Miranda Devine: Questions Must Be Answered on Ex-Twitter Lawyer James Baker’s Role in Censorship Scandals

Let’s award 3.14159 stars to Elon Musk for firing Twitter’s lawyer, James Baker, Tuesday.

But there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered about the role of Baker, the FBI’s former Russiagate protagonist, in — not one, but two — censorship scandals.

First, having been parachuted into Twitter conveniently five months before the 2020 election as deputy general counsel and vice president, Baker played an instrumental role in the censorship of The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020.

Second, Baker was involved in the potential suppression of material that Musk ordered released from Twitter’s files last Friday to reveal who was involved in killing The Post’s story and thus preventing derogatory material about candidate Joe Biden from being disseminated widely. The “most important data was hidden [and] may have been deleted,” Musk says.

When Musk asked Baker what he was up to, “his explanation was . . . unconvincing.”

Musk claims he realized only Sunday that Baker had intervened to suppress “information important to the public dialogue.”

But it was obvious Friday that someone had excised mention of the FBI from the “Twitter Files,” and it wasn’t hard to guess who, once you realized Twitter’s lawyer was Baker, who had been the FBI’s top lawyer involved in every one of the bureau’s Russia-collusion plots against Donald Trump. It’s hard not to see his role as a gatekeeper planted at Twitter to ensure information helpful to Trump’s re-election never saw the light of day.

Jack Dorsey, the genius inventor of Twitter, posed a question Wednesday that cut to the heart of Musk’s halting efforts to expose the truth.

“If the goal is transparency to build trust,” tweeted Dorsey, who still owns a small stake in the social-media company and quit as CEO last year, “why not just release everything without filter and let people judge for themselves? Including all discussions around current and future actions? Make everything public now.”

Musk, who paid $44 billion for Twitter in October, leading wags to say he bought a “crime scene, not a company,” replied to his predecessor eight hours later.

“Most important data was hidden (from you too) and some may have been deleted, but everything we find will be released.”

Musk’s promise is good news, and it’s a bit rich for Dorsey to be demanding transparency now, when he was in charge in 2020 when Baker was hired and when the subterfuge was occurring ­under his nose.

But we do need more than haphazard Twitter threads curated by Substack journalist Matt Taibbi, who was deputized by Musk to ­release the Twitter Files.

Taibbi’s claim that he had seen no “government involvement in the laptop story” rang alarm bells because we know that the FBI “pre-bunked” the laptop story during weekly meetings with Twitter before the election.

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then-head of site integrity, has stated in a sworn declaration that the FBI warned them to look out for “hacked” material, likely in October, involving Hunter Biden. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg similarly has admitted the FBI warned Face­book about an impending “dump” of Russian disinformation that “fit the pattern” of The Post’s Hunter Biden story. Time for Zuckerberg to come clean.

There also is mounting evidence from whistleblowers, and from Senate Republicans, that the FBI colluded with congressional Democrats through 2020 to protect Joe Biden from proof of his involvement in his family’s corrupt ­international influence-peddling scheme.

Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley have disclosed that they were ambushed by two FBI agents on Aug. 6, 2020, with a bogus “defensive briefing” to “falsely attack [as] Russian disinformation” their investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial connections to China and Ukraine. News of the FBI briefing was then leaked to Democrat-friendly media successfully to discredit, in advance, their accurate and prescient Sept. 23, 2020, report “Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Corruption: The Impact on U.S. Government Policy and Related Concerns.”

Three weeks after that report was released and ignored by a media primed by the FBI to believe it was “Russian disinformation” came The Post’s story and its immediate censorship by Face­book and Twitter, citing a new “hacked materials” policy.

This is why Musk’s promise to reveal the inner workings of the censorship of The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story is so important for mounting a case of FBI corruption.

Catch up on Twitter’s censorship of The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story

We know that Baker weighed in on the side of censorship when Twitter executives were frantically discussing how to handle The Post’s story on Oct. 14, 2020, but we don’t know the full extent of his influence.

Is there evidence he was communicating with people at the FBI or anyone connected to the Biden campaign? What other evidence is there of FBI interference?

When the White House was asked about the Twitter Files, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre airily dismissed the scandal as “old news.”

The president’s response has been more flagrant. He has been flagrantly parading his son in front of the cameras.

There was Hunter strolling the streets of Nantucket with his ­father. There he was on the White House balcony watching fireworks. There he was on Marine One returning from a weekend with dad at Camp David, where journalists have no access to visitor logs.

There he was in a tuxedo at the White House, glad-handing guests at the French state dinner last week, and there he was shmoozing with Hollywood celebrities at the Kennedy Center Honors events Sunday.

But nothing changes the fact that the FBI credibly now stands accused of interfering in the 2020 election on behalf of Joe Biden and conspiring to violate the First Amendment.

FBI Director Chris Wray and his boss, Attorney General Merrick Garland, have been oddly silent about this grave allegation.

If it is not true, they should say so, and reassure millions of concerned Americans that the FBI is not a corrupt arm of the Democratic Party.

The problem is that the FBI is the lead agency in the US tasked with investigating election interference. So who will investigate the FBI?

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