Chrissy Teigen reacted in disbelief after an old tweet of hers was quoted during the House Oversight Committee hearing in the US.
As part of the House Republicans’ newly launched investigation into US President Joe Biden and the Democrats, Wednesday’s (8 February) hearing examined Twitter executives’ temporary move to block distribution of a 2020 story by the New York Post about Hunter Biden.
The article claimed to show emails from Hunter to an executive at a Ukrainian gas company he represented as an attorney and later served as a board member for.
However, things took an unexpected detour when Virginia’s Democratic Congressman Gerry Connelly asked former Twitter employee Anika Collier Navaroli about a past viral exchange between former US President Donald Trump and Teigen.
In September 2019, Trump heckled Teigen on Twitter, referring to her as John Legend’s “filthy-mouthed” wife. After which Teigen responded calling Trump a “pussy ass b****”.
A clip of Navaroli reading Teigen’s tweet aloud at the hearings has since been shared on Twitter, with Teigen commenting: “I... oh my god.”
Replying to a user who found her original post, asking, “is this the tweet?” Teigen wrote: “I am crying. I cannot go on.”
Continuing, Connolly then asked Navaroli: “The White House almost immediately thereafter contacted Twitter to demand the tweet be taken down. Is that accurate?”
“I do remember hearing we’d received a request from the White House to make sure we evaluated this tweet, and they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement directed at the president,” Navaroli answered. The tweet was never removed.
The hearings were meant to call into question the social media giant’s alleged censorship of the Post’s story.
A spokesperson for the White House called the hearing a “bizarre political stunt” and “the latest effort by the House Republican majority’s most extreme MAGA members to question and relitigate the outcome of the 2020 election”.
