The Daily Caller News Foundation – Harold Hutchison on July 5, 2023
Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey of Missouri said that the COVID-19 pandemic was a “Trojan horse” for wider censorship efforts Wednesday after a federal judge issued an injunction against the Biden administration’s coordination with social media companies.
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.”
The Biden administration filed an appeal to Doughty’s ruling Wednesday.
“The right of free speech is a fundamental constitutional right that is vital to the freedom of our nation, and Plaintiffs have produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content,” Doughty wrote in the opinion granting the injunction sought by Bailey and Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry of Louisiana. Bailey succeeded Eric Schmitt, who initiated the lawsuit with Landry in May 2022, as attorney general of Missouri after Schmitt won election to the U.S. Senate in November.
“We have an E-mail chain from March to May 2021 between Rob Flaherty, the communications director at the White House with cronies in Big Tech social media corporations where he’s targeting any kind of skepticism about masks or vaccines in response to COVID,” Bailey told “Jesse Watters Primetime” guest host Katie Pavlich. “He’s specifically targeting a Tomi Lahren video, a Tucker Carlson video and demanding them to be taken down.”
Tucker Carlson, a co-founder of the Daily Caller News Foundation, was among those targeted for censorship by the Biden administration, according to an April 14, 2021 email from Flaherty, the White House Director of Digital Strategy, to an unidentified Facebook employee, demanding the company censor Carlson’s video about vaccines released in January of that year.
“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.
“COVID was a trojan horse that got the enemy behind the wall, but their censorship enterprise expanded so quickly they needed a new bureaucratic structure to manage it,” Bailey said. “The court has identified that the likely nerve center of the censorship enterprise is housed in the Department of Homeland Security, just to funnel all the requests for censorship through one simple bureaucratic agency, so we know it’s grown. We know it’s expanded its scope beyond just COVID to include election integrity and certainly we saw an unrepentant attitude from the Department of Justice when we were in court on this matter last month and it is certainly demonstrated in their notice of appeal.”
The Biden administration filed an appeal of Doughty’s ruling Wednesday.
“This country always rejected government censorship in favor of counterspeech, not censorship,” Bailey told Pavlich. “That’s what this fight is all about. That’s what the freedom of speech is all about.”
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