Former White House officials finally take the stand in a longrunning jawboning investigation on Covid and the 2020 election
Rep. Jim Jordan held a Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee hearing with former Biden administration officials alleging that the White House colluded with tech companies to censor Covid-19 and 2020 election posts online. | Francis Chung/POLITICOopened a fresh line of attack on the Biden administration Wednesday — using a hearing on social media in 2021 to raise questions about whether the White House was scheming to impact the upcoming election.
Those conversations — revealed in court filings and documents released by the committee — have become a hot-button issue on the right, seen as evidence of collusion between Big Tech and Democrats to suppress critiques of Covid-19 policies and questions about the 2020 election results. Jordan immediately went on the attack, accusing Flaherty and Slavitt of coercion, showcasing images of emails they sent to Facebook employees to remove what they claimed was misinformation around Covid-19.
“We had no intention in coercing any social media companies into taking any action,” Slavitt said. “We never received any indication that our dialogue ever was interpreted that way. I want to be clear that they made their own decisions.” Plaskett has asked Jordan to make public hundreds of hours of interviews with tech employees and government officials his investigators had conducted. She said in the hearing Wednesday that he refused, only making public two transcribed interviews.
Jordan tried to use the hearing to spin the issue forward — saying the Biden administration could continue to chill speech ahead of the upcoming election.has resumed sharing intelligence about foreign influence campaigns with tech companies, after being stopped following a lower court ruling last year saying such outreach was unconstitutional.
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