A former Biden Pentagon official who claimed Twitter’s censorship of Hunter Biden laptop stories proved they were false while working on the Biden campaign has joined TikTok as a communications director.
Jamal Brown, who served as the Defense Department’s deputy press secretary from February 2021 to February 2022, has joined TikTok to run its policy communications in the Americas, reportedly with a main focus on the United States, as the Biden administration conducts a national security review of the Chinese government-linked video app and as Republicans urge President Joe Biden to ban it.
Brown was also national press secretary for Joe Biden from April 2019 to November 2020, during which he worked to downplay allegations related to Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings in China and praised Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post’s stories on the laptop hard drive in October 2020.
TIKTOK SPENT MORE THAN $1 MILLION ON LOBBYING IN SUMMER 2022
ByteDance, the Beijing-based company that owns TikTok and has links to the Chinese government, spent $1 million on lobbying from July to September, and TikTok itself reported spending another $110,000 in the third quarter of 2022. TikTok has put together a large lobbying team made up of one-time lawmakers and former congressional staffers from both parties to try to shield the company. TikTok’s lobbying has targeted the Biden White House.
Brown’s LinkedIn says he began working for TikTok in October. The Pentagon, other government agencies, and a host of organizations and agencies have banned employees from using the app.
“It is time to drop the hammer on this hammer and sickle operation,” Brendan Carr, the top Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, told the Washington Examiner in October. “TikTok cannot spend lobbying money fast enough to cover up for the deluge of reports coming out that expose TikTok for the national security threat that it is. The Biden administration needs to end its review and ban TikTok now.”
TikTok has thrived during the two years of Biden’s presidency after unsuccessful efforts by former President Donald Trump’s administration to crack down on the app. Biden officials emphasize a national security review of the app is underway. The National Security Council said this summer that a separate review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States “is ongoing.”
The Trump administration labeled TikTok a national security threat due to concerns that it could be exploited by the Chinese Communist Party to obtain U.S. user data illicitly.
The New York Post reported in October 2020 that emails from the laptop showed evidence of Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings tied to Ukraine and China. When the publication attempted to post the articles on its Twitter account, the social media company said that doing so violated its rule against sharing “hacked” materials.
“I think Twitter’s response to the actual article itself makes clear that these purported allegations are false and they’re not true and glad to see social media companies like Twitter taking responsibility to limit misinformation,” Brown said the next day.
Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted that day, “Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix.” Facebook also limited the dissemination of the New York Post stories.
When asked in late October 2020 if he stood by his claim that Twitter censoring the Hunter Biden laptop stories proved that the stories weren’t true, Brown replied, “Look, we’re not going to waste any seconds on this smear campaign. If we want to talk about corruption, let’s look at Donald Trump. He’s paid more money in taxes to China than he has to the United States of America. So, we’re not going to waste any time on that. It’s another distraction.”
Dorsey testified before the Senate in November 2020 after Biden defeated Trump.
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“We made a quick interpretation, using no other evidence, that the materials in the article were obtained through hacking, and according to our policy, we blocked them from being spread,” Dorsey said. “Upon further consideration, we admitted this action was wrong and corrected it within 24 hours.”
Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos, a cyberforensics expert and former Secret Service agent, conducted an examination of the laptop for the Washington Examiner this year, concluding that “the hard drive is authentic.”
