U.S. Representative James Comer (R-KY), Chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, speaks at a media event at the National Press Club on Jan. 2023 in Washington, DC.
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House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., raves about it Twitter owner Elon Musk on Wednesday for “transparency” about the tech background.
“God bless Elon Musk,” Comer said in an interview on “ink pot.” He called the controversial mogul “a great American.”
Comer’s comment came just a few days later Musk visits Washington and met with Republican leaders in the House of Representatives for more than an hour, a group that included Comer.
They also come just a week before Comer is set to chair the first major congressional hearing on Twitter since Musk bought the company last year and since Republicans took control of the House.
On February 8, the House Oversight Committee will hear from three former Twitter executives about what Comer called “the government’s role in stopping the Biden laptop story.”
Notably, Comer did not say he would investigate Twitter’s role in the alleged crackdown.
Musk’s glamor attack on Capitol Hill appears to be limited to Republican and White House officials.
Musk initially stated that he had “met” with Democratic House Minority Leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, NY
Just met @SpeakerMcCarthy & @RepJeffries to discuss making sure that [Twitter] is fair to both sides,” Musk tweeted on January 26.
But an aide to Jeffries later said this is not what happened.
Jeffries ran into Musk on his way out of McCarthy’s office and was introduced to him. So while McCarthy and the Republicans met with Musk for over an hour, Jeffries literally just “met” him.
Twitter’s decision-making during the 2020 presidential campaign was the main subject of the so-called Twitter Profiles, an unprecedented series of disclosures of Twitter’s internal communications authorized by Musk himself. .
Musk hand-picked a group of independent journalists and gave them a set of internal Twitter messages from before Mush bought the company. Slack emails and chats appear to show Twitter executives debating how to handle the laptop story and other sensitive political events.
Comer praised Musk’s decision to make his company’s internal discussions public, saying Wednesday that “he’s done a great service to every American who cares about language freedom.” argument.”
Republicans supported Twitter’s decision in 2020 to limit the distribution of a New York Post story published in October 2020, claiming that a Email “smoking gun” The then-proven Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was introduced to a Ukrainian energy executive by his son, Hunter.
The Post said its report was based on data recovered from a laptop that Hunter Biden took to a computer repair shop in Delaware, but never picked up.
The Biden campaign categorically denied the Post’s report, saying Biden’s official schedule from the time of the alleged meeting showed nothing about it “ever took place”.
Facebook and Twitter both restrict story distribution, with Twitter taking the very unusual step of block links to articles completely. At the time, the company said the article violated its hacked documents policy.
The decision caused an uproar among Republicans, who criticized Twitter for censoring conservatives, a claim they have long maintained, despite the company’s denials.
Twitter later turn away from the decision, allowing links to Post stories. CEO then Jack Dorsey called the original pick to block links with a little “not great” explanation. Twitter also updated its hacked material policy to only remove hacked content if it was shared directly or with hackers.
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