Mr. Musk has a target on his back for acquiring Twitter and opening it up to diverse points of view. His sin, in the Biden administration’s eyes, was to turn a social media platform the Left claimed as its own plaything into a public town square for the free exchange of ideas. Free speech and transparency do not sit well with the Biden administration and the left-wing progressive base of the Democratic Party.

The Biden administration is weaponizing its federal law enforcement powers to trample on the First Amendment. It is trying to intimidate Mr. Musk so that he will do its bidding and censor speech posted on the Twitter platform that the administration considers to be “disinformation” or “hate speech.” So far, the Biden administration’s hardball tactics are not working.

Twitter’s new CEO is exposing how Twitter’s former management and Biden campaign officials colluded to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. Former senior managers at Twitter decided to censor postings of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story just a few weeks before the 2020 presidential election. They used the false pretext that the information upon which the story was based was “hacked” and was possibly disinformation spread by a foreign government. These baseless accusations were apparently fed to the Twitter censors by the FBI, which had the laptop in its possession since December 2019 and had the opportunity to verify its contents.

The New York Post story that Twitter had blocked from its site was published on October 14, 2020. It revealed, among other things, how Hunter Biden introduced one of the key Ukrainian businessmen with whom Hunter Biden had business dealings to his father while Joe Biden was vice president. It showed that Joe Biden was lying when he claimed that he has “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”

We are now learning how the FBI put its thumb on the scale to help the Biden campaign at a critical time before the election. FBI agents warned Twitter and other social media platforms to be on guard for disinformation allegedly spread by a foreign government and mentioned Hunter Biden’s laptop specifically in this connection. Twitter’s former senior management took the hint and dutifully suppressed the New York Post story.

Daniel Greenfield aptly entitled his FrontPage Magazine article regarding the collusion among Big Tech, leftists, and the government to get around the First Amendment, “Twittergate and the Plot Against Free Speech.”

The plot thickened even more when Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker (the former FBI General Counsel before joining Twitter) was caught slowing up the release of Twitter’s internal fileswithout Elon Musk’s knowledge. He was supposedly “vetting” the files before approving their release. “Vetting” is a polite term for deep-sixing e-mails in Twitter’s internal files that could expose wrongdoing by Mr. Baker himself while he was at the FBI and by other FBI officials.

When Elon Musk found out about this ploy and did not receive a satisfactory explanation from Baker, Musk fired Baker. Good decision. Baker would have continued running interference for the FBI and the Biden administration inside of Twitter had he been allowed to stay. This is the same James Baker who was involved in the Russia collusion hoax while he was the FBI’s General Counsel. And it is the same James Baker who assured Twitter’s former management, in his capacity as Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, that it was “reasonable for us to assume” that the information in the New York Poststory was hacked. Twitter’s management at the time then ran with the ball and used the fallacious hacking assumption as a justification for suppressing the story.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tried to dismiss Mr. Musk’s release of internal Twitter e-mail files regarding the former management’s censorship of the New York Postlaptop story as “not healthy” and a “distraction.” Ms. Jean-Pierre’s job is obviously to distract attention from a major scandal that undermined voters’ right to know about information highly relevant to their choice of which presidential candidate to vote for.

Instead, the White House Press Secretary demonstrated the Biden administration’s indifference to First Amendment protections when they get in the administration’s way. She said that “Twitter is facing very real and very serious questions” about the content that Twitter is now allowing on its platform, which the administration regards as “hate speech” or “disinformation.”

Ms. Jean-Pierre had previously said that the Biden administration was watching closely the situation at Twitter after Elon Musk acquired ownership of the company. In other words, the administration is monitoring a particular media company that publishes content the White House does not approve of. It is the administration’s way of pressuring Twitter to take down the “offensive” posts while being able to say that the ultimate decision is up to Twitter, a private company, and thus get around the First Amendment. However, depending on the nature of the interactions between government officials and Twitter, there may well be a First Amendment issue. Mild inquiries are one thing. Government demands and warnings are something else.

In any event, Big Brother at the White House is doing more than just watching Twitter and making its unhappiness with certain posts known to Twitter’s current management. The Biden administration is using the full weight of its law enforcement powers to intimidate Elon Musk and threaten punishment for not submitting to the administration’s demands.

In response to a question at a presidential press conference last month whether he thought that Elon Musk was a threat to U.S. national security, the “Big Guy” called for federal investigations of Mr. Musk’s business dealings with foreign countries. “I think that Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at,” President Biden said. “Whether or not he is doing anything inappropriate, I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting that it’s worth being looked at.”

President Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reversed herself on whether it would be appropriate to investigate Mr. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, bringing herself into line with the president.

“I misspoke,” she told an audience at the New York Times DealBook Summit on November 30^th, referring to her earlier statement that she saw no reason to investigate the transaction. “Let me say to the extent that there are international investments there, we have an agency within Treasury called CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] that does look at transactions that involve foreign investment in the United States to see if they create national security risk.”

Funny how the Biden administration is slow-walking a decision about what to do with Chinese-owned TikTok’s U.S. operations. TikTok poses obvious national security concerns as a result of the Chinese regime’s access, through TikTok’s Chinese parent, to the personal information of U.S. citizens who use TikTok’s services. Yet nearly two years after President Biden took office, TikTok’s Chinese owner has not been required to sell its U.S. operations to a U.S.-owned company and ensure that all U.S. citizens’ data would be solely controlled and accessible by the new U.S. company. But President Biden and his Treasury Secretary did not hesitate to threaten an investigation of a U.S. citizen’s acquisition of a U.S. company on the phony pretext of national security concerns.

How about also taking a look at the Biden family’s own business dealings with China, Russia, and Ukraine, which have enriched them – most likely including the “Big Guy” – while jeopardizing national security in the process? President Biden dismissed questions about his own family’s business dealings in which he may well have had a part as “almost comedy.” He said that the “American public wants to move on.”

Not so fast.

Now that the Republicans will be taking control of the House of Representatives in January, they will be issuing subpoenas to get some answers regarding the Biden family business enterprise trading access and political influence for money. They also intend to investigate the whole Hunter Biden laptop saga, which Twitter and other Biden-friendly media tried to hide from the voters. Mr. Musk’s decision to make public the internal machinations of Twitter’s prior management will certainly provide fodder for the hearings that may affect whether Joe Biden runs for re-election in 2024.

Therefore, the White House and its allies are preparing for an all-out information war to discredit the Republican House hearings in advance as the work of extreme MAGA Republicans aided by a superrich plutocrat who cannot be trusted. The calls following the mid-term election by President Biden and his Treasury Secretary for investigations into the Twitter acquisition are an indication of what is to come.

There is also the latest reported investigation of another Musk-owned company. Not an investigation of Twitter in this case, but still one targeted at damaging Musk’s business holdings.

Reuters reported that “Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a medical device company, is under federal investigation for potential animal-welfare violations.” Some staff members have complained that Mr. Musk pushed them hard to conduct the tests too quickly, which they claimed have resulted  in “needless suffering and deaths” of test animals.

Neuralink’s facilities have passed all of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s regulatory inspections. The company is attempting to develop a brain implant that one day, according to the Reuters article, could “help paralyzed people walk again and cure other neurological ailments.” Elon Musk is known for demanding a sense of urgency from his staff to achieve quick positive results.

Using animals for testing in pursuit of medical breakthroughs to help neurologically disabled human beings is certainly more constructive than using taxpayer money to fund multi-million dollar marijuana experiments on monkeys. Or than authorizing experiments that included de-barking beagle puppies and then conducting drug toxicity and infected fly infestation tests on the dogs before killing them, as  Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has reportedly done.

Rather than conducting a full-scale investigation of how such cruel animal experiments could have been authorized and funded by the federal government, the Biden administration has other priorities. It would rather go after an Elon Musk company that is working on technologies to help human beings with serious neurological disabilities enjoy much better lives.

The Biden administration is hounding Elon Musk to pressure him into doing its bidding or, if that does not work, to make him pay dearly for daring to stand up for free speech. But Elon Musk can take heart from a famous Frank Sinatra quote: “The best revenge is massive success.”