He’s the Forrest Gump of the Democrats’ never-ending effort to get Donald Trump, popping up at key junctures to lend a black-gloved hand to the cause. And now he’s looking for work.
James Baker, who shares a name and little else with former President Reagan’s legendary adviser, was a top FBI lawyer in 2016 when the bureau shamefully tried to frame Trump as a stooge of Russia. He helped get two absurd lies started by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign into the bureau’s bloodstream and opened the entire Trump operation up to secret surveillance.
The first ridiculous lie Baker helped spread was that Trump communicated with the Kremlin by sending mysterious bat signals from Trump Tower to a Russian bank, and the other one was that a dossier full of phony dirt on Trump was legit. Baker can take a bow for his central role in ginning up a $32 million investigation that went nowhere and hamstrung an entire presidency.
Now, Baker has resurfaced at Twitter, where we – and new owner Elon Musk – are only just learning of his continued efforts to throw sand in the gears of transparency. After leaving his FBI gig in 2017, Baker did a short stint at Lawfare, the Democratic Party’s dirty legal tricks headquarters, then took a seven-figure job as Twitter’s deputy general counsel in June of 2020.
In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 6, 2022
Three employers, but the same basic job: Get the Orange Man while covering up tracks and wiping fingerprints.
It was Baker who advised Twitter not to allow sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 election. Polls suggest the laptop story, broken by the New York Post and full of shocking evidence of the younger Biden selling his father’s influence, would have swung the election if social media platforms Twitter and Facebook, together with legacy media outlets, hadn’t squashed it. But Baker wasn’t done sabotaging free speech from inside Twitter, even though he is now.
When Musk turned over the platform’s internal communications to a pair of respected journalists, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, so they could raise the curtain on Twitter’s partisan, swamp-directed “content moderation,” Baker sprang into action one last time. Since Musk hadn’t yet rooted him out, Baker was the one in position to screen the communications given to Taibbi and Weiss.
Taibbi’s bombshell first review of the behind-the-scenes deliberations that led to killing the laptop story showed Twitter’s old regime looking hapless and corrupt. The Democrats appeared to dictate the platform’s social justice warriors’ every decision. Baker let one email through that he undoubtedly thought portrayed him as a wizened attorney, out to protect the company.
“It’s reasonable for us to assume that they may have been [hacked] and that caution is warranted,” Baker opined about the laptop to Twitter’s social justice warriors.
Astute observers like Miranda Devine, the indefatigable New York Post reporter and author of “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide,” noticed there was a dog that wasn’t barking in the first tranche of emails, texts, and Slack messages pored over and poured out by Taibbi.
Where was the FBI?
Yoel Roth, whose job at Twitter involved silencing conservatives and bore the absurd title of “global head of safety & integrity,” had already let slip that the FBI had warned Twitter that the laptop story was coming, claiming that it was a Russian disinformation operation.
“I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter,” he said in a Dec. 21, 2020 sworn declaration to the Federal Election Commission. “I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
That jibes perfectly with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s August revelation to podcast king Joe Rogan that the FBI had warned the company just before the 2020 election that a “dump” of “Russian propaganda” was on the way.
Yet nothing in the first batch of Twitter files implicated the FBI. If you find that suspicious, so did Musk. He “exited” the FBI operative post haste, allowing him to join fan favorites Ligma and Johnson on the sidewalk outside Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.
With the fox out of the henhouse, we may soon see more proof of the FBI’s complicity in burying the Hunter Biden laptop story. As for seeing more of James Baker, tune in to MSNBC. They’re probably reviewing his resume right now.