The White House refers to the Twitter Files as “old news” and a “distraction”

“So, look, we see this as an interesting, uh, a coincidence,” Jean-Pierre said. “If I may, that he would so haphazardly push this distraction, that is, uh, full of old news, if you think about it.”

In his tweet, Taibbi cited specific moves used by Twitter to suppress certain posts by labeling them as un-safe and blocking users from sharing links to the story through direct messages. The social media company claimed that those tweets violated its hacking policy.

The Twitter team would censor accounts that re-tweeted the Hunter story, including the account of President Trump’s Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.

However, the current press secretary claimed that the release of the Twitter Files was CEO Elon Musk’s attempt draw attention away from itself.

“At the same time, Twitter is facing very real and very serious questions,” Jean-Pierre said. “About the rising volume of anger, hate, and antisemitism on their platform.”

Meanwhile, Republicans such as Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the big data dump showed that Twitter executives were working directly with the Biden administration.