Ex-FBI agents and executives permeated Twitter’s upper echelons, tying the firm even more closely to the government agency under scrutiny for using Twitter to interfere in the 2020 elections.
In the months and years preceding Elon Musk’s October acquisition of the social network, over a dozen former federal employees joined the company.
The Post discovered that FBI influence was significantly greater than that of former FBI general counsel James Baker, who later served in the same capacity for Twitter. Musk recently fired him for interfering with the billionaire’s efforts to come clean about his company’s previous mistakes.
In several instances, the former G-men and –women had positions that would have placed them in close proximity to business executives directly involved in October 2020’s censorship of The Post’s Hunter Biden coverage.
Matthew Williams worked with the FBI for almost 15 years, primarily in Seattle, where he most recently held the positions of intelligence program manager and senior supervisory intelligence analyst.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Williams joined Twitter in June 2020 — the same month as Baker — as a “senior director of product trust.” In June 2022, he was promoted to Twitter’s “senior director of product trust, revenue policy, counsel systems, and analytics.” He remarked that this made him “co-leader of Trust and Safety.”
Before Musk’s takeover, the Twitter crew was notoriously liberal, with 99 percent of employee campaign contributions going to Democratic candidates. According to Federal Election Commission records, Williams contributed small but consistent amounts to Democrats running for federal office during his tenure at the corporation.
After more than fifteen years with the FBI, Matthew Williams joined Twitter in June of 2020.
According to LinkedIn and Bloomberg, Dawn Burton, a former federal prosecutor and deputy chief of staff to FBI director James Comey, joined Twitter in September 2019 as director of strategy and operations and counsel organization.
As a Comey insider, Burton would have been familiar with the agency’s investigations into Hillary Clinton’s emails and Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. She remained to serve in her position after Comey was fired in May 2017 and Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel.
She contributed to Democrats as well. Burton departed Twitter in July, before to Musk’s acquisition, and is now employed at Google.
Prior to joining Twitter in May 2021, Jeff Carlton worked for the FBI, the CIA, and as an intelligence officer for the United States Marine Corps. According to his since-deleted LinkedIn profile, he led “Twitter’s Strategic Response Team of 50+ employees/agents in addressing the most high-profile Trust & Safety escalation” to encourage “healthy public conversations.” In November 2021, he contributed $100 to Democratic House candidate Will Rollins in California.
Yoel Roth, the recently discredited former company censor and inventor of the platform’s extensive shadow-banning activities, led Twitter’s Trust and Safety division. Roth joked about his contacts with the FBI in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, according to troves of internal messages newly revealed by Musk.
Roth have regular talks with the FBI in advance of the 2020 presidential election.
“I was informed in these meetings that the intelligence community anticipated that individuals associated with political campaigns would be the target of hacking attacks and that information obtained through these hacking attacks would likely be disseminated via social media platforms, including Twitter,” Roth said in a declaration to the Federal Election Commission on December 21, 2020. “I also discovered in these discussions that there were reports that Hunter Biden would be involved in a hack-and-leak operation.”
The unholy partnership between Twitter and the FBI was condemned by critics.
Jim Hanson, president of WorldStrat, an information warfare analysis and consultancy organization, stated: “Twitter’s previous administration purchased a direct connection between past and present FBI personnel as part of its value proposition.” “They wanted access and air cover, and the FBI was willing to conduct some of the typical things they should do, such as watch for crime and terrorism, while also utilizing Twitter to silence dissent and attack political opponents.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who will chair the House Judiciary Committee next year, has pledged a comprehensive investigation into the politicization of the FBI, including the censoring and suppression of The Post’s Hunter Biden reporting by Big Tech.
Before joining Twitter, Kevin Michelena spent more than 12 years as an FBI intelligence analyst.
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“I am concerned that the administration may have conducted a disinformation campaign against We the People. “We want to get to the bottom of Baker, but any other FBI employees who were on Twitter are also a cause for concern, and this is something we must investigate,” Jordan told The Post.
Kevin Michelena spent over a decade as an FBI intelligence analyst before joining Twitter in July 2021 as a “Senior Corporate Security Analyst.”
According to his LinkedIN profile, which has since been heavily edited, his responsibilities included “Partner with Software Engineering to create and optimize security products” and “Collaborate with public policy and site integrity leads to ensure policies are properly implemented, which has mitigated risk to users from identified threat actors.”
Michael Bertrand spent 23 years with the FBI serving in counterterrorism, internal investigations, and as the agency’s chief of staff. He started using Twitter in January.
According to his LinkedIN profile, Bertrand was responsible for “proactively and reactively leading teams to assess and manage global occurrences and crises affecting Twitter’s workers, offices, and reputation.”
Karen Walsh worked with the FBI for over two decades before joining Twitter in March 2020.
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Karen Walsh served at the FBI for over two decades as a special agent specializing in “Public-Private Sector Outreach.” In March 2020, she joined Twitter as director of corporate resilience.
Doug Hunt joined Twitter as a “senior director” after 20 years as a supervisory special agent with the FBI. Before joining Twitter in July 2019 as a “Senior Security Manager,” Vincent Lucero also spent almost two decades in the same position.
Mark Jaroszewski was appointed director of corporate security in August 2018 after twenty years as a supervisory FBI special agent.
According to a 2018 FBI press release, his responsibilities included “helping the FBI establish strategic, mutually beneficial connections with the private sector.” Upon joining Twitter, he also began to donate to Democrats.
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