Twitter on Wednesday blocked users from sharing a New York Post report that said Hunter Biden introduced his dad, former Vice President and current Democratic nominee Joe Biden, to a “top executive” at a Ukrainian energy company, before pressuring Ukrainian lawmakers to fire a prosecutor looking into the company a year later.
When users go to share the story link on Twitter, they’re greeted with a warning label saying the story is “potentially harmful” and unable to be posted.
A Twitter rep told TheWrap it took action against the story because it violated the company’s “Hacked Materials Policy,” which says users “can’t directly distribute hacked materials.”
Earlier on Wednesday, the Post shared a trove of emails it said belonged to the younger Biden. Among them was a 2015 “message of appreciation” from Vadym Pozharskyi — an adviser to the board of Burisma, the energy company that paid Hunter Biden a reported $50,000 a month — thanking him for an introduction to then-VP Joe Biden.
The New York Post said, “Less than eight months after Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden for the introduction to his dad, the then-vice president admittedly pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk into getting rid of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin by threatening to withhold a $1 billion US loan guarantee during a December 2015 trip to Kiev.”
The Post said the emails were from a computer that had been dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop last year. The shop owner made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to the attorney for Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and current lawyer for President Trump. Ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon informed the Post about the hard drive last month, and Giuliani shared a copy of it last Sunday, according to the report.
Joe Biden’s camp pushed back on the report afterwards, saying the meeting did not happen.
“The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story,” Biden rep Andrew Bates told Politico. “They certainly never raised that Rudy Guiliani — whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported — claimed to have such materials. Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”
Twitter’s decision to block the story came only a few hours after Facebook said it was “reducing” the report’s distribution. Facebook has not responded to TheWrap’s request for comment.
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