WASHINGTON — The FBI warned major U.S. tech companies before the Post’s first reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020 that Russian agents were preparing a strikingly similar document dump — and once the scoop materializedFacebook executives discussed calibrating censorship decisions to please what they believed would be an incoming Biden-Harris administration, according to a congressional investigation.

The new details — contained in an interim report from the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the militarization of government — emerge as former President Donald Trump leads in polls ahead of the Nov. 5 election and his allies are asking the FBI for a big clean-up. and possible new regulations or antitrust actions to punish and restrict platforms like Facebook.

“The FBI warned us all last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,” an unidentified Microsoft employee wrote on October 14, 2020, the day the Post published the article. first in a series of explosive stories on the Biden administration’s foreign relationsaccording to the Congressional report.

Internal Facebook communications, including a chat log, show that employees quickly discounted the Post’s information because it was the “exact content expected for the hack and leak.”

“Exactly on time,” another Facebook employee confirmed.

“Clearly, our calls on this could sway (sic) how a new Biden administration views us more than almost anything else…” Nick Clegg, then vice president of global affairs at Facebook, wrote the same day , to the vice president of global public policy. Joel Kaplan.

The Post spent nearly a month verifying the authenticity of the laptop files before their publication, although it is unclear to what extent the FBI was aware of this work when it was preparing its preface .

The FBI has had Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop since December 2019 and knew the files cited by the Post in its coverage came from a Delaware computer repairman, not the Kremlin — but, after downplaying the world exclusive of Big Tech, the FBI has remained publicly silent while 51 former intelligence officials suggested then candidate Joe Biden bluntly alleged that the files came from Russia.

Post reporting showed that Biden, while vice president, interacted with the international business associates of his son Hunter and his brother James, including in countries where he helped shape U.S. policy, like China and Ukraine.

The reports were widely, albeit belatedly, corroborated by other media outlets and the records were even used by federal prosecutors in court – but only after Biden defeated Trump in November 2020 by narrow swing-state margins, which some Republicans said was partly due to the cloud of suspicion over the laptop.

Fixer-turned-whistleblower John Paul Mac Isaac provided the laptop, which Hunter failed to recover, to the FBI in December 2019, believing it held important information about international corruption. He then provided copies of the same files to the Post.

Congressional Republicans are accusing the FBI and tech platforms of working together to defeat Trump in the last election — a perception that social media company employees were aware of at the time.

“(When) we are brought to the (Capitol) (H)ill to testify about why we influenced the 2020 election, we can say that we have been meeting for YEARS with the United States government (the US government) to plan this,” Facebook said. the employee wrote in a July 15, 2020 message published in the new report.

THE The FBI told some Twitter employees on the day of the first laptop story that the device was real, but that message did not appear to have been widely shared internally, and a similar acknowledgment did not emerge involving Facebook.

“(If) the FBI’s intention was truly to help social media companies combat real foreign influence operations, the FBI should have shared the most important fact: the influence peddling allegations contained in Post article was based on actual and credible information, including information in the possession of the FBI,” said the Republican-authored report, compiled under the direction of subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

“The FBI failed to do this. Although the FBI ultimately admitted that there was no indication that the allegations in the Post article constituted Russian disinformation — only after an FBI agent mistakenly revealed to Twitter that the computer laptop was “real” – the FBI still hid the fact that it had seized and authenticated the laptop. Hunter Biden’s laptop months ago.

“As a result, Twitter and Facebook continued to censor the most important news of the election cycle, limiting the scope of the Biden family’s corruption allegations and ultimately benefiting the Biden-Harris campaign.

The report blasted the FBI — led then, as now, by Director Christopher Wray — as other congressional Republicans criticize the bureau’s role in investigating alleged Iranian hacking of the Trump campaign during this election.

House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) denounced on Sunday in a post to “deep FBI corruption regarding Iranian foreign election interference targeting President Trump” and an alleged “corrupt cover-up” – a message retweeted by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

Trump allies also remain furious over the FBI’s extensive and leaked investigation into Trump’s alleged ties to Russia during the 2016 election – which revealed no evidence of a conspiracy after dominating more than half of the Trump’s tenure — and the office’s role in an unprecedented two criminal prosecutions against the former president for allegedly mismanaging national security records and contesting his 2020 defeat to Biden.