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Biden, Psaki, Fauci sued for ‘colluding’ with Big Tech to suppress free speech on Hunter laptop, COVID

May 6, 2022 | | Print Article

(Video: Fox News)

President Joe Biden and members of his administration are being accused of having “pressured and colluded” with Big Tech companies to suppress information on topics like COVID and Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The president, White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Dr. Anthony Fauci, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and even the newly-named head of the “Disinformation Governance Board,” Nina Jankowicz, have been targeted in the lawsuit filed by two GOP-led states.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry accused Biden and top administration officials in a lawsuit of trying to silence critics through censorship by conspiring with social media giants Meta, Twitter, and YouTube “under the guise of combating misinformation,” Fox News reported.

Filed Thursday in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, the lawsuit names Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy as well as Jen Easterly, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

According to Fox News:

The attorneys general are asking the court to find that the Biden administration’s actions violate the First Amendment and exceeds its statutory authority, and stop the officials from continuing to engage in their “unlawful” conduct to suppress free speech. In addition, they specifically claim that the DHS and HHS officials’ conduct violates the Administrative Procedure Act to “hold unlawful and set aside final agency actions” that are deemed to be an abuse of power and arbitrary and capricious.

 

The 86-page lawsuit alleges that the administration officials actively worked to suppress free speech in “one of its greatest assaults by federal government officials in the Nation’s history,” and they “coerced, threatened, and pressured social media platforms to censor disfavored speakers and viewpoints by using threats of adverse government action.”

“Having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left, senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’” the filing states.

Missouri’s attorney general said the president and his administration have been “engaged in a pernicious campaign” violating free speech rights.

“In direct contravention to the First Amendment and freedom of speech, the Biden Administration has been engaged in a pernicious campaign to both pressure social media giants to censor and suppress speech and work directly with those platforms to achieve that censorship in a misguided and Orwellian campaign against ‘misinformation,’” Schmitt told Fox News Digital. “I will not stand idly by while the Biden Administration attempts to trample on the First Amendment rights of Missourians and Americans.”

“Big Tech has become an extension of Biden’s Big Government, and neither are protecting the freedoms of Americans; rather, they are suppressing truth and demonizing those who think differently,” said Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry. “Ripped from the playbook of Stalin and his ilk, Biden has been colluding with Big Tech to censor free speech and propagandize the masses. We are fighting back to ensure the rule of law and prevent the government from unconstitutional banning, chilling, and stifling of speech.”

Schmitt spoke about the lawsuit in an appearance with Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“These folks are nuts, they’re intent on suppressing speech that they don’t like, calling it disinformation, misinformation, so we’re filing a lawsuit,” he said.

“The reality is, individuals have a right to speak their mind, this is at the core of the American experiment, this a God-given right, government’s there to protect those rights, not to tell you what you can say and when you can say it,” he told Carlson. “So this lawsuit, it’s a landmark lawsuit, we’re going directly after the collusion, they’re working together to suppress speech and we’re fighting back.”

Schmitt unpacked examples of the government’s collusion with Big Tech in a series of tweets on Thursday. The examples covered the suppression of a 2020 New York Post story on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, noting that the lawsuit alleged “Biden, his allies, and those acting in concert with them falsely attacked the Hunter Biden laptop story as ‘disinformation.’”

The two attorneys general also cited how Facebook censored posts about the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, saying Fauci “was orchestrating a campaign to falsely discredit the lab-leak theory” and was “exchanging emails with Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, regarding the control and dissemination of COVID-19 information.”

Also mentioned in the lawsuit are examples of how YouTube censored Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis when they raised questions about the effectiveness of wearing cloth masks.

“Biden repeatedly threatened social media companies for not doing enough to combat ‘misinformation,'” Schmitt tweeted.

The tech giants are also accused of “aggressively censoring speech that raised concerns about the security of voting by mail, a major election-security issue.”

“Notoriously, social-media platforms aggressively censored core political speech by then-President Trump and the Trump campaign raising concerns about the security of voting by mail in the run-up to the November 2020 presidential election,” the suit states.

Schmitt also posted examples of Psaki and Murthy calling on social media companies to do more about “misinformation.”

“There is a common theme to all these examples of wrong-headed censorship: Each involved censoring truthful or reliable information that contradicted left-wing political narratives,” the filing states.

Frieda Powers
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