When journalist Matt Taibbi kicked off a 36-tweet thread on Twitter last week, dropping leaked emails from the former C-suite of the social media company now owned by Elon Musk, conspiracy theorists rejoiced. And then Musk responded.
Those leaked emails, which detail how Twitter suppressed a New York Post story about the copied contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, have been heralded as a watershed moment by Donald Trump’s most ardent fans. They see the so-called Twitter Files as crucial validation: proof of a previously intangible plot to suppress conservative voices online and elect Joe Biden.
As that theory percolated, it identified an enemy in one of Twitter’s top lawyers. On Tuesday, Musk abruptly fired him. It points to an emerging pattern at Twitter HQ: Play to the crowd.
The Twitter Files, promoted ahead of time by Musk himself, are being hyped as a critical missing piece in all manner of conspiracy theories—from QAnon to debunked claims of electoral fraud, to President Joe Biden’s supposed corrupt practices in Ukraine. In the process, it is ginning up exactly the kind of Twitter traffic that Musk has craved.
Foreign intelligence officials identified the laptop as possible Russian interference, and major news outlets, unable to corroborate its contents, held off on the story. Twitter went a step further, temporarily forbidding its users from sharing the Post story, even in their DMs.
Fans of Trump suspected there was more to Twitter’s actions. They believed the FBI and the Democratic National Committee, which they believed colluded to rig the 2016 election with allegations of the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, were meddling in the 2020 vote as well: the Deep State in action.
In the years since, that paranoia has only grown. Trump took to calling Hunter Biden’s computer the “laptop from hell”—a quip that would later become the title of a book from a Post columnist. The book described the story as one of “the greatest coverups in media history” and promised to uncover the “coordinated censorship operation by Big Tech, the media establishment, and former intelligence operatives.” (While the book castigates Twitter for suppressing the story, including suspending the Post’s account, it acknowledges the platform “admitted after the election that it had made a mistake.”)
It has become established rhetoric among the political right that suppressing the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was nothing short of a conspiracy between the Biden campaign and Twitter, supposedly proving Trump’s grandiose claims of an orchestrated effort to keep him from the White House.
“The Twitter Files confirm Q’s entire main narrative,” one QAnon influencer wrote. “Balenciaga confirms the rest.” That message, which references the fantastical claims about fashion brand Balenciaga’s role in child trafficking, was seen more than 120,000 times on Telegram. (Despite some optimism that his account would be restored, that particular QAnon influencer remains suspended on Twitter.) Other QAnon influencers seized on the fact that former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s personal email, which Taibbi failed to censor in a screenshot he shared, used the custom top-level domain .pizza.
Liz Crokin, a popular QAnon influencer who boasts more than 100,000 followers on Telegram and hundreds of paid subscribers on Substack, wrote on Telegram that the emails implicate Dorsey in the same Satanic cabal as Hillary Clinton adviser John Podesta. “Pizza is a pedophile code word that’s been identified by law enforcement,” Crokin wrote. (She, too, is still suspended from Twitter.)
On Tuesday, Crokin spoke at Mar-a-Lago, where she discussed “Pizzagate, Balenciaga, and what President Trump’s Administration did to combat human trafficking,” according to her Telegram channel. Crokin also uploaded a speech from Trump to the small gathering, where he heaped praise on his briefly tenured national security adviser, Michael Flynn—who has become one of the most high-profile QAnon influencers in recent years.
The enormously popular @catturd account, with its more than 1 million followers on Twitter and more than 800,000 on Truth Social, called to “disband the FBI” and “arrest [FBI Director] Christopher Wray” following the release of the documents. “After what Elon Musk revealed about #TwitterGate—I never want to hear the phrase ‘free and fair elections’ coming from the FBI, big tech fact checkers, the media, or the Democrat party, ever again,” the anonymous person behind the account wrote.
Yet, as Tabbi himself explains, the files prove no such thing. “Although several sources recalled hearing about a ‘general’ warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence—that I've seen—of any government involvement in the laptop story,” Taibbi wrote.
In fact, Taibbi reports, the decision was made at high levels of Twitter, but below then CEO Dorsey. “They freelanced it,” a source who spoke to the journalist said.
The actual contents of the Twitter Files wouldn’t get in the way of a good story, however. Eagle-eyed supporters of Trump picked up on one particular name in the Twitter Files: James Baker.
In the leaked internal emails, Baker, Twitter’s deputy general counsel, urged a careful approach. “We need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked,” he wrote. As one of the company’s most senior lawyers, he noted that some evidence pointed to the contents of the laptop having been hacked, while other indicators pointed to it being legitimately abandoned by Biden. In the absence of good information, he recommended that Twitter assume the worst and proceed with “caution.”
Baker had been general counsel at the FBI from 2014 to 2017, as the bureau had been investigating Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election. Baker was also implicated in a particularly thorny saga—he interviewed a source whom John Durham, a special counsel appointed by Trump, would accuse of lying and concealing his ties to the Hilary Clinton campaign. Baker denied that he knew of those ties, and he furnished documents to prove it. His source was acquitted earlier this year.
Baker, after leaving the FBI, had become Twitter’s deputy general counsel. The mere presence of Baker’s name set off alarm bells for right-wing onlookers.
“The same James Baker neck deep in Russiagate?” Lori Mills, a failed Republican state assembly candidate, wrote on Twitter. “Anyone ever notice it’s always the same people?” A QAnon Telegram account mused: “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. See a pattern?”
In the hour after Taibbi’s Friday night Twitter thread, users defaced Baker’s Wikipedia page to identify him as “an official at the Department of Justice who committed treason by helping suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.” Shortly thereafter, conspiracy website The Gateway Pundit proclaimed: “Crooked FBI Lawyer James Baker—One of the Architects of Spygate—Was Involved in Twitter’s Decision to Suppress Hunter Biden Laptop From Hell Story.”
Attorney Jonathan Turley took to the New York Post to explain how that single email proved that Baker and Twitter’s chief legal counsel “swatted down internal misgivings to bury a story that could well have made the difference in the close 2020 election.”
Taibbi shared Turley’s article on Sunday. On Tuesday, both Taibbi and Musk revealed that Baker had been fired for, as Taibbi put it, “vetting the first batch of ‘Twitter Files’—without knowledge of new management.”
That decision, in turn, spurred a whole new round of conspiracy theories. “James Baker intercepted the Twitter Files before they could get to Taibbi and scrubbed references to the FBI,” wrote Jack Posobiec, a conspiracy-minded writer and contributor to Steve Bannon’s podcast, on Truth Social, echoing the sentiment across his various social media pages.
While Musk’s acquisition has been troubled—marked by an exodus of advertisers and a return of neo-Nazis—he has constantly pointed to record-high engagement as proof positive that his leadership was netting results.
The SpaceX CEO’s effort to encourage reaction from Trump’s megafans—even if some of them, like Trump himself, remain on other platforms—has clearly helped drive that traffic. Musk, now, seems to be clearly reacting to their reactions to keep that momentum going.
