Judiciary Committee Demands Interview With Biden Official On ‘Censorship Scheme’
In a letter to the Biden administration’s former director of digital strategy, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) demanded the former official appear to give a transcribed interview about the administration’s collusion with Big Tech to censor Americans.
Director of Digital Strategy Robert Flaherty recently announced his decision to leave the White House, where he has been working since January 2021, and is expected to join President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign team in the near future.
During Flaherty’s tenure in the White House, the Biden administration actively lobbied and colluded with Big Tech companies to censor unpopular speech that they deemed “misinformation.”
Jordan’s letter, which was sent to Flaherty on Friday, noted that the interview was part of a probe into the Biden administration’s participation in a “censorship regime.”
“The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of how and the extent to which the Executive Branch has coerced and colluded with tech companies and other intermediaries to censor speech. Whether directly or indirectly, a government-approved or -facilitated censorship regime poses a grave threat to the First Amendment and Americans’ civil liberties,” the letter states.
The Judiciary Committee chairman went on to directly implicate Flaherty in the White House-Big Tech collusion.
“Documents made public earlier this year demonstrate that in the course of your employment at the White House, you facilitated direct communications between [the Executive Office of the President] and large social media companies regarding the moderation of content related to topics such as COVID-19 and vaccines,” the letter alleges.
“These direct and frequent communications with these companies included instructions and demands to remove certain content, which, in numerous instances, appear to have been followed by the social media companies,” the letter continues.
Jordan concludes the letter by demanding that Flaherty contact the Judiciary Committee no later than July 7 to schedule his interview.
This news comes after numerous revelations about government censorship from the “Twitter Files” — a massive dump of internal messages and documents from Twitter CEO Elon Musk that was shared on the platform by several independent journalists.
The “Twitter Files” ended up uncovering direct communications between White House officials and Twitter’s previous management — where the officials demanded the censorship of certain ideas, individuals and organizations.
