Trump shocked by evidence of FBI role in social media censorship: 'Rigging the election'

Former President Donald Trump still has a reverence for the FBI, even after the Russia collusion debacle and Mar-a-Lago raid. But he's adamant the bureau needs to be banned from meddling in elections by pressuring social media firms to censor Americans' opinions.

In a wide-ranging interview Tuesday with Just the News, America's 45th president said it was "shocking to me" when Twitter released internal files showing the extent of FBI efforts to censor content during the 2020 election, including the creation of a command center in San Francisco just for that mission.

"You always want to love the FBI and all you know it stands for, the image of what it stands for," Trump told the John Solomon Reports podcast and "Just the News, No Noise" television show on Real America's Voice.

"And then you see where the FBI was actually rigging the election," he continued, "where they were suppressing bad news on Biden and they say push the good news on Biden, and the exact opposite on me."

A poll released last month found three quarters of American voters believed they lacked "critical" information about Hunter Biden's laptop during the 2020 elections, and half would have voted differently if they had know the Biden scandal allegations were authentic.

The poll showed more than two-thirds of voters believed the FBI and U.S. intelligence deliberately misled the public by urging Facebook and Twitter to stop spreading the laptop stories by portraying them as foreign "disinformation."

Trump said the FBI's role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story still needs to be more thoroughly investigated. But he said the bureau's impact through censorship on the election was exacerbated by a news media that leans left and refuses to challenge establishment narratives even when contrary evidence surfaces. "The media is just so corrupt," he said.

"If you have a story that's positive about Trump, they just won't write it, and if you have a story that's positive about Biden, or some Democrat or whatever, that side of the equation, they make it, you know, front page news," Trump said, insisting that media coverage this week of the discovery of classified documents in Joe Biden's private office was underplayed compared to the raid last August on his Mar-a-Lago compound or the original Russia collusion allegations from 2016-17.

"A report came out yesterday that, by the way, showed the influence of Russia over the election was tiny," he said. "There was nothing. It was nothing. It was all a big hoax, it was a scam. It's a witch hunt. And it continues to this day. But I think that this new revelation on Biden with the highly classified documents is a tough thing for them. I don't know how they handle that one."