James Baker, The Tool of Tools

At what point in his arduous take-over of Twitter did Elon Musk realize that the package came with a joker in the deck: James A. Baker, formerly general counsel of the FBI? Did he wonder: what is this guy doing here? Were there any conversations between the two? Or did Mr. Musk just quietly observe his presence at a remove in nervous wonder, as one might, say, upon discovering a scorpion in the corner of his hotel room?

Mr. Baker, you understand, was notoriously at the center of the FBI’s FISA court fuckery that got the ball rolling in the Crossfire Hurricane operation, Act One of RussiaGate, as well as the Alfa Bank caper concocted by Hillary Clinton (disclosed this year by special counsel John Durham), and probably every other sedition pie the FBI cooked in its oven in those years, considering Mr. Baker’s position as chief legal advisor to Director Chris Wray. When the alt-news media caught onto Mr. Baker’s nefarious activities, he became inconvenient to the agency, was re-assigned to some nebulous task (polishing Mr. Wray’s cuff links?), and quit in May, 2018. He landed temporarily — or was he, rather, parked out-of-sight? — at the shadowy R Street Institute, an Intel Community cut-out, one of its countless PR channels in the DC Swamp.

But then, mysteriously, Mr. Baker got hired by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in June of 2020 — the heat of a presidential election — to work under Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s general counsel (and chief of “legal, policy, and trust” [ha!]), where he remained until just the other day. Is it a stretch to imagine Mr. Baker’s former employer, the FBI — which, let’s face it, operates as a sort of blood-brotherhood — purposely installed Mr. Baker in that sensitive job at Twitter to help “moderate” the national conversation in the central forum that public debate had moved to in our time?

If so, he apparently did a crackerjack job, and just at the right time, too, after the FBI discovered, in emails they ripped off Rudolph Giuliani’s purloined cloud account, that Donald Trump’s attorney possessed of a copy of the laptop hard-drive of one Hunter Biden, son of presidential candidate Joe Biden — said computer (the FBI knew full-well by then) being stuffed not just with pornographic photos of crack orgies and other personal infelicities, but also a trove of emails and deal memos laying out a bribery and money-laundering scheme that the younger Biden was running all over Eurasia as a family business.

Of course, the FBI had that selfsame computer in its possession for the better part of a year when The New York Post broke the news of its existence days before the election of 2020. In fact, the Bureau had had possession at the very time that Mr. Trump was busy getting impeached for daring to suggest to Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, that the Bidens were involved in some shady business worth investigating with the Kiev-based Burisma gas company. Evidence of that and much much more — including way-bigger shady deals with CCP cut-outs — lay moldering in the laptop the FBI just silently sat on. Isn’t it a little strange that during the dragged-out impeachment ordeal neither Attorney General William Barr nor FBI chief Chris Wray volunteered to Mr. Trump’s legal defense that they held exculpatory evidence on that laptop for the very thing he was impeached on?

That was January, 2020, many months before The New York Post took the laptop’s existence public. And whaddaya know… by June of that year, James A. Baker was in place at Twitter, ready to serve! As election day approached, he apparently succeeded in stifling transmission of the Post’s laptop story plus any-and-all conversation about it in the Twitterverse, and was careful not to leave a memo trail of his heroic interventions. Do you suppose he might have had some conversations about all that with his old colleagues at the FBI? At the same time, you understand, the FBI was leaning successfully on that other social network giant, Facebook, to likewise smother the laptop story. And Google, too, having become an Intel Community tool, was avid to tailor its search algorithms to steer the curious away from Hunter’s laptop. And so was fortune’s fool Joe Biden inserted into history….

Amazingly, after all that huggermugger, James A. Baker still remained in place last week at Twitter — even as his putative boss, censor-in-chief, Vijaya Gadde, got drop-kicked out the door — just as Elon Musk prepared to release a trove of information detailing Twitter’s censorship activities of recent years. Yes! And, evidently, Mr. Baker functioned as a sort of one-man clearing house for all the documents getting shoveled to independent reporter Matt Taibbi, whom Mr. Musk had designated to be the news conduit for these awaited revelations. And, yes, there is every reason to suspect that Mr. Baker censored, or perhaps even tried to destroy, the very documents that Mr. Musk ordered released.

Was that not like leaving a wolverine in Twitter’s henhouse? How could Mr. Musk not know how absurd it was for Mr. Baker to moderate that release? Well, the chatter is that Mr. Musk was seeking a way to encourage Mr. Baker to inculpate himself, so as to foreclose any lawsuits he might think to bring against Twitter for wrongful termination. I have to say, Mr. Musk would be an idiot if he did not have copies of the server that James Baker had access to and had the opportunity to delete stuff from. I guess we’ll find out.

But there is one other matter that has been left out of all the sound and fury about the Twitter doc release: the meta story of the US government’s rogue agencies’ greater war against the public interest. Not just the Intel Community but all the public health agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services: the FDA, CDC, NIAID, NIH, and more.

Consider that James A. Baker — formerly the FBI’s consigliere— was in that job at Twitter most of the time that Covid-19 was raging across the land. How much did he have to say about censoring the life-and-death information surrounding the pandemic? Did he stifle debate about the early treatment medications — ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, Vitamin D, etc. — that could have saved many thousands of lives otherwise sacrificed to the medical establishment’s Moloch of intubation-and-remdesivir?

Did he advise the blackballing, silencing, and cancellation of doctors who opposed Dr. Fauci’s regime of lockdowns, masks, and “vaccines”? Did he prevent the public from learning how ineffective and harmful the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA shots are? Did he help promote every government-sponsored untruth about Covid-19, meaning just about everything public officials have uttered about it for three years? Did he, in sum, in his machinations at Twitter, so pervert the national conversation through an epic crisis that he has contributed to the collapsing US economy and a genocide-like campaign against the people of this country? I think he probably did. That’s how serious this matter is.

James Howard Kunstler is a renowned author, social critic, and public speaker. He has written several books including “The Geography of Nowhere” and “The Long Emergency.” He has written for Rolling Stone Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and has lectured at some of the most prestigious schools in the country, including Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. For more from Mr. Kunstler, please visit his website.