Special Counsel Jack Smith admitted federal prosecutors tampered with evidence in his criminal case alleging former President Donald Trump mishandled classified documents.
According to a Friday court filing, prosecutors said documents the FBI seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence are no longer in the same order in which they found them, and some are mislabeled and may even be misplaced. A government “filter team” that dealt with the boxes once the FBI took them “was not focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box,” the special counsel’s office wrote in the filing.
Later the filing says, of early inventories and scanned records of the seized document boxes, “Because these inventories and scans were created close in time to the seizure of the documents, they are the best evidence available of the order the documents were in when seized. That said, there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” A footnote on this last sentence says: “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.”
The filing also suggests the Department of Justice and FBI may have lost and mislabeled some of the documents. When the agencies first took the documents at Mar-a-Lago, government employees used many blank sheets of paper as substitutes and cover papers for what they decided might be classified documents.
After the FBI brought the document boxes to Washington DC, federal employees and contractors began replacing these “handwritten sheets” with proper classified document covers. At that point, the filing says, “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet.” This indicates the special counsel’s office disclosed it isn’t sure whether some it lost or mislabeled some of the allegedly classified documents it seized in the Trump raid.
In response, Trump’s defense team filed a motion to dismiss the case over prosecutorial misconduct.
Setting aside the FBI high-tailed it out of southern FLA to conduct the investigation within the confines of the corrupt Washington FBI field office, Smith admits DOJ cannot be sure every place holder corresponds with the correct document. pic.twitter.com/Fxy8MZp2qs
Smith charged Trump last June with 37 criminal counts related to the former president’s handling of classified documents. In July, Smith added three more counts against Trump as Democrats strategize to retain the presidency by imprisoning their chief political opponent in an unprecedented lawfare campaign. New evidence shows the Democrat White House worked closely with the DOJ and National Archives and Records Administration in crafting the documents case against Trump.
The classified documents case is Trump’s largest election-year court battle, as nearly half of the 88 total charges against him currently are related to the records. Federal prosecutors confiscated 33 boxes of documents from the hostile raid on Trump’s home in August 2022, according to Fox News. The Department of Justice has spent more than $23 million in taxpayer dollars for Smith to investigate Trump.
In April, Federalist Elections Correspondent Brianna Lyman outlined three major revelations to emerge from the classified documents case to date, including deep state pressure to move forward with Trump’s prosecution and White House involvement.
“President Biden also retained classified documents after leaving the vice presidency,” Lyman reported. “Yet he was not charged because prosecutors say they believed he would ‘present himself to the jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’”
The Department of Energy allegedly revoked the former president’s security clearance retroactively once Trump was indicted.
In February, journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag reported the FBI raid may have been orchestrated to cover up the intelligence state’s role in the Russia hoax. The article posted on Shellenberger’s news website, Public, outlined how intelligence officials fretted over the presence of a classified “binder” in Trump’s possession that former CIA Director Gina Haspel was careful to protect for years.
“Transgressions [the feds might have wanted to cover up] range from Justice Department surveillance of domestic political targets without probable cause to the improper unmasking of a pre-election conversation between a Trump official and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to WMD-style manipulation of intelligence for public reports on alleged Russian ‘influence activities,’” Public reported.
The binder was “Trump’s insurance policy,” according to an unnamed source cited as “knowledgeable about the case.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Last week in Denver, several hundred people gathered in person for the Genspect conference, “The Bigger Picture,” while many more from all over the world joined online. Genspect’s founder, Stella O’Malley, has the intentional strategy of hosting their annual conference at the same time and in the same location as the annual World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) meeting.
Last year they gathered in Killarney, Ireland, when WPATH met there, and next year they will host their gathering in Lisbon, Portugal, piggybacking off of the WPATH dates and location. It’s an interesting strategy offering WPATH attendees to come to Genspect’s sessions for free whereby they can engage with a different perspective, as well as putting WPATH on notice that there is a growing movement of those who want to offer a “healthy approach to sex and gender.”
I was unable to attend their gathering last year in Ireland, but when O’Malley invited me to speak at the Denver conference, I was happy to accept. The speaker’s list was a who’s who of those fighting gender ideology, some for many years.
On the Front Lines of the Gender Wars
Michael Shellenberger opened the conference with a bold claim that time is up for WPATH and that soon he would release his “WPATH files” on his Substack, where he will show the receipts he has on the pseudoscientific standards of care and practices of WPATH. Amid robust applauses, attendees were encouraged to post on X using #TimesUpWPATH. A lifelong member of the Democrat Party, he lamented how far the left has fallen from the principles that drew him to that party.
Highlights for me were hearing from the brilliant Leor Sapir on “Institutional Capture (How gender ideology has been embedded within America).” Sapir chronicled Obama’s 2010 anti-bullying initiative, which was at first sex-based directed, and then expanded in 2011 to include gender language in the antibullying initiative.
Following this was the 2015 letter from James Ferg Cadima in the Office of Civil Rights, stating, “The Department’s Title IX regulations permit schools to provide sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes under certain circumstances. When a school elects to separate or treat students differently on the basis of sex in those situations, a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”
Wonder how America got to this place? Perhaps a well-intentioned initiative to combat bullying quickly led us down the path where boys can have access to spaces that were once protected for girls.
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright and scientist Heather Heying did an excellent job, patiently and thoroughly stating the obvious, that there remain only two sexes no matter what others assert. They marveled at the fact that even once-trusted scientific journals are now claiming that “The idea of two sexes is overly simplistic.”
Two mothers, January Littlejohn and Erin Friday, gave impassioned speeches about their daughters who believed the lie that they were born in the wrong body. Littlejohn spoke about her daughter’s middle school working behind their back to encourage this idea and talked about her decision to bring forth a lawsuit, restoring rights and protections to parents over their own children.
Friday, an attorney by training who works with Our Duty, had many in tears using Hans Christian Anderson’s story of “The Snow Queen” to parallel her own efforts to save her daughter from the evils of gender ideology. She is a force in the state of California, fighting laws passed by Gov. Gavin Newsom while trying to raise funds to get initiatives on the ballot to put before voters which will protect children and parental rights. She appealed to the audience that if the transing of children can be stopped in California this will have an enormous positive effect across the whole country.
Stories of Destransitioning and Whistleblowers
Any conference like the one hosted by Genspect naturally needs to include the voices of those most harmed by “gender affirmation therapy,” those who transitioned and have now detransitioned once they realized their decision to transition didn’t fix any of their mental health issues, and as is often the case, made things worse. Chloe Cole and Prisha Mosley both spoke about their deeply personal experiences. Many other detransitioners attended the conference as well. It was wonderful to see how their tragic stories have brought them together in the spirit of camaraderie.
And who doesn’t love a good whistleblower story like Jamie Reed? Reed blew up the internet back in February with her expose, “I thought I was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.”
Since 2018, Reed served as a case manager at Washington University, in their Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, until she came to the realization that she could no longer condone the treatment children were receiving. Her remarks at Genspect were a rallying cry for the political left to wake up and stop harming children. As a lifelong leftist, she implored the audience not to give up on the left, but to help them return to principles.
The title of my own talk — “Transgender Assisted Reproduction: where is this going?” — was a convergence on my years of work in assisted reproductive technology and how this technology will most likely be needed by trans-identifying people, especially children who are fast-tracked to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries.
When I first found out that children were being offered fertility preservation procedures, knowing
that “gender affirmation care” harms natural and normal fertility, I began speaking up and producing documentary films about the lack of medical ethics and evidence-based medicine supporting these practices. Pre-puberty, children are offered to cryopreserve their ovarian or testicular tissue because their gametes, (ova and sperm) are not yet mature. Post-puberty, the child will have mature ova and sperm, so they are offered to freeze and bank their gametes.
The data is clear. Most assisted reproductive technology cycles fail. Data is coming out about the harms and risks to children being created by these technologies. The maxim, “First, Do No Harm” is being ignored in offering hope of future children, when in fact this is considered an experimental procedure with no data on this population. From the audience’s reactions and comments, it was clear that this is a whole new level of doubling down on harming children to advance an ideology that ignores biological reality, evidence-based medicine, and medical ethics.
Times up, WPATH.
Jennifer Lahl, MA, BSN, RN, is a filmmaker and founder of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. She is on X @JenniferLahl
“It may be possible — if we can take off the tinfoil hat — that there is not a vast conspiracy,” Democrat Colin Allred of Texas scoffed at independent journalist Matt Taibbi during Thursday’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing. But while Allred was busy deriding Taibbi and fellow witness, journalist Michael Shellenberger, the public was digesting the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” — which contained yet further proof that the government funds and leads a sprawling Censorship Complex.
Taibbi dropped the Twitter thread about an hour before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing began. And notwithstanding the breadth and depth of the players revealed in the 17-or-so earlier installments of the “Twitter Files,” Thursday’s reporting exposed even more government-funded organizations pushing Twitter to censor speech.
But yesterday’s thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” did more than merely expand the knowledge base of the various actors: It revealed that government-funded organizations sought the censorship of truthful speech by ordinary Americans.
In his prepared testimony for the subcommittee, Shellenberger spoke of the censorship slide he saw in reviewing the internal Twitter communications. “The bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from ‘countering terrorism’ to ‘countering extremism’ to ‘countering simple misinformation.’ Otherwise known as being wrong on the internet,” Shellenberger testified.
“The government no longer needs the predicate of calling you a terrorist or an extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity,” Shellenberger continued. “The only predicate it needs is the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.”
Being “wrong” isn’t even a prerequisite for censorship requests, however, with the Virality Project headed out of the Stanford Internet Observatory reportedly pushing “multiple platforms” to censor “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.”
An excerpt showed this verboten category included “viral posts of individuals expressing vaccine hesitancy, or stories of true vaccine side effects,” which the so-called disinformation experts acknowledged might “not clearly” be “mis or disinformation, but it may be malinformation (exaggerated or misleading).”
Silencing such speech is bad enough, but the Virality Project “added to this bucket” of “true content” worthy of censorship: “true posts which could fuel hesitancy, such as individual countries banning certain vaccines.”
Let that sink in for a minute. The Virality Project — more on that shortly — pushed “multiple platforms” to take action against individuals posting true news reports of countries banning certain vaccines. And why? Because it might make individuals “hesitant” to receive a Covid shot.
So who is this overlord of information, the Virality Project?
The Stanford Internet Observatory reports that it launched the Virality Project in response to the coronavirus, to conduct “a global study aimed at understanding the disinformation dynamics specific to the COVID-19 crisis.” Stanford expanded the project in January 2020, “with colleagues at New York University, the University of Washington, the National Council on Citizenship, and Graphika.”
Beyond collaboration with state-funded universities, the Virality Project, in its own words, “built strong ties with several federal government agencies, most notably the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC, to facilitate bidirectional situational awareness around emerging narratives.” According to the Virality Project’s 2022 report, “Memes, Magnets, and Microchips Narrative Dynamics Around COVID-19 Vaccines,” “the CDC’s biweekly ‘COVID-19 State of Vaccine Confidence Insights’ reports provided visibility into widespread anti-vaccine and vaccine hesitancy narratives observed by other research efforts.”
The Virality Project’s report also championed its success in engaging six Big Tech platforms — Facebook (including Instagram), Twitter, Google (including YouTube), TikTok, Medium, and Pinterest — using a “ticket” system. The social media platforms would “review and act on” reports from the Virality Project, “in accordance with their policies.”
With the Virality Project working closely with the surgeon general and the CDC, which provided “vaccine hesitancy narratives” to the Stanford team, and the Stanford team then providing censorship requests to the tech giants, the government censorship loop was closed.
Censorship requests were not limited to Covid-19, however, with the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Election Integrity Partnership playing a similar role in providing Twitter — and presumably other Big Tech companies — requests to remove supposed election disinformation.
Earlier “Twitter Files” established that the Election Integrity Partnership was a conduit for censorship requests to Twitter for other government-funded entities, such as the Center for Internet Security. And in addition to receiving millions in government grants, during the 2020 election, the Center for Internet Security partnered with the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security — again completing the circle of government censorship we saw at play during the 2020 election cycle.
The groups involved in both the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project are also connected by government funding. The Election Integrity Partnership boasted that it “brought together misinformation researchers” from across four organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Both Graphika and the University of Washington also partnered with Stanford for the Virality Project, along with individuals from New York University and the National Council on Citizenship.
Beyond the taxpayer-funded state universities involved in the projects, Graphika received numerous Department of Defense contracts and a $3 million grant from the DOD for a 2021-2022 research project related to “Research on Cross-Platform Detection to Counter Malign Influence.” Graphika also received a nearly $2 million grant from the DOD for “research on Co-Citation Network Mapping and had previously researched “network mapping,” or the tracking of how Covid “disinformation” spreads through social media.
The Atlantic Council likewise receives federal funding, including a grant from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center awarded to its Digital Forensics Research Lab. And Stanford rakes in millions in federal grants as well.
The government funding of these censorship conduits is not the only scandal exposed by the “Twitter Files.” Rather, the internal communications of the social media giant also revealed that several censorship requests rested on bogus research.
But really, that is nothing compared to what Thursday’s “Twitter Files” revealed: a request for the censorship of truthful information, including news that certain Covid shots had been banned in some countries. And that censorship request came from a group of so-called disinformation experts closely coordinating with the government and with several partners funded with government grants — just as was the case during the 2020 election.
This all goes to show that sometimes there is a vast conspiracy at play and that the problem is not that someone is donning a tinfoil hat, but that he’s buried his head in the sand.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Most committee hearings flounder because politicians waste time grandstanding, but lawmakers shouldn’t squander the chance to ask insightful questions of the ‘Twitter Files’ witnesses.
Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testify on Thursday before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Little they say will be new, yet because corporate media have refused to cover the story, many Americans remain ignorant about the massive scandals Taibbi, Shellenberger, and the other independent journalists have revealed over the last three months in the “Twitter Files.”
Here’s what the House committee must do to break the cone of silence.
Introduce Taibbi and Shellenberger to Americans
Most Americans know little about Taibbi and Shellenberger, allowing the left to execute its go-to play when faced with inconvenient facts: call the messengers members of a right-wing conspiracy. The House’s weaponization committee should thus ensure the public knows neither Taibbi nor Shellenberger can be written off as conservative conspirators, much less “ultra MAGA.”
Hopefully, the two witnesses for the majority party will ensure their opening statements detail their non-conservative “credentials” — something Taibbi has attempted to do on Twitter, writing: “I’m pro-choice and didn’t vote for Trump,” and noting he is an independent.
Taibbi’s work covering politics for Rolling Stone and his “incisive, bilious takedowns of Wall Street,” as well as past appearances on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, and his work with Keith Olbermann, are the non-conservative credentials Americans need to hear.
Shellenberger’s biography likewise confirms he is no right-winger or Trump surrogate. Time Magazine named him “Hero of the Environment.” “In the 1990s, Shellenberger helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, inspire Nike to improve factory conditions, and advocate for decriminalization and harm reduction policies,” his webpage reads — details helpful to highlight for the listening public.
If Taibbi and Shellenberger’s prepared testimony omits these and other details, Chair Jim Jordan should open the hearing by asking the witnesses to share with the country their political and policy perspectives and then push them on why all Americans should care about the “Twitter Files.”
Here, the committee and its witnesses need to remind Americans of the importance of free speech and that the silencing of speech harms the country, even when it is not the government acting as the censor. (In fact, I would argue it is precisely because our country has lost a sense of the importance of free speech that the government successfully outsourced censorship to Twitter.)
Guide Them So They Tell a Coherent Story
Next, the questioning will begin. Unfortunately, here’s where most committee hearings flounder because politicians prefer to pontificate than pose insightful questions to their witnesses. But in the case of the “Twitter Files,” Republicans can do both because the witnesses have already provided detailed answers to much of what the country needs to know in the nearly 20 installments they published over the last several months.
Thus the goal of the committee should be to provide a platform that allows the witnesses to tell the story of the scandals uncovered. Ideally, then, committee members will lead the witnesses through their testimony as if each question represents the opening paragraph of a chapter, with Taibbi and Shellenberger given the floor to provide the details.
Start at the Beginning, the Best Place to Start
Committee members will all want to focus on the most shocking discoveries, such as the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the government’s demands to silence unapproved Covid messages. But those events merely represent symptoms of the diseased state of free speech Taibbi and Shellenberger uncovered, and the latter represents the real threat to our country.
Democrats, independents, and apolitical Americans will also be inclined to immediately write off the hearings as political theater if Republicans immediately flip to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and Covid messaging. Both are important parts of the story, but Americans first need to understand the context.
Begin there: After Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he provided Taibbi, Shellenberger, and other independent journalists access to internal communications. What communications were accessible? What types of emails did the journalists review? How many? What else remains to explore?
Buckets of Scandals
The story will quickly progress from there, but how?
While the committee could walk Taibbi and Shellenberger through each of their individual “Twitter Files” reports, the better approach would be to bucket the scandals because each thread the journalists wrote included details that overlapped with earlier (and later) revelations.
Remember: The scandals are not merely the “events,” such as the blocking of the New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Rather, they go back to first principles — in this case, the value of free speech.
Twitter’s Huge Censorship Toolbox
Moving next to what Taibbi called Twitter’s “huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user,” the House committee should ask the witnesses to expand on those tools, which include “Search Blacklist,” “Trends Blacklist,” “Do Not Amplify” settings, limits on hashtag searches, and more.
What were those tools? How often were they used and why? Did complaints from the government or other organizations ever prompt Twitter to use those visibility filters? Were official government accounts ever subjected to the filters? If so, why?
Twitter-Government Coordination
The natural next chapter will focus on any coordination between Twitter and the government. Again, the “Twitter Files” exposed the breadth and depth of government interaction with the tech giant — from FBI offices all over the country contacting Twitter about problematic accounts to, as Taibbi wrote, Twitter “taking requests from every conceivable government agency, from state officials in Wyoming, Georgia, Minnesota, Connecticut, California, and others to the NSA, FBI, DHS, DOD, DOJ, and many others.”
Internal communications also showed the CIA — referred to under the euphemism “Other Government Agencies” in the emails — working closely with Twitter as well. Other emails showed Twitter allowed the Department of Defense to run covert propaganda operations, “whitelisting” Pentagon accounts to prevent the covert accounts from being banned. The multi-agency Global Engagement Center, housed in the Department of State, also played a large part in the government’s efforts to prompt the censorship of speech.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations reached out to Twitter as well, seeking the removal of various posts, as did other individual politicians, such as Rep. Adam Schiff and Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
To keep the conversation coherent, the committee should catalog the various government agencies, centers, and individuals revealed in the “Twitter Files” and ask the witnesses how these government-connected individuals or organizations communicated with Twitter, how they pressured Twitter, the types of requests they made, and their success.
The “Twitter Files” detailed censorship requests numbering in the tens of thousands from the government. Asking the witnesses to expand on those requests and how individual Americans responded when they learned they were supposedly Russian bots or Indian trolls will make the scandal more personal.
Non-Governmental Organizations
Questioning should then proceed to the non-governmental organizations connected to Twitter’s censorship efforts. Again, the committee should first provide a quick synopsis of the revelations from the “Twitter Files,” highlighting the involvement of various nonprofits and academic institutions in the “disinformation” project, including the Election Integrity Partnership, Alliance Securing Democracy (which hosted the Hamilton 68 platform), the Atlantic Council’s Center for Internet Security, and Clemson University.
What role did these organizations play? Have you reviewed all of the communications related to these groups? Were there other non-governmental organizations communicating with Twitter? How much influence did these groups have?
Disinformation About Disinformation
The story should continue next with testimony about the validity of the various disinformation claims peddled to Twitter. Internal communications showed Twitter insiders knew the Hamilton 68 dashboard’s methodology was flawed. Other emails indicated Twitter experts found the claims of Russian disinformation coming from Clemson, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, and the Global Engagement Center questionable.
Highlighting these facts and then asking the witnesses to elaborate on the revelations, organization by organization, will advance the story for the public.
Funding Sources
Next up should be the funding of those organizations, which came from government grants and often the same few private organizations. Here the Committee should ask Taibbi the status of his research on the financing of these organizations — something the journalist indicated last month he is delving into.
Taibbi also suggested the Global Engagement Center’s funding should be looked at in the next budget. Why? What should the House know before it makes future budget decisions?
Connecting the Censorship Complex Dots
After these details have been discussed, the committee should connect the dots as Taibbi did when he wrote: “What most people think of as the ‘deep state’ is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.”
Read that quote — and other powerful ones from either the emails or the journalists covering the story — to the witnesses. Hopefully, staffers already have the best quotes blown up and ready for tomorrow.
Can you explain what you mean, here, Mr. Taibbi? What “state agencies”? What NGOs? Mr. Shellenberger, do you agree? What governmental or non-governmental players did you see involved?
What Was the Media’s Role?
Asking the witnesses about the media’s involvement will then close the circle on the big picture, which is ironic given the press’s role in circular reporting — something even Twitter recognized. Hamilton 68 or the Global Engagement Center would announce Russian disinformation and peddle it to the press, Twitter, and politicians. Then when Twitter’s review found the accounts not concerning, politicians would rely on the press’s coverage to bolster the claims of disinformation and pressure Twitter to respond. And even when Twitter told the reporters (and politicians) the disinformation methodologies were lacking, the media persisted in regurgitating claims of Russian disinformation.
Can you explain how the press responded when Twitter told reporters to be cautious of the Hamilton 68 database? What precisely did Twitter say? Did you find similar warnings to the media about the Global Engagement Center’s data?
Specific Instances of Censorship
Then the committee should focus on specific instances of censorship, with the Hunter Biden laptop story and Covid debates deserving top billing.
While Republicans care most about the censorship of the laptop story, this committee hearing is not the place to put the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandals on trial. Rather, Americans need to understand four key takeaways: The laptop was real, the FBI knew it was real, the FBI’s warnings to Twitter and other tech giants prompted censorship of the Post’s reporting, and the legacy media were complicit in silencing the story. Having the witnesses explain why Twitter censored the story with the goal of conveying those points will be key.
However, highlighting the censorship of Covid debates offers a better opportunity to cross the political divide of the country and to convince Americans that the hand-in-glove relationship between media and government threatens everyone’s speech. Stressing that both the Trump and Biden administrations pushed Twitter to censor Covid-related speech will also bolster that point.
The committee should start by summarizing the various Covid topics considered verboten — the virus’ origins, vaccines, natural immunity, masking, school closings — and then stress that the science now indicates the speech silenced was correct. Highlighting specific tweets that were blocked and medical professionals who were axed from the platform, while asking the witnesses to explain how this happened, will show the public the real-world implications of a Censorship Complex governing debate in America.
Where Do We Go from Here?
The committee should close by giving Taibbi and Shellenberger the floor, asking: “Where do we go from here?”
The “Twitter Files” revealed that the government and its allies did not limit their efforts to Twitter but pushed censorship at other platforms, and also that a new “cottage industry” in disinformation has already launched. How do Americans know they are hearing the truth? How do we know the government is not manipulating or censoring the truth?
Furthermore, if the same Censorship Complex that limits speech on social media succeeds in canceling alternative news outlets, and if the legacy media won’t provide a check on the government, how do we preserve our constitutional republic?
That last question is not for tomorrow’s witnesses, however. It is for every American.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
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