Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker is in critics’ sights now that his firing by Elon Musk has disclosed his role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election.
Baker was one of the voices urging the company to prohibit the tweet because it wasn’t clear if it was based on hacked material, a violation of Twitter’s content policy.
“We need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked,” Baker wrote at the time in an internal email, according to a Wired report.
The laptop tweet, which linked to a New York Post story, alleged a compromising email communication between then-Vice President Biden’s son and a Ukrainian official.
Although some evidence pointed to the contents of the laptop having been hacked, Baker said, other evidence suggested otherwise, so the prudent move was for Twitter to assume the worst. “Caution is warranted,” he said, according to the Wired report.
The company later admitted it was a mistake to suppress the story, but critics saw it as yet more evidence social media platforms have a left-leaning bias.
‘Twitter Files’
Baker's role in the decision was revealed as part of a controversial move in early December by Musk to release internal company communications about the suppressed laptop story to bloggers, including Matt Taibbi, who published the first installment of the release in a lengthy Twitter thread.
After the release, which he dubbed the “Twitter Files,” Musk announced he was firing Baker, citing his possible role in suppressing information, although he didn’t give specifics behind the decision.
Musk didn’t say if the suppression was in connection to Baker’s role in blocking the laptop story or, as some reports speculated, for making unauthorized redactions in the email communications that he had released to the bloggers.
“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 tweeted on Tuesday.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, took issue with Musk’s release of the internal communications, saying it could put employees involved in content moderation at risk by people who don’t like the decisions they make. It “puts them in harm’s way and is a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do,” he said, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Investigative role
Baker is a former general counsel of the FBI. He was the agency’s top lawyer when it was investigating whether Russia was trying to influence the 2016 presidential election, but he was reassigned in 2017, after Donald Trump won office and appointed Christopher Wray FBI director. He left the agency a year later, took a position as a senior fellow at Lawfare, a national security newsletter published by the Brookings Institution, and then joined Twitter in 2020.
“Jim is committed to our core principles of an open internet and freedom of expression,” Sean Edgett, Twitter’s general counsel at the time, said in announcing his hire.
Baker’s years at the FBI put him in the center of the agency’s Russia investigation, giving fodder to critics of Twitter’s suppression of the laptop story.
He was part of the team that had sought a surveillance warrant of one-time Trump campaign advisor Carter Page that relied partly on the controversial Steele Dossier, the intelligence report compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, funded by the campaign of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
Baker was also involved in a politically sensitive matter involving statements made by a former lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign about computer data showing a link between the Trump campaign and a Russian bank, and he reportedly was the subject of an investigation by the Department of Justice about another matter.
“So the General Counsel at the FBI during the Russia Hoax was also the General Counsel at Twitter during the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, where he helped cover it up,” Lori Mills, a California state assembly candidate who lost her race last month, wrote on Twitter, Wired reported. “See a pattern?”
Other comments stemming from Musk’s release of the internal emails treated Baker as part of a biased cover-up.
Decimated ranks
Baker’s firing means Twitter has few senior attorneys left in its legal department since Musk instituted wide-ranging layoffs shortly after he took over.
According to a Bloomberg Law report, the company has lost more than half its lawyers and, with Baker gone, it might only have one deputy general counsel in a leadership role, Regina Lima, who oversees legal matters for the company’s international operations.
The legal department had between 150 and 200 lawyers before Musk took over.
“The loss of so many seasoned attorneys has led to concerns about whether enough legal expertise remains in-house,” the Bloomberg report said.
Alex Spiro of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan is reportedly the top lawyer now. The company’s previous chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde, and Edgett, the former general counsel, were both let go on Musk’s first day as owner.
Baker couldn’t be reached for comment, and Twitter has reportedly shut down its communications department.
