The 2020 Hunter Biden laptop snafu was one of the truly shocking acts of press censorship in recent memory, when tech platforms decided to simply suppress a legitimate story from the New York Post that shed more light on Hunter Biden’s involvement with Ukrainian gas giant Burisma and the possible connection to his father, then Democratic candidate Joe Biden, something Republicans hoped would be an election-deciding “October surprise.” Last Friday, we got a peek behind the curtain at the behind-the-scenes deliberations at Twitter at the time, thanks to an orchestrated leak of emails billionaire Twitter CEO Elon Musk made to journalist Matt Taibbi.

The emails purport to show how Twitter higher-ups “freelanced” the decision to block the New York Post story without the weighing in of either the government or of then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Taibbi says that by 2020, “requests from connected actors” — specifically, the Biden campaign and the Donald Trump White House — “to delete tweets were routine,” though the screenshots provided only show Biden’s team and the Democratic National Committee requesting the removal of Hunter’s explicit personal photos.

But most scandalously, the select email screenshots shared by Taibbi on Twitter, where the story was reported, appear to show these higher-ups debating not whether they should or shouldn’t suppress the story and the press freedom implications of doing so, but which post hoc justification they should use to sell this censorship to the public.