Chris Lange, FISM News
A federal judge has ordered White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and the Biden administration’s retiring chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, to turn over all email communications with social media companies regarding the censorship of information pertaining to COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The order is a victory for Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landy and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt in their lawsuit against President Biden and top government officials alleging that they colluded with social media companies in a massive campaign to suppress free speech.
Louisiana U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty rejected the Justice Department’s objection to the release of the emails, which it says are protected by executive privilege and presidential communications privilege. Jean-Pierre and Fauci have 21 days to comply with the order.
“This Court believes Plaintiffs are entitled to external communications by Jean-Pierre and Dr. Fauci in their capacities as White House Press Secretary and Chief Medical Advisor to the president to third-party social media platforms. The White House has waived its claim of privilege in relation to specific documents that it voluntarily revealed to third parties outside the White House,” Doughty wrote in the ruling.
The court in July directed the White House to hand over certain documents, but both sides have been deliberating for months over additional items to be included per the order, including the emails.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt praised Doughty’s decision while slamming the Biden administration for failing to comply with standard legal discovery obligations.
“Up until this point, the Department of Justice has refused to cooperate with our requests for discovery from top officials in the Biden Administration under the guise of ‘executive privilege.’ Today, the Court entered an order that requires that the federal government turn over the records we’ve long requested,” Schmitt said in a statement.
“The American people deserve answers on how the federal government has colluded with social media companies to censor free speech on these major platforms,” he said, with a vow to “continue to fight to uncover more of this vast censorship enterprise.”
The lawsuit centers around the alleged collaboration between top government officials and social media companies to censor information about the origins of COVID-19 and the efficacy of vaccines and face masks, as well as the suppression of the Hunter Biden scandal ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
The suit alleges that the Biden administration coerced social media companies including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, through “express and implied threats from government officials” which resulted in the Biden administration’s “open and explicit censorship programs.”
A portion of the complaint reads:
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 platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’
FISM reported in July that documents obtained in the lawsuit exposed collaborative efforts undertaken by multiple federal agency officials and social media companies to develop a strategy to moderate content, according to the attorneys general.
In one communication, Department of Health and Human Services and Facebook officials discussed how they could take down groups that challenged the Biden administration’s COVID-19 policies. Among these groups are prominent doctors and scientists who joined the lawsuit last month.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that he suppressed the Hunter Biden story on Facebook ahead of the 2020 election after FBI officials approached him with warnings of “Russian disinformation.”
This article was partially informed by a Washington Examiner report.