
apologize. It has come to my attention that I have to seek a 
unanimous request in order to submit some additional documents.
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you. Apologies.
    Chairman Comer. With that, and without objection, all 
Members will have five legislative days within which to submit 
materials and to submit additional written questions for the 
witnesses, which will be forward to the witnesses for their 
response.
    If there is no further business, without objection, the 
Committee stands adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 4:12 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]

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