Republican AGs Request Court Block Biden Admin From ‘Coercing And Colluding With Big Tech’
Two Republican attorneys general have filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to block top Biden administration officials from “coercing and colluding” with Big Tech to violate the First Amendment rights of the American people.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed the motion on Monday as part of their ongoing free speech lawsuit against the Biden administration.
The lawsuit — which was filed on May 5, 2022 — was initiated by Landry and Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), who served as Missouri’s attorney general from 2019 to 2023. Schmitt previously appeared on Fox News with Dan Bongino to discuss the lawsuit.
The Missouri v. Biden free speech lawsuit has thus far resulted in the Republican attorneys general gaining access to thousands of internal documents from the Biden administration.
In their latest filing, Landry and Bailey cited 1,432 facts uncovered from these internal documents, which allegedly show that high-ranking Biden administration officials had colluded with several Big Tech companies to engage in censorship activities.
“This case involves some of the most egregious First Amendment violations in American history,” the attorneys general wrote in the filing. “Federal officials from the White House and multiple agencies use pressure, threats, coercion, cajoling, collusion, demands, and trickery and deceit to induce social-media platforms to censor speakers and viewpoints on social media that the federal officials disfavor.”
Alongside the motion for a preliminary injunction, the Republican attorneys general included a 364-page document that details multiple instances of censorship by the federal government.
According to Landry’s press release, these instances included officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) flagging social media posts for removal, the FBI “deliberately” planting false information to convince social media platforms to censor the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story, and officials from the White House coercing social media platforms to censor certain viewpoints.
Other examples cited in the press release include Dr. Anthony Fauci pressuring social media companies to censor the now-confirmed lab leak theory and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) operating “switchboards” that allowed state and local election officials to flag so-called misinformation.
The lawsuit also previously garnered documents revealing that the White House had pressured Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson for stating that vaccines “don’t work.”
“The overwhelming evidence is clear: the highest levels of our federal government are suppressing the First Amendment rights of Americans who have opposing views,” Landry wrote in a statement. “This egregious and unlawful viewpoint censorship by the White House, FBI, CDC, CISA, and other agencies not only chills speech; but it also unjustly inflicts grave and irreparable injuries on citizens and states, whose duty it is to protect their fundamental rights.”
If the court grants the preliminary injunction, Biden administration officials would be barred from “taking any steps to demand, urge, encourage, pressure, coerce, deceive, collude with, or otherwise induce” social media platforms to censor or take any “adverse action” against a speaker or viewpoint, according to the court filing.
