Hot-button ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ scandal still not over

Bob Unruh
WND News Center

Members of the U.S. Senate are charging that Joe Biden’s handlers are concealing details about their censorship schemes.

The accusations involve Biden’s planned Disinformation Governance Board, a program that purportedly was discontinued when the strategy came to light some months ago.

It was supposedly a government operation that would review and declare certain statements, even opinions, “disinformation” and rule that it be censored.

It’s already known that the Biden administration had multiple channels to foundations to complain about social media statements it disliked.

Those foundations then would, acting on behalf of the government, lobby social media companies to censor those views.

The scenario raises many First Amendment questions, as the government is forbidden from censoring private speech.

Now, according to a report at JihadWatch, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Josh Hawley of Missouri are saying the Biden administration concealed critical details about the board in documents provided to the senators.

“In a Thursday letter to Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Grassley and Hawley said the Department of Homeland Security heavily redacted documents requested by the pair in June regarding the board and its relationship with social media platforms,” JihadWatch documented.

“Based on our review of this material, it appears that many of the redactions are applied to pre-decisional and deliberative process material. We remind you that the oversight letters we send to the Executive Branch are signed in our capacity as sitting members of Congress, a separate and co-equal branch of government,” the senators wrote.

Grassley and Hawley then confirmed they would formally renew their requests to the department, as it is still “impossible to know the full extent to which various DHS components and offices are engaged in DHS’s ‘burgeoning’ counter-disinformation efforts,” the report said.

Developing as just one of the latest scandals of the Biden administration is the team effort that his bureaucrats assembled to influence the information the public was able to see by sending those censorship demands to various foundations, which then insisted that Big Tech censor what the administration disliked.

Multiple investigations now are pending.

Further, WND reported that a panel of the Department of Homeland Security rebuked Biden for his agenda to create that “Disinformation Governance Board” and impose its ideologies on Americans.

A report at Just the News cited a statement from the Homeland Security Advisory Panel that said, “We have concluded that there is no need for a Disinformation Governance Board.”

WND had reported that Biden was attracting comments comparing his administration and his “disinformation” agenda to “1984” and its “Ministry of Truth.”

His strategy was to have a government operation that could censor Americans and control what information they could have.

Biden quickly retreated given the American outrage that erupted over his plan, and administration officials hemmed and hawed and explained the board really wasn’t operational yet.

But details on that issue remain murky, so the American Center for Law & Justice sued for the details.

Its lawsuit is a Freedom of Information Act case seeking details about the development and launch of the censorship program.

Significant in the case is that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed that the operation had “not yet begun its work.”

But documents already uncovered show that plans for the operations were launched as early as September 2021 and Mayorkas signed the board’s charter in February 2022.

At that point it was operational.

Then two months later, Nina Jankowicz, whose expertise in disinformation appears to come from her campaigns using it, not fighting it, confirmed she’d been working on the project for some time.