Search Results: intelligence

https://www.yahoo.com/news/house-gop-opens-hunter-biden-103000184.html
House Republicans’ Hunter Biden Probe Begins With a Thud

House Republicans failed in the opening salvo of their investigation into the finances of Joe Biden’s family to produce evidence substantiating their claims that US intelligence officials worked with Twitter Inc. to suppress an unflattering 2020 news story on the president’s son.

Former Twitter Inc. officials testified Wednesday that their decision to limit the spread of the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s now-infamous laptop and his overseas business dealings was, in hindsight, a mistake. But they said they weren’t directed by the FBI or other US intelligence officials, and the action wasn’t politically motivated.

Many of the documents Republicans displayed at the House Oversight hearing were from the so-called “Twitter Files,” a series of reports shared by journalists who were invited by Elon Musk to examine Twitter’s handling of controversial decisions made under the company’s previous leaders. The first installment of the Twitter Files focused on the company’s treatment of the New York Post story.

Musk gave the journalists access to company emails and Slack messages, and many of those messages were then published on Twitter. Most of the reports suggest without evidence that Twitter made decisions based on demands or pressure from the FBI and the Biden campaign.

“I think you guys wanted to take it down,” House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, who also sits on the Oversight committee, said of the story, which was published just weeks before the 2020 election that then-President Donald Trump lost to Biden. “I think you got played by the FBI.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mccarthy-formally-blocks-schiff-swalwell-005632370.html
McCarthy formally blocks Schiff, Swalwell from Intel panel

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Tuesday formally rejected two Democrats — Reps. Adam Schiff (Calif.) and Eric Swalwell (Calif.) — from serving on the House Intelligence Committee, escalating the two-year tit-for-tat battle between the parties over who is qualified for certain positions on Capitol Hill.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N. Y.) had written to McCarthy on Saturday asking that both Schiff and Swalwell be seated on the Intel panel, where membership assignments come solely at the discretion of the Speaker.

But McCarthy said Schiff’s and Swalwell’s previous actions make them unfit to serve on a panel with jurisdiction over and access to sensitive issues of national security.

“In order to maintain a standard worthy of this committee’s responsibilities, I am hereby rejecting the appointments of Representative Adam Schiff and Representative Eric Swalwell to serve on the Intelligence Committee,” he wrote in a letter to Jeffries on Tuesday.

Republicans have been up in arms over the issue since 2021, when Democrats staged votes to remove GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Paul Gosar (Ariz.) from their committees following revelations that they had promoted violence against some of their Democratic colleagues. The eviction votes came after McCarthy declined to punish either lawmaker internally within the GOP conference, which is typically where such disciplinary actions are meted out.

Still, McCarthy on Tuesday denied that his decision regarding Schiff and Swalwell was retribution for Greene and Gosar.

“This is not not anything political. This is not similar to what the Democrats did,” McCarthy told reporters on Tuesday evening just outside his office in the Capitol.