Musk fires Twitter lawyer over alleged role in censoring Hunter Biden laptop story

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has fired company general counsel James Baker over his possible role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.

"In light of concerns about Baker's possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today," Musk wrote in response to a Tweet from alternative journalist Matt Taibbi that included an article on Baker's history with federal investigations.

Baker was formerly the FBI's general counsel and was one of several federal officials to push the now-discredited Steele Dossier as part of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

The Tesla founder went on to assert that he had given Baker a chance to explain himself, but that "[h]is explanation was ...unconvincing."

Musk and Taibbi have recently begun to release the "Twitter Files," a series of internal documents and communications outlining the platform's censorship practices, to which Democrats enjoyed preferential access. Beginning last Friday, Taibbi started posting screenshots of email conversations between Twitter executives and political groups in which they coordinated the deletion of posts with which said groups took issue.

Part of that document dump was a series of emails, including Baker, in which top-level Twitter executives discussed their censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story. The New York Post, ahead of the 2020 presidential election, published an article that included damaging information on the Biden family recovered from Hunter's laptop.

In the released documents, Baker advocated that the firm should assume the information came from hacked materials, but asserted that the platform needed more information to justify its throttling of the article.