House Republicans Wade Deeper Into Debate Over ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’ Backed by White House

The House select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government is set to hold a hearing to examine the Biden administration’s potential collusion with social media companies to censor conservatives — the latest front in what is likely to be a years-long investigation. Members of Congress will hear testimony on Thursday morning from Senator Schmitt; the Louisiana attorney general, Jeff Landry; Mr. Landry’s assistant attorney general; and a fellow in constitutional law at Stanford, Matthew Seligman. The hearing will focus on a federal court case in the western district of Louisiana examining charges of collusion between the federal agencies and Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Twitter. The case, Missouri v. Biden, was filed last year by Messrs. Landry and Schmitt, the latter of whom at the time was serving as Missouri’s attorney general before his election to the Senate. The lawsuit alleges that “express and implied threats from government officials” were made against social media companies regarding if they failed to remove some information from their platforms. “Having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left,” the brief continues, “senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers.”Mr. Schmitt has cited a number of Silicon Valley sources and government agents as reasons for filing his lawsuit. “Here’s what we know so far,” Mr. Schmitt told Fox News. “First of all, during Covid, we know that high-ranking Facebook officials were text messaging the surgeon general of the United States saying, ‘Hey, we took that down, what more can we do?’ We also know that there was a special portal created for Big Tech with the government to take down people and, you know, have them deplatformed.”Mr. Schmitt also mentioned an appearance made by the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, on Joe Rogan’s podcast during which he admitted that the FBI was in regular contact with his company.“He was on a podcast talking about this himself,” Mr. Schmitt said, referring to Mr. Zuckerberg. Since the subcommittee’s formation earlier this year, it has held two hearings. They focused on disclosures that the FBI had been in contact with Twitter’s leadership team in order to recommend certain accounts be banned for spreading “misinformation” surrounding Covid-19. Lawyers litigating the Missouri lawsuit have already deposed a number of high-profile government officials, including Anthony Fauci and members of the FBI and the surgeon general’s office who were in contact with Twitter. Thursday’s hearing is expected to follow course, with Republicans demanding answers about federal agencies’ contact with Silicon Valley and Democrats calling the process a Joseph McCarthy-esque search for villains. At the last hearing, earlier this month, an independent journalist, Matt Taibbi, sparred with many Democrats on the committee, saying they were not taking the threat of the “censorship-industrial complex” seriously enough. “It’s not a slippery slope,” Mr. Taibbi said at the time. “It’s an immediate leap into a terrifying mechanism that we only see in totalitarian societies.”During the Democrats’ questioning of Mr. Taibbi at the last hearing, they showed little interest in the content of his reporting on the so-called Twitter files, but rather demanded answers about where he had gotten the information. Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett, the committee’s ranking member, asked Mr. Taibbi multiple times who had given him access to the emails he had obtained. She also asked another witness, author Michael Shellenberger, if he had been contacted by the Twitter CEO, Elon Musk, personally. “The attribution from my story is ‘sources at Twitter’ and that’s what I’m going to refer to,” Mr. Taibbi said in response to the ranking member’s questions.On March 9, the same day Mr. Taibbi testified before Congress, the Internal Revenue Service visited his home in New Jersey searching for him. With Mr. Taibbi at Washington, the IRS left a note on his door asking for him to call. The chairman of the weaponization committee, Congressman Jim Jordan, released a letter on Monday denouncing the IRS’s visit to Mr. Taibbi’s home and asking for information from the agency and Secretary Yellen about the visit. “The circumstances surrounding the IRS’s unannounced and unprompted visit to Mr. Taibbi’s home,” the letter states, “are incredible. … These facts demand a careful examination by the Committee to determine whether the visit was a thinly-veiled attempt to influence or intimidate a witness before Congress.” The House Democratic leader, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, has consistently derided the committee as a project of the far right that has no legislative purpose. In response to a letter sent by the committee’s Republicans requesting information from the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, Mr. Jeffries said Mr. Jordan was stepping out of bounds. “Instead of the House majority focusing on the economy, they continue to peddle conspiracy theories led by this so-called weaponization committee,” Mr. Jeffries told MSNBC, adding that Republicans had, in fact, set up a committee to project insurrectionists.

House Republicans Wade Deeper Into Debate Over ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’ Backed by White House

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