Twitter and Meta executives, as well as journalists from a variety of media outlets, participated in a training exercise regarding a potential leak of data related to Hunter Biden that had similarities with a New York Post story published roughly one month later, according to internal documents published by author Michael Shellenberger as part of Elon Musk’s ongoing “Twitter Files.”
The Post’s original Oct. 14, 2020, story was based on a laptop, apparently belonging to Biden, containing a 2015 email that linked then-Vice President Joe Biden to his son Hunter’s business dealings with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. At an unspecified date in September, a training exercise hosted by the Aspen Institute titled “The Burisma Leak,” outlined a potential timeline of events following a hypothetical Oct. 5, 2020 hack and leak of Burisma documents showing Hunter receiving more compensation than previously reported for his work with the company and communicating with his father about the firm.
The Aspen Institute exercise imagines a hypothetical timeline between Oct. 5, 2020 to Oct. 15, 2020, where a cache of documents implies that the Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin, Shellenberger reported. The purpose of this training exercise was to “shape how the media covered it — and how social media carried it,” according to Shellenberger.