When the New York Post exposed the Biden family's overseas business dealings on the eve of the 2020 election, Big Tech swooped into action. As everyone now recalls, Facebook and Twitter buried legitimate reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop, potentially tipping the scales of a close race.

A new report from Congress explodes any notion that the censorship was just an innocent mistake. Far from it, Big Tech was expecting to win favor with a Biden White House by making the scandal disappear - and tech insiders privately acknowledged they had their thumbs on the scale.

Biden corruption goes deeper

According to House Judiciary's Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee, the FBI met dozens of times before the 2020 election with Big Tech to warn about a "hack and leak" involving Hunter Biden.

These meetings prepared Big Tech platforms to censor the Biden story when it appeared, in what House Republicans called "prebunking."

During one of these pre-election meetings, a member of Facebook's "trust and safety" team candidly admitted that their response could impact the election.

"[W]hen we get hauled up to [Capitol] hill to testify on why we influenced the 2020 elections, we can say we have been meeting for YEARS with USG [the U.S. government] to plan for it," the person said.

As Facebook discussed how to handle the laptop story, Facebook's then-U.K-based Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs, admitted that burying it could pay off if Biden won the presidency.

"Obviously, our calls on this could colour the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than almost anything else," he told Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan.

FBI deception

Hunter Biden had infamously abandoned the laptop at a computer shop in Delaware in 2019.

The FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, which briefed companies like Facebook and Twitter, was aware that Biden's laptop was obtained and authenticated by the FBI in 2019.

Despite this, the FBI "failed to disclose that it possessed and had authenticated the laptop—a key fact that likely would have ended any justification for censorship," Republicans on the Judiciary Subcommittee said.

As a result of this deception, "millions of Americans cast their presidential vote unaware of serious, credible allegations of misconduct levied against one of the two candidates."

At the time, dozens of intelligence agents also shared a bogus letter with the nation attesting that the laptop appeared to be a Russian fake, providing a pretext for the media, and Joe Biden, to dismiss the story.

As he faces the waning days of his one-term presidency, Joe Biden must decide whether to pardon his son for federal tax and gun crimes. President Trump, if re-elected, has suggested he may pardon Hunter to unite the country.