The FBI buried Hunter Biden's laptop story three weeks before the 2020 election and paid Twitter millions to help.
Now someone finally found a way to force the receipts into open court.
A federal judge is now holding the one document the FBI has spent three years insisting does not exist.
The FBI FOIA Lawsuit Over Taxpayer-Funded Censorship
The New Civil Liberties Alliance – a conservative civil liberties group founded to fight administrative overreach – filed a FOIA request in January 2023 asking a simple question: did the FBI pay social media companies, media organizations, and other private groups to suppress speech?
The FBI's answer was to not answer at all.
Rather than search for a single page of records, the bureau invoked an exemption designed for ongoing criminal investigations and used it as a blanket shield. Then it claimed it could neither confirm nor deny that any records existed.
That last part is where the FBI's story falls apart entirely.
For years the bureau has publicly acknowledged it reimburses Twitter – now X – and other platforms for the cost of complying with legal process. Now it insists that even acknowledging those records exist is too sensitive to put on paper.
Casey Norman, Litigation Counsel at NCLA, nailed the contradiction directly: "The FBI is effectively saying: 'We will not search, we will not explain, and we also will not acknowledge the existence of records that we've already acknowledged exist.' That's not how FOIA works."
On June 30, NCLA filed a motion for summary judgment in federal court asking a judge to force the bureau to open its files.
What the Twitter Files Already Proved
The receipts the FBI is hiding aren't hypothetical.
The Twitter Files – internal company documents Elon Musk released in late 2022 – showed the FBI maintained weekly meetings with Twitter's top executives for years leading into the 2020 election.
FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent 10 documents to Twitter's then-head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, the day before the New York Post published its exposé on Hunter Biden's laptop. Twitter buried the story within hours.
The FBI had possessed that laptop since December 2019. It had authenticated it. When Facebook asked the bureau directly whether the story was Russian disinformation, the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force refused to answer – leaving platforms to conclude it was.
House Judiciary Committee testimony later confirmed the FBI employees who warned social media companies about a phantom Russian hack operation already knew the laptop was real.
That is not bureaucratic incompetence. That is a coordinated federal operation to kill a story about the son of a Democrat presidential candidate weeks before a national election.
An internal email from a Facebook employee written in July 2020 – months before election day – made the coordination explicit: the company had been "meeting for years with USG to plan for it."
The federal government built the censorship operation. Silicon Valley staffed it.
Did the FBI Pay Twitter to Censor Conservative Speech
The $3.4 million Twitter collected from the FBI between October 2019 and early 2021 is already public record – that much nobody disputes.
What NCLA is trying to find out is whether the FBI also paid to modify content moderation policies and reprogram platform filters so that what millions of Americans were allowed to see lined up with what federal agencies wanted them to see.
That is a different transaction entirely.
Paying a company to pull user records under a warrant is law enforcement. Paying a company to reprogram its censorship engine to match government definitions of "misinformation" is a federal agency purchasing private speech suppression and billing it to the taxpayers being silenced.
Zhonette Brown, NCLA's General Counsel, said the FBI's position collapses under its own logic: "The FBI's claim that acknowledging the existence of payments would disclose investigation techniques when they also claim that the payments are justified because they are mandated by statute is absurd."
An agency cannot simultaneously argue a payment is legally required by statute and also too sensitive to acknowledge under FOIA.
Judicial Watch and the Deep State Payments the FBI Still Will Not Release
Judicial Watch has been fighting the same wall since December 2022 – a parallel FOIA lawsuit the bureau has blocked at every turn, including stonewalling from the Trump DOJ, which argued releasing even quarterly payment totals would help bad actors.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton named it plainly: "We're fighting the Trump Justice Department and the Trump FBI for records that could provide some insight into the abuse of Trump."
Corporate media will not report that the Trump DOJ is the one blocking this. The FBI has stalled for three and a half years because the answer is something it does not want a federal judge reading aloud in open court.
Sources:
- New Civil Liberties Alliance, "NCLA Urges D.C. Court to End FBI's Stonewalling over Payments to Social Media Platforms," GlobeNewswire, June 30, 2026.
- New Civil Liberties Alliance, "NCLA Asks D.C. Court to Order FOIA Disclosure of FBI Payments to Social Media Platforms," GlobeNewswire, April 2, 2025.
- House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, "The Cover Up: Big Tech, the Swamp, and Mainstream Media Coordinated to Censor Americans' Free Speech," October 2023.
- House Judiciary Committee, "Testimony Reveals FBI Employees Who Warned Social Media Companies about Hack and Leak Operation Knew Hunter Biden Laptop Wasn't Russian Disinformation," September 2024.
- Katelynn Richardson, "Feds Still Refusing to Disclose Deep-State Payments to Twitter During Peak Censorship," Daily Caller News Foundation / World Net Daily, February 2026.
- House Judiciary Committee Republicans, "House GOP Wants FBI's Twitter Censorship, Reimbursement Records," December 28, 2022.
- Judicial Watch, "FBI Hiding Biden Twitter Censorship Records – Federal Court Hearing Set," June 2025.
