Incoming DOJ Official Pressured Twitter To Remove Tweets About GA Election Irregularities, Emails Show

A current high-ranking official in the Department of Justice urged former Twitter head of trust and safety, Vijaya Gadde, to remove tweets containing evidence of election irregularities in Georgia, emails show.

“Thanks for responding this weekend re the dangerous tweets I flagged for you,” wrote Vanita Gupta, who now serves as the associate U.S. attorney general under President Biden, in an email to Gadde. The email — dated January 3, 2021 — was sent just four days before Gupta was nominated for her current post by President Biden.

“I am looping Lauren Groh-Wargo and Esosa Ose from Fair Fight. Can you loop them directly with your team that is policing disinformation and threats re Georgia elections?” Gupta continued. “They need to tag things quickly given real time and swift harm.”

Fair Fight Action is an organization formed by Stacey Abrams in 2018 that seeks to address “voter suppression” in Georgia.

One tweet targeted for censorship by Gupta was a report from James O’Keefe on potential voter fraud in the Peach State. The report featured an undercover conversation with Adam Seely, who served as Managing Director at the food pantry Emmaus House, where thousands of people were reportedly registered to vote.

“And it probably was a couple thousand people that had our address registered as their mailing address for their voter registration,” Seely can be heard saying. “And I was like ‘oh my god.’ So I’m looking through it and I’m like ‘well, this guy is dead.'”

Georgia law requires voters to register where they live while permitting someone to list false residency is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Our OMG journalist describes his undercover reporting that reveals possible illegal voter registration in Fulton County, GA. GA State Law makes it a crime to put false information on a voting registration for any primary or general election § 21-2-562

We have an exciting update… pic.twitter.com/YVlHH6PFQl

— O’Keefe Media Group (@OKeefeMedia) August 17, 2023

In response to Gupta’s email, Gadde agreed and offered to put her people in touch with Twitter’s on-call censorship teams. “I’m copying a few of my colleagues – they can escalate any issues to our on-call review teams,” Gadde wrote.

Another Twitter executive named Reggie McCrimmon asked Fair Fight to provide examples of the tweets they want taken down. “Can you share with us the details of what you’re seeing? Links to the tweets or accounts in question are helpful,” McCrimmon wrote. “We can escalate internally and address accordingly.”

Just a few months after the email exchange — when Gupta was firmly in place as the number three in the Biden DOJ — O’Keefe’s account was permanently suspended from Twitter.