No good deed goes unpunished

Elon Musk and X have hugely helped free speech (and Berenson v Biden) by voluntarily opening X's internal records to me; they asked in return only that I publish the resulting article on X!

Gotta be honest.

I’m disappointed in (some of) you.

Yesterday, I published a major investigative piece showing how Biden Administration operative Andy Slavitt and Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb conspired to force Twitter (now X) to censor Covid vaccine skeptics in 2021 - as the White House prepared to roll out boosters and mandates that juiced Pfizer’s profits.

This documents I used in the story have never been made public before. They came directly from X’s archives.

This is more than just a big scoop. The information I reference in it will make Berenson v Biden - my lawsuit about the conspiracy - even stronger. My lawyer James Lawrence and I will soon amend the complaint to incorporate these new documents (and likely others as well).

The article even has the potential to impact the Supreme Court’s view of Murthy v Missouri, the broader case about the Biden Administration’s social media censorship - although the court may have already finalized its decision in that case.

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(Read it on X and don’t weep!)

SOURCE

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I linked to the article in a Substack I sent yesterday.

Yet many of the comments on yesterday’s Stack are complaints!

Why?

Because I published the article on X, not here.

Let’s be clear, folks. These documents are a huge gift from X and Elon Musk.

Some crucial background. Twitter banned me in August 2021, supposedly for violating its Covid misinformation policies. I sued Twitter four months later and in April 2022 won a crucial victory defeating Twitter’s motion to dismiss the suit.

In July 2022, before Elon bought Twitter and renamed it X, I settled the suit, becoming the first user ever to force a social media company to reinstate him following a ban lawsuit.

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(Shady’s back)

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But the most crucial part of the settlement wasn’t the reinstatement. As I said at the time, I would not settle unless Twitter gave me documents about third-party pressure on Twitter to ban me.

I was serious, and I kept my word to all of you, including those of you who generously backed the suit.

But - how do I put this politely? - the pre-Musk Twitter and its lawyers interpreted the settlement differently than I expected.

I became aware of the games original Twitter had played after Musk’s first pass at opening X’s archives, the original “Twitter Files.”

Michael Shellenberger, one of the Twitter Files writers, came across an email from a Twitter lawyer suggesting Twitter had not turned over documents it probably should have in the summer of 2022. He mentioned it to me in May 2023 - after we had filed Berenson v Biden.

I immediately understood the importance of the missing documents. Getting them was another story. Trying to relitigate the settlement agreement was one possibility; but doing so would be difficult and expensive and put me at odds with Elon.

We then attempted to subpoena X for what is called “third-party discovery” in Berenson v Biden. But the defendants fought the subpoena and the judge overseeing the case agreed to delay it until after she rules on their motion to dismiss the suit.

X’s voluntary cooperation was our only chance.

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(Unsubscribe? You kidding me? If you were on the fence about subscribing, yesterday’s article should have pushed you over!)

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The situation was made even more complicated because Elon was frustrated with the backlash against the Twitter Files. He was even more frustrated with me in particular because I had initially published my own Twitter Files reporting on this Substack page while only posting highlights to X.

I thought a single long-form article made more sense, and I thought I had told him my plans. Elon disagreed. In his view, having spent $44 billion to buy Twitter and then taken the risk to open the archives, he was entitled to expect that I publish exclusively, or at least first, on Twitter.

I understood, but it was too late for me to do anything but apologize - and ask him to look past his irritation with me and reopen the X archives for another look at the censorship pressures that Twitter faced in 2021.

I spent a year doing so.

I guess he eventually believed me, at least a little. In May, a lawyer for X told James Lawrence that X was prepared to take another look through its archives. This search required significant resources. Unlike the original Twitter Files searches, X’s lawyers ran it. They have already turned over 400 documents to James and me, and more are coming.

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In return, X and Elon had one main request.

They did not ask me to tell them what I planned to write based on the documents they turned over. They didn’t ask for editorial control or input. They didn’t ask for any edits on the piece that I posted.

But they wanted me to run the story on X — which, by the way, now has a Substack-like engine allowing the publication of long pieces, including images, on a single page.

That deal seemed very fair to me.

Especially since the piece would reach a larger audience than I could here (it has already reached 1 million views, and it will reach go far higher if Elon decides to repost it, as I hope he will).

I hope it does to you too.

At some point, I’m going to write here about what the documents mean for Berenson v Biden - Substack readers have been incredible supporters of the lawsuit, and I want to share that good news with you first. But, like yesterday’s piece, future stories based on the documents X provides are going to run on X.

No, you don’t have to subscribe to anything - you can read them there for free.

I’d like to think you will.