Jordan
File photo | The Lima News
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A hearing to discuss a federal lawsuit that claims the Biden administration has directed social media companies to “censor and suppress Americans’ free speech” degenerated into testy partisan sniping on Thursday with Democrats and Republicans accusing each other of censorship.
The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing chaired by Ohio’s Jim Jordan was supposed to discuss Missouri v. Biden, a 2022 lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana that alleges the current presidential administration has “led the largest speech censorship operation in recent American history,” as former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt told the committee.
Jordan said their lawsuit demonstrates the need for his subcommittee to investigate the “censorship industrial complex,” declaring that people should have the right to free speech, even if they are spreading bad information.
“The First Amendment is not just for some people, not just for one political persuasion, not just for the so-called smart people like (former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony) Fauci, it’s for 337 million Americans,” said Jordan, a Republican from Champaign County. “That’s how our Constitution works.”
The hearing at times became a partisan bickering match, with Democrats accusing Jordan of using the committee to protect former President Donald Trump and Republicans comparing President Joe Biden’s administration to the secret police in East Germany.
At one point, the committee’s top Democrat rose from her chair and tossed a letter at the Republican she said had just thrown it at her.
In his testimony, Schmitt, who became a GOP U.S. Senator this year, accused the Biden administration of coercing social media companies to “censor disfavored speech.”
“The Biden team has publicly threatened social media companies with removing legal protections, blamed social media companies for societal problems, and accused social media companies of killing people” for allowing the spread of coronavirus “misinformation,” said Schmitt.
He accused social media companies of advancing government censorship through “fact-checking ruses,” and of censoring credible information, including the Hunter Biden laptop story, the COVID-19 lab leak theory, and the efficacy of masks. He said Biden’s team suggested that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should be subject to civil liability and potential criminal prosecution for not censoring political speech.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said the lawsuit has “uncovered a censorship enterprise so vast that it spans over a dozen significant government institutions, including the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
“Publicly, these federal actors have justified their deeds in the name of protecting the public against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ when in fact it is done to suppress disfavored views,” Landry continued.
A witness called by Democrats, Matthew Seligman of Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center, said the allegations in their lawsuit lack “a reasonable legal and factual basis” and threaten “to undermine efforts by social media platforms to combat the grave and growing threat posed by misinformation on issues ranging from public health to election integrity.”
He said government officials at all federal agencies “consistently and repeatedly reaffirmed—in public pronouncements and in private communications—that content moderation decisions ultimately rest with social media platforms and the officials’ communications were simply suggestions that the platforms were free to adopt or disregard in the application of the platforms’ own moderation policies.”
He also said no governmental official ever even hinted that social media platforms would be subject to any enforcement action of any kind if they declined to adopt the officials’ recommendations, and platforms that disagreed with government officials were not punished for doing so.
“By attacking platforms’ attempts to combat misinformation, and the government’s assistance to those platforms’ implementation of their own content moderation policies, the plaintiffs in cases like Missouri v. Biden do disservice to the principles of free speech that they claim to support and invite the grave consequences of misinformation that they seek to spread unchecked,” said Seligman.
Democrats objected to Jordan allowing Schmitt and Landry to leave the hearing after delivering their opening statements, and unsuccessfully tried to strike their testimony from the record. They accused the witnesses of making misleading statements and said they wanted to cross-examine them. Jordan pointed out that U.S. Senators like Schmitt who testify before Congress don’t usually answer questions from Congress members.
They also accused Jordan of using his post as House Judiciary Chairman to weaponize the government, by attempting to interfere in the potential prosecution of former President Donald Trump for his role in making an alleged $130,000 hush-money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
Jordan says he’s deciding whether to draft legislation that would protect “former and/or current Presidents from politically motivated prosecutions by state and local officials” in response to the potential charges, and has sent letters demanding testimony and documents about the probe from New York’s district attorney.
“This hearing really isn’t about social media companies, and it’s really not about COVID deniers,” said California Democrat Linda Sanchez. “It’s about protecting former president Donald Trump.”
Democrats said Trump has repeatedly used social media to incite violence, such as the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“President Trump used the federal government, used his position as president … to promote the big lie that the election was stolen, ” added California Democrat John. Garamendi. “That is the example of weaponization that this committee should be paying attention to.”
When Louisiana Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson asked to put a letter from Landry that decries violence into the hearing record, and presented a copy to the committee’s top Democrat, Virgin Islands Delegate Stacie Plaskett, Plaskett followed Johnson back to his seat and threw the letter back at him, accusing him of throwing the letter at her.
At another point in the hearing, Utah GOP Rep. Chris Stewart compared the Biden administration’s behavior to that of the Stasi secret police in East Germany, describing how Internal Revenue Service agents visited the home of journalist Matt Taibbi on the day he testified about the Twitter files before Jordan’s subcommittee.
“Secret police make conspicuous visits to homes and workplaces so the citizens will be aware and intimidated by the presence and power,” said Stewart.
