A U.S. district court judge issued a ruling on Tuesday that requires Chief Medical Adviser to the President Anthony Fauci, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and other key public health officials to turn over all external communications with Big Tech companies. The ruling is based upon a lawsuit filed against top-ranking Biden administration officials by Missouri and Louisiana Attorneys General Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry for “colluding with social media companies to censor free speech.”
Writing for the Western District of Louisiana Court, Judge Terry A. Doughty noted how the plaintiffs “are entitled to external communications by Jean-Pierre and Dr. Fauci in their capacities as White House Press Secretary and Chief Medical Advisor to the President to third-party social media platforms” and ordered that both officials “shall provide answers to
the Plaintiff’s interrogatories and document requests within twenty-one (21) days from the date
of [the] order.”
In the ruling, Doughty also mandated that several prominent officials with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must “provide responses to Plaintiffs’ expedited discovery requests” regarding communications with social media companies within 21 days, including “HHS’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Engagement, the head of HHS’s Digital Engagement Team, the Deputy Director of the office of Communications in HRSA, and HHS’s Deputy Digital Director.”
“Up until this point, the Department of Justice has refused to cooperate with our requests for discovery from top officials in the Biden Administration under the guise of ‘executive privilege.’ Today, the Court entered an order that requires that the federal government turn over the records we’ve long requested,” Schmitt said in a statement. “The American people deserve answers on how the federal government has colluded with social media companies to censor free speech on these major platforms. We will continue to fight to uncover more of this vast censorship enterprise.”
The issuance of the court order comes days after the release of bombshell emails showing that the Biden administration coordinated with senior officials at Facebook and Twitter to censor posts about Covid-19 they claimed contained false or misleading information. As reported by The Federalist, “In an email dated July 16, 2021, addressed to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a senior representative for Facebook discussed how the company and Biden administration officials met ‘to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from [Facebook] on misinformation going forward.'”
A separate email chain dated July 20, 2021, also shows Digital Director for the White House Covid-19 Response Team Clarke Humphrey asking Facebook if the tech giant could remove a parody Instagram account of Dr. Anthony Fauci, to which a company official replied, “Yep, on it!”
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