Ex-Twitter Employee Confirms Trump Administration Asked Twitter Remove Chrissy Teigen’s Tweet

As part of a larger Republican-led congressional investigation into President Joe Biden’s administration and family, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee questioned former Twitter executives during a hearing Wednesday about Twitter’s role in temporarily suppressing an October 2020 New York Post story regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The Republicans allege that Twitter’s decision to block the story, weeks before the 2020 election, was an attempt to protect Biden from damaging materials that could have swayed the election in favor of then-President Donald Trump.

While acknowledging that their handling of the story was a “mistake,” the former Twitter executives denied any involvement of government officials and explained that because the Post’s tweeted images “looked like they may have been obtained through hacking,” their temporary block was consistent with a policy they had developed in 2018 in an attempt to “prevent Twitter from becoming a dumping ground for hacked materials.”

They went on to explain that after careful deliberation, they realized that they had not “fully appreciated the impact of the policy on free press and others,” and admitting that they were “wrong,” the policy was changed within 24 hours.

The hearing took an unexpected turn when Rep. Gerry Connolly, (D-Virginia), asked a former Twitter employee about a September 2019 exchange between then-President Donald Trump and Chrissy Teigen. The exchange in question involved Trump referring to Teigen as John Legend’s “filthy-mouthed” wife and Teigen’s two-sentence response insulting Trump.

Anika Collier Navaroli, a former expert on Twitter’s content moderation team, told the House Oversight Committee that they “had received a formal request from the White House to evaluate this tweet.”

She went on to explain that the White House wanted Teigen’s tweet to “come down because it was a derogatory statement directed towards the president,” revealing that the Trump administration made requests from Twitter, not the Biden administration as claimed by Republicans.