New Twitter Files raise question of how independent pre-Musk company was from Biden administration

Where did the Biden administration end and Twitter begin?

The latest batch of the Twitter Files, reported by former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker from records turned over by the Elon Musk-owned company now called X, shows a curious timeline in the first couple months of Democratic President Joe Biden's term.

Within two weeks of the inauguration, the company covertly hired a "global strategic advisory and commercial diplomacy services" firm cofounded and chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to seek State's help dealing with censorship pressure from India.

On the two-month anniversary of the Biden administration, Politico reported on a new "blob" that had formed from alumni from the firm, Albright Stonebridge. At least 10 had taken top foreign-policy jobs including United Nations ambassador, deputy secretary of state, two undersecretaries of state, and deputy national assistant security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Another became chief of staff to the now-Democratic nominee for president's husband, first gentleman Doug Emhoff.

3) Politico reported around this same time that 10 of Biden’s top foreign policy crowd came from Albright Stonebridge.

“The Blob” pic.twitter.com/L4Ve1DxOYP

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) August 22, 2024

The new tranche of internal emails "calls into sharp question claims by Democrats," including House Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee ranking member Delegate Stacey Plaskett, "and their allies in the media that Twitter did not collude with federal agencies and was free from Biden administration pressure to make its own censorship decisions," Thacker wrote.

"India censoring of social media drove Twitter right into the arms of [a] lobby shop of foreign policy experts staffing the Biden administration," he said. "How can a company [be] reliant on government advice and help make decisions independent of that same government?"

Plaskett represents the Virgin Islands and touts her bipartisan bona fides by noting she started as a George W. Bush administration Justice Department lawyer, but gave the GOP fodder by demanding Twitter Files journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger turn over their sources, as the Federal Trade Commission had demanded of Musk after he opened the files.

At a hearing on the Twitter Files last year, Plaskett claimed that "real evidence showed that there wasn’t coordination between Twitter and the federal government," referring to a previous hearing with former Twitter executives. 

"That’s just laughable" now, Thacker wrote. "Twitter was highly reliant on the advice and help of the Biden administration and their allied lobbyists to manage problems in India, Twitter’s third largest market."

Plaskett's office didn't respond to a query about how she perceives pre-Musk Twitter's relationship with the Biden administration in light of the new evidence.

Before her passing in 2022, Albright was also a board member on the Atlantic Council, whose Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL) partnered with State's Global Engagement Center on the "U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge against disinformation and propaganda" in fall 2021.

GEC funded the Atlantic Council, which in June 2021 sent Twitter a spreadsheet of tens of thousands of accounts for removal, for purportedly "engaging in inauthentic behavior" supporting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party "and Hindu nationalism more broadly" – regarded as India's version of Donald Trump's MAGA by American liberals.

Twitter's then-trust and safety chief Yoel Roth, who admitted using disappearing-message apps in communications with federal officials and complained about censorship pressure from the FBI, had mocked the accuracy of the DFRL list and a GEC Chinese list.

Yet "executives began collaborating with the State Department to address censorship in India, even as the State Department and their grantee the Atlantic Council pressured Twitter to censor," Thacker wrote.

DFRL was additionally one of four principals on the Department of Homeland Security-conceived Election Integrity Partnership that mass-reported purported election misinformation to social media platforms for suppression starting with the 2020 cycle.

Just the News reporting brought heavy scrutiny on the public-private collaboration, which this May said it had actually shuttered after the 2022 election, and Benz wrote a report on it too.

The Supreme Court's skepticism this spring that federal pressure to censor was unconstitutional apparently prompted the feds to start communicating with social media again about election misinformation, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., told reporters a couple weeks before the partnership's belated disclosure of its shuttering.

"The Atlantic Council has 7 CIA directors on its board, is funded by the Pentagon, the State Dept & cut-outs like the National Endowment for Democracy," former Trump administration State Department official Mike Benz recently noted on X.

The group gave international pop star Dua Lipa its "Distinguished Artistic Leadership Award" in 2021 "for using her activist voice & reach to promote NATO’s political objectives in the Balkans," Benz said. Her sensual performances show "how effective this … NATO soft power technique… can be [sic]."

I do feel, for science, I need to drop this in the thread for fellas to appreciate how effective this… NATO soft power technique… can be pic.twitter.com/M9jKpgML8l

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) August 23, 2024

The new Twitter Files tranche is particularly relevant because Musk's critics have portrayed him as a hypocrite for "bending to foreign governments’ call to censor their own citizens" while claiming the Biden administration was censoring Americans, Thacker said.

Unlike Musk's recent decision to shut down X in Brazil to protect his legal representative from imprisonment for refusing to suspend accounts, he previously gave in to India's demands to censor Modi's critics on X when the government also threatened to jail its local executives.

Nearly four months before pre-Musk Twitter publicly pushed back on India's demands to censor accounts critical of its COVID-19 response early in spring 2021, its new lobbyists at Albright Stonebridge asked Deputy Assistant Secretary for South Asia Laura Stone for help.

Senior Vice President John Hughes asked whether Stone could join a breakfast club with Global Head of Public Policy Monique Meche to "avoid any further escalation" with India, possibly through the U.S. Embassy's intervention.

2) “This is John Hughes from Albright Stonebridge Group, the commercial diplomacy firm founded by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright,” wrote Twitter’s lobbyist to a senior official at State.

Twitter was seeking “advice” and help. pic.twitter.com/uqwsQ6jNCa

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) August 22, 2024

A May 24, 2021, email from Meche asked Stone to "meet with us again for an update" on India's actions against Twitter. Days after the platform marked a tweet by the national spokesperson for Modi's party "manipulated media," police told Twitter's head in the country to be available for an investigation, then visited its Delhi office.

This followed "emergency blocking orders" for removal of more than 100 tweets criticizing the government's COVID response, Meche told Stone, who responded that State was trying to reach the embassy for more details and asked whether Meche wanted to talk that day or the next.

Twitter already talked to the embassy, Meche said. A flurry of emails between Twitter and State staff followed over the next 40 minutes, and Vinod Kannuthurai in State's Office of India Affairs told Twitter's Heather Lenar to send State officials a calendar invite for a half-hour from then.

Stone and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Kara McDonald would be on the call, Kannuthurai said. Thacker noted the email thread is marked “sensitive but unclassified.”

President Biden later nominated Stone as ambassador to the Marshall Islands and McDonald as ambassador to Lithuania, and both were confirmed.