Politics
Former Missouri AG To Testify Biden Admin Ran ‘Largest Speech Censorship Operation’ In History Of U.S.
Former Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt will be testifying in front of a House committee on Thursday that the Biden administration led “the largest speech censorship operation in recent history,” Fox News reported.
Schmitt is claiming the Biden admin would coordinate with social media companies to strip away the free speech rights of Americans. The former attorney general is set to testify in front of the House Weaponization Committee on Thursday.
Schmitt is believed to be testifying along with Louisiana A.G. Jeff Landry and the former Missouri deputy A.G. for special litigation, D. John Sauer.
The three individuals, citing a May 2022 lawsuit they filed against the Biden administration over censorship, said this case is “the most important free speech lawsuit of this generation.”
Their lawsuit suggests Biden’s administration “colluded with social media giants Meta, Twitter, and YouTube to censor free speech in the name of combating so-called ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation.’”
The operation and relationship between the Biden admin and these social media companies fostered censorship “on a scale never before seen,” the lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit uses examples of COVID-19 vaccination background, the COVID-19 lab leak theory, and Hunter Biden’s laptop as story topics that were censored.
Schmitt is reported to testify that Biden’s relationship with these social media companies is much more “destructive than ever known” currently. “Discovery obtained by Missouri and Louisiana demonstrated that the Biden administration’s coordination with social media companies and collusion with non-governmental organizations to censor speech was far more pervasive and destructive than ever known.”
During the discovery process of the lawsuit, the three witnesses testifying Thursday have been able to depose Anthony Fauci about COVID-19 and an FBI agent about Hunter Biden.
In Landry’s prepared testimony, he said they have “uncovered a censorship enterprise so vast that it spans over a dozen significant government institutions,” Fox News Digital reported.
These government institutions Landry referred to include the CDC, the White House, the FBI, and the National Institutes of Health.
“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 is expected to say.
These federal officials are not allowed to “circumvent the First Amendment by inducing, threatening, and/or colluding with private entities to suppress protected speech.”