Margot Cleveland of the Federalist identifies political scandals worth watching in the new year.
Government’s Puppeteering of Big Tech and Media
The ongoing release of the “Twitter Files” closed 2022 with a new scandal, as the internal communications of the tech giant exposed extensive coordination between the government and Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other big players controlling the flow of information. While conservatives have known — and complained — for years of Big Tech’s censorship and shadowbanning, by purchasing Twitter and giving independent journalists access to corporate emails, Elon Musk provided indisputable confirmation that Twitter both censored and blacklisted conservatives. …
… Intelligence Agencies’ 2020 Election Interference
A related scandal to track in 2023 concerns intelligence agencies’ interference in the 2020 election. Even before Musk took over at Twitter, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed the FBI’s role in prompting the censorship of the Hunter Biden story. …
… [D]uring an August 2020 interview with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg revealed that before the Hunter Biden laptop story dropped, the FBI had warned the Facebook team to “be on high alert.” According to Zuckerberg, the FBI told Facebook, “[W]e thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election” and that “we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that so just be vigilant.” Based on the FBI’s warning, when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden story, Facebook treated it as potential misinformation and limited the visibility of the scandal. …
… The Biden Laundromat
Since at least 2020, Hunter Biden has been under investigation by federal prosecutors. Many expected charges to come last year, when in March of 2022, The New York Times — one of the go-to media outlets for Democrats to prime with inside information to blunt the effects of soon-to-be-released negative news — reported based on unnamed sources that David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware overseeing the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, had a grand jury conducting “a wide-ranging examination” of Hunter “Biden’s international business dealings, with prosecutors considering charges for tax fraud, criminal foreign lobbying, and money laundering.”