House Republicans will subpoena the 51 intelligence veterans who signed a letter suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop story could be part of a Russian disinformation operation, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) pledged on Saturday.

The commitment from McCarthy, who is positioned to become speaker of the House next term, comes as Twitter CEO Elon Musk works with multiple journalists to release “The Twitter Files,” including internal messages about efforts to suppress the spread of reporting about the contents of the laptop ahead of the 2020 election.

During an appearance on Fox News’ “One Nation,” McCarthy was teed up to discuss ways in which Republicans would conduct investigations into Twitter once they take over the lower chamber. He said it is “egregious what we’re finding” and focused on the dozens of former intelligence officials whom critics have accused of election interference.

“Those 51 intel agents that signed a letter that said the Hunter Biden information was all wrong — was Russia collusion — many of them have a security clearance,” McCarthy said.

The signees, which include former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, warned in the letter that the October 2020 arrival of reporting about the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Going further than what the letter said, Politico used a headline that said the former intelligence officials were claiming the story was “Russian disinfo.” Then-candidate Joe Biden, the father of Hunter, used the letter to cast doubt on the laptop story during one of his debates with then-President Donald Trump.

McCarthy said the intelligence veterans would be subpoenaed and brought before a committee to address the letter about the laptop, many of the contents of which have since been analyzed and shown to be authentic.

“Why did they sign it?” McCarthy asked. “Why did they lie to the American public? A Clapper, a Brennan? Why did you use the reputation that America was able to give to you — more information — but use it for a political purpose and lie to the American public?”

McCarthy also said Facebook and Google should be scrutinized, claiming they “became an arm of the Democratic Party and the arm of government,” and asserted these tech companies should not have Section 230 legal protections.

The Hunter Biden probe is one of many that Republicans are gearing up to conduct after they won a slim majority in the House in the 2022 midterm cycle. In a House floor vote set for next month, McCarthy needs the support of a simple majority of members to become speaker. He is being challenged by at least one Republican, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who has argued that McCarthy has been disloyal to Trump and encouraged colleagues to “reinvigorate the America First movement.”

Elon Musk, whose exposure of Twitter’s internal communications has lifted the curtain on censorship of conservatives, took aim at a new target with an early-morning tweet Sunday: Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” Musk tweeted, an hour after another tweet warning that things were about to “get spicy.”

So far, the Twitter revelations, delivered in four tweet threads by journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, and author Michael Shellenberger, have mostly focused on Twitter’s decision to stifle the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story just days before the 2020 presidential election and its move to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform.

My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022

Musk’s latest tweets could suggest damning information might soon be revealed about Fauci, the government virologist who set COVID policies, including school lockdowns, economic shutdowns, and mask and vaccine mandates, under two administrations.

Fauci’s defenders have elevated him to god-like status over the last three years, with yard signs saying “In Fauci We Trust” and votive candles bearing his image. But a growing chorus of critics blame the octogenarian head of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases and current chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden for blocking investigation into the possibility that COVID leaked from a Chinese lab, where his office had funded dangerous bat virus research as well as his heavy-handed advice to close schools and businesses during the pandemic.

Fauci is scheduled to retire sometime this month, although Republicans in the House and Senate have vowed to investigate his potential role in the pandemic, which has so far killed more than six million people around the world.

Prior to Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in October, the platform routinely muzzled anyone who questioned the Fauci-led federal line on COVID. Conservative critics who raised the lab-leak theory decried the effect on children of closing schools and questioned the intentional shutdown of large swaths of the economy were silenced on the platform.

In Weiss’s Twitter Files revelation last week, it was shown that Twitter content police secretly blacklisted respected Stanford University professor Dr. Jay Battacharya, who was an early critic of Fauci. After seeing proof that he had been silenced, the horrified medical academic told Fox News such decisions had a devastating effect on society.

“We needed to have a discussion, an open scientific discussion about the right policies for COVID,” Bhattacharya told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. “Imagine how different all the small businesses who stayed open, all the people that wouldn’t have missed their cancer screenings, all the kids that wouldn’t be depressed and suicidal, all the learning loss that could have been avoided if we just had an open scientific discussion.”

“This was not a free and fair kind of discussion,” he added. “It was censorship that I think led to the tremendously bad policies we’ve had over COVID and the failures that we’ve seen over the last three years.”