A top former FBI lawyer and Twitter’s deputy general counsel, James Baker, was fired by Elon Musk over his alleged role in censoring information. 

The news was announced by Musk on the social networking platform. “In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today,” the Tesla CEO tweeted on Tuesday, December 6. 

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The firing came after Musk claimed that Baker’s explanation about Twitter suppressing a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was “unconvincing”. 

What went into the decision behind the conscious decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story at Twitter’s top levels before Musk took over the company, was revealed in the so-called Twitter files recently. 

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Who is Jim Baker?

Jim Baker, who was once a top Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) lawyer joined Twitter in 2020. Previously from November 1990 to October 2007, he worked at the US Department of Justice.

He was once a key figure in the FBI’s probe into the alleged collaboration between Russia and former President Donald Trump, who was then a Republican nominee during the 2016 presidential election. He was also a former CNN analyst.

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Baker served as general counsel for the FBI from 2014 to 2018, and at the time he worked with Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, both of whom are prominent  Trump critics at the FBI. 

Following his exit from the bureau, he made headlines in 2018 when he was accused of leaking materials to the media. He also served as a key witness in special counsel John Durham’s case against Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer. The latter allegedly lied to Baker about him working for the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when he informed the then-FBI official about undisclosed contact between the Trump Organization and a Russian-based bank.