Judge’s order ‘important step in reining in government abuse’
Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett said Wednesday that the “incriminating evidence” that the Biden administration was colluding with social media companies to censor viewpoints was “compelling.”
United States District Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued an injunction Tuesday prohibiting Biden administration officials with multiple agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Health and Human Services, from contacting social media companies to push for “the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.” “This injunction by a federal judge is a very important step in reining in government abuse of power,” Jarrett told Fox News host Trace Gallagher.
“You know, the Twitter files and the congressional hearings that followed exposed just how the FBI and other agencies were bullying and pressuring and coercing companies under veiled threats into suppressing media posts for purely political reasons,” Jarrett added.
Doughty denied the Biden administration’s motion on March 20 to dismiss the suit brought on May 5, 2022, by Republican Attorneys General Erik Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.
“Long ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, Trace, that this kind of censorship by proxy, as it’s known, violates the First Amendment,” Jarrett continued. “Technically, it also is a crime under the U.S. codes for government officials to conspire with others to violate somebody’s constitutional rights.”
Doughty listed 25 instances where social media companies either censored or were pressured to censor by the Biden administration, according to a thread on Twitter posted by Justin Hart, author of the Covid Reasoning newsletter on Substack.
Tucker Carlson, a co-founder of the Daily Caller and Daily Caller News Foundation, was among those targeted for censorship by the Biden administration, according to an April 14, 2021 email from White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty to an unidentified Facebook employee, demanding the company censor Carlson’s video about vaccines released in January.
“Since we’ve been on the phone – the top post about vaccines today is [T]ucker Carlson saying they don’t work. Yesterday it was Tomi Lehren [sic] saying she won’t take one,” Flaherty wrote to a Facebook employee, who promised to look into the matter.
“The incriminating evidence was compelling here. The FBI, Homeland Security, State Department, they were all involved. They were colluding with platforms to forbid dissent,” Jarrett said. “The judge didn’t buy for one minute the DOJ’s rather vacuous argument that their only intent was combatting disinformation in the name of national security.”
This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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