The federal agents who told Facebook* to look out for "Russian disinformation" ahead of the publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election made donations to the Democratic Party that same year, the Washington Free Beacon has discovered, citing a court filing and Federal Election Commission receipts.
Laura Dehmlow, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and Elvis Chan, chief of the FBI San Francisco office’s cyber division, were “involved” in communications which ultimately led Facebook to take measures to snuff out the story on the then-Democratic presidential candidate's son, the filings show.
“Pursuant to the third-party subpoena, Meta has identified the FBI’s FITF, as supervised by Laura Dehmlow, and Elvis Chan as involved in the communications between the FBI and Meta that led to Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story,” the court document states.
The campaign finance record showed that Chan gave a total of $100 to Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia in 2020, while Dehmlow gave six separate donations totaling $60 to the Democratic National Committee.
US social media companies acted swiftly at the FBI’s request to prohibit or limit the sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop story after the New York Post published its first piece in October 2020, just weeks before the election.
In an interview with Joe Rogan in August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the FBI contacted Facebook to “be on high alert” for “Russian propaganda” ahead of the Post’s publication of the laptop story, with the company subsequently “decreasing” its distribution on its platform, resulting in “fewer people [seeing] it than would’ve otherwise.”
The revelations about the FBI agents’ donations to the Democratic Party come amid long-standing allegations by GOP lawmakers of bias against Republicans and former president Donald Trump by the domestic security service.
During the period between October 2020 and the spring of 2022, the New York Post and other conservative-leaning and alternative media resources were the only ones that reported on the laptop, with major liberal newspapers and networks including the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and MSNBC staying silent or publishing stories “debunking” the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden as some kind of Russian plot.
WaPo and the NYT admitted that the laptop was real only in March of this year after carrying out “forensic analyses,” a year-and-a-half after the story broke.
Hunter Biden’s laptop contains hundreds of thousands of emails, photos, videos, text messages and other files, including embarrassing and potentially incriminating evidence of his cavorting with prostitutes, terrorizing his ex-wife, doing crack cocaine, and organizing business deals between foreign businessmen and his powerful politician father.
Dozens of references to payments made to a mysterious “big guy” and “pops” in the emails may indicate his dad's direct involvement in the illegal pay-to-play arrangement, with former Hunter business associate Tony Bobulinski telling media that Joe Biden is indeed the “big guy” mentioned in the communications.
Republican lawmakers have promised to launch a formal Congressional probe into the Biden family’s business activities, including alleged “influence peddling” in nations which are subject to US sanctions, after the midterm election in November.
“The whole reason we’re investigating Hunter Biden is because we know that he’s a national security threat and we fear that he has compromised Joe Biden,” Republican Representative James Comer told Fox News on Monday.
Hunter Biden is already being probed by feds over alleged tax crimes in an investigation that began in 2018. Last week, US media reported that the government had obtained “sufficient evidence” to formally charge the 52-year-old with tax crimes and lying about his drug abuse to buy a handgun.
* Facebook and its parent company Meta are banned in Russia as extremist, terrorist organizations.