FIRST ON FOX: House Republicans are throwing their support behind a multistate lawsuit against the Biden administration for alleged collusion with social media companies to censor free speech.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Government Armaments filed an amicus brief late Monday night in the case of Missouri v. Biden. The case came after months of GOP-led accusations that federal officials worked to stifle views on COVID-19 and the 2020 election that didn’t align with their own.
“The extensive investigation by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on Armaments of the Federal Government has uncovered smoking gun documents that show how Big Tech and Big Government worked together to stifle free speech online,” said House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. , who also chairs the subcommittee, told Fox News Digital.
“We know from the Facebook files that the Biden administration directed major tech companies to censor speech with which the government disagreed and launched a pressure campaign when the companies failed to comply with those orders of censorship quickly enough,” he said.
Over the past two weeks, Jordan has released several troves of internal company emails, court records and various documents related to Facebook that Republicans point to as evidence of a “smoking gun” that the Biden administration and Big Business Tech violated the First Amendment.
Revelations of those “Facebook files” were included in Monday night’s amicus brief, which accuses the Biden administration of exerting “direct and coercive” pressure on social media companies.
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“For example, the Administration tried to suppress discussion of the origins of COVID: When a Facebook executive asked in July 2021 why the company censored the theory of COVID lab leaks, an executive in charge of developing of Content Policy said: “[b]because we were under pressure from the [A]administration to do so,” the court filing said.
“The same Facebook executive confessed that the company ‘shouldn’t have done it.'” Yet Facebook continued to do the Administration’s bidding, repeatedly removing and reducing content the federal government disapproved of. the writing said.
House GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, RNY, who is also a signatory to the brief, praised Jordan’s “rigorous” investigation in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“This is un-American, unconstitutional and a violation of our First Amendment rights,” Stefanik said. “I am proud to join this amicus brief to protect the First Amendment rights of Americans and stand up to the Biden administration’s continued unconstitutional weaponization of the federal government against its political opponents “.
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House Republicans are represented by America First Legal, whose president Stephen Miller is a former Trump administration official. He told Fox News Digital: “Freedom and democracy itself depend on the outcome of this case.”
“This amicus brief calls the Court’s attention to these new findings and sets out why the Court should affirm the decision below and stop the government from any further collusive behavior with Meta and others Big IT company to unconstitutionally silence or censor the speech and political expression of Americans,” Miller said.
The judge presiding over the case, US District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana, handed President Biden’s opposition a major victory last month when he issued a preliminary injunction to prevent key agencies and officials from communicate with Big Tech companies.
Doughty, a Trump appointee, said there was “substantial evidence” that the Biden administration engaged in the “dystopian” stifling of speech during the COVID-19 pandemic in a scathing 155-page opinion.
“[T]The evidence produced so far describes an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps most characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the U.S. government appears to have taken on a role akin to an Orwellian ‘ministry of truth,'” Doughty wrote.
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