In the most recently exposed Biden administration scheme to combat misinformation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) colluded with a compromised Ukrainian intelligence agency to censor the speech of Americans. The federal agency responsible for protecting the nation against terrorists, violent street gangs and serial killers joined forces with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which is widely known to be infiltrated by Russian-aligned forces, to take down the authentic social media accounts of Americans. This includes a verified U.S. State Department profile and those belonging to American journalists. Interestingly, accounts targeted for removal by the SBU and FBI criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin and expressed pro-Ukrainian views.
Details of the illicit operation are outlined in a new congressional report made public this week by the House Judiciary Committee. The document also exposes how the FBI offered Facebook and Instagram legal cover to delete social media accounts singled out by the SBU. The two agencies routinely sent the popular social media platforms spreadsheets and other documents identifying thousands of profiles to eliminate. “Regardless of its intended purpose in endorsing the SBU’s requests, the FBI had no legal justification for facilitating the censorship of Americans’ protected speech on social media,” the report states. “In contrast to the Biden Administration’s stated support for Ukraine, the FBI, on behalf of the SBU, flagged Americans’ accounts and posts that were critical of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
The report says that the FBI also delivered censorship orders from the SBU to Google and YouTube and reveals that a senior cybersecurity employee at Google said the company was “deluged with various requests” for content removal after Russia invaded Ukraine. The primary liaison between the FBI and Silicon Valley is Elvis Chan, a San Francisco-based assistant special agent in charge of the division’s cyber branch. The congressional probe highlights the FBI’s unconstitutional role in enabling the SBU’s censorship regime and raises grave concerns about the agency’s credibility and competence as the nation’s premier law enforcement organization. “Put simply, the FBI worked with and on behalf of a foreign intelligence agency—widely known to be compromised by Moscow at the time—and directly abetted efforts to censor Americans engaging in protected speech,” the report says. “As a result, the FBI agents’ actions had the potential to render substantial aid to the Kremlin’s war effort.”
Strangely—or perhaps not surprisingly—the alarming document has received scant coverage from the mainstream media. One national outlet that did publish a story about it, dismissed it as “the latest in a series of Republican efforts to attack the Biden administration’s work with social media platforms, which ramped up over intervention on stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.” The operation is hardly the first involving the administration’s highly questionable efforts to control information. Just days ago, a federal judge issued an order prohibiting the Biden administration from pressuring social media companies to suppress free speech protected under the Constitution. The ruling involves a lawsuit filed by states accusing the federal government of going too far to supposedly combat COVID-19 disinformation. In the decision, the judge wrote that there was “substantial evidence” of a far-reaching censorship campaign.
It is part of a broader effort to divert public funds for a fictitious crisis created by the Biden administration to control information. The movement started with a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) panel known as the Disinformation Governance Board, which was technically dismantled after major backlash. Taxpayer dollars keep flowing to related causes, however. Millions in DHS terrorism prevention grants have gone to combat “misinformation and disinformation” and to create media disinformation networks worldwide. Large sums have also gone to related projects such as fighting science misinformation and misperceptions in black communities and, of course, COVID-19 misinformation, especially involving minorities and vaccines.