FIRST ON FOX: House Republicans are throwing their support behind a multistate lawsuit against the Biden administration over alleged collusion with social media companies to censor free speech.
Republicans on the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Government Weaponization filed an amicus brief late Monday night in the case of Missouri v. Biden. The case was brought after months of GOP-led accusations that federal officials worked to stymie views on COVID-19 and the 2020 election that did not align with theirs.
"The extensive investigation of the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has uncovered smoking gun documents showing how Big Tech and Big Government worked together to stifle free speech online," House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who also chairs the subcommittee, told Fox News Digital.
"We know through the Facebook Files that the Biden Administration directed Big Tech companies to censor speech the government disagreed with, and launched a pressure campaign when companies did not comply with these censorship orders quickly enough," he said.
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Over the last two weeks, Jordan has released several tranches of internal company emails, court records and various documents related to Facebook that Republicans are pointing to as "smoking gun" evidence that the Biden administration and Big Tech firms ran afoul of the First Amendment.
Revelations from those "Facebook Files" were included in the Monday night amicus brief, which accuses the Biden administration of exerting "direct and coercive" pressure on social media companies.
"For example, the Administration tried to suppress discussion of COVID’s origins: when a Facebook executive asked in July 2021 why the company censored the COVID lab leak theory, an executive in charge of content policy development said, ‘[b]ecause we were under pressure from the [A]dministration’ to do so," the court filing said.
"The same Facebook executive confessed that the company ‘shouldn’t have done it.’ Yet Facebook continued to do the Administration’s bidding, repeatedly removing and reducing content the federal government disfavored," the brief said.
House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who is also signed onto the brief, praised Jordan’s "rigorous" investigation in a statement to Fox News Digital.
"This is un-American, unconstitutional, and a violation of our First Amendment rights," Stefanik said. "I am proud to join this amicus brief to protect Americans' First Amendment rights and stand up to the Biden Administration’s continued unconstitutional weaponization of the federal government against their political opponents."
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The House Republicans are being represented by America First Legal, whose president Stephen Miller is a former Trump administration official. He told Fox News Digital, "Freedom and democracy itself depend on the outcome of this case."
"This amicus urgently calls the Court’s attention to these new findings and establishes why the court must affirm the decision below and stop the government from any further collusive behavior with Meta and other Big Tech to unconstitutionally silence or censor Americans’ speech and political expression," Miller said.
The judge presiding over the case, Louisiana U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, delivered President Biden’s opposition a big win last month when he issued a preliminary injunction to block key agencies and officials from communicating with Big Tech companies.
Doughty, a Trump appointee, said there was "substantial evidence" the Biden administration engaged in "dystopian" stifling of speech during the COVID-19 pandemic in a biting 155-page opinion.
"[T]he evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’" Doughty wrote.
