The Federal Bureau of Investigation defended itself following a slew of accusations levied against it by journalists releasing Elon Musk's Twitter files, Fox News first reported.
In a Wednesday statement, the agency suggested reporters Matt Taibbi, Lee Fang, and Bari Weiss, as well as author Michael Shellenberger, were "conspiracy theorists" in their threads exposing internal Twitter documents.
"The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding, and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries," the statement read.
The FBI further argued its tips from agents to Twitter employees provided "critical information" to the social media platform to protect themselves and their customers."
"It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency," it added.
The defense follows several internal memos provided to Shellenberger demonstrating, what Musk claimed to be, the government paying "Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public."
Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel James A. Baker "wasn't the only senior FBI exec. involved in the Trump investigation to go to Twitter," Shellenberger wrote. "Dawn Burton, the former dep. chief of staff to FBI head James Comey, who initiated the investigation of [former President Donald] Trump, joined Twitter in 2019 as director of strategy."
"As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — "Bu alumni" — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals," the author later claimed.
Shellenberger also shared a 2021 email showing that Twitter's Safety, Content, and Law Enforcement division had obtained $3.4 million in reimbursements for its work responding to FBI information requests, CNN noted.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.