A federal court has granted the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana permission to depose dozens of top Biden administration officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
“[T]he United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana granted Missouri and Louisiana’s request for depositions from top-ranking officials in the federal government,” Missouri AG Eric Schmitt’s office announced Friday.
Permission to depose was granted as per a lawsuit filed in May accusing “top-ranking Biden Administration officials” of “colluding to suppress freedom of speech.”
Regarding Dr. Fauci, Judge Terry A. Doughty ruled that “there are compelling reasons that suggest Dr. Fauci has acted through intermediaries, and acted on behalf of others, in procuring the social-media censorship of credible scientific opinions.”
Regarding Psaki, the judge likewise noted that she’s “made a number of statements that are relevant to the Government’s involvement in a number of social-media platforms’ efforts to censor its users across the board for sharing information related to COVID19.”
The order can be found here: https://t.co/s6eNnnpciC pic.twitter.com/R7LovMdu8C
— Attorney General Eric Schmitt (@AGEricSchmitt) October 21, 2022
“After finding documentation of a collusive relationship between the Biden Administration and social media companies to censor free speech, we immediately filed a motion to get these officials under oath,” Schmitt said in a statement.
“It is high time we shine a light on this censorship enterprise and force these officials to come clean to the American people, and this ruling will allow us to do just that. We’ll keep pressing for the truth,” he added.
For whatever reason, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry didn’t issue a statement as well, though he did announce Doughty’s decision via a tweet posted Friday:
🚨 🚨🚨 The court has granted our request to depose Dr. Anthony Fauci, former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, FBI Supervisory
Special Agent Elvis Chan, and other Biden Administration officials relating to collusion with social media to suppress free speech.— AG Jeff Landry (@AGJeffLandry) October 21, 2022
The last statement Landry made was published around the start of the month, right after he and Schmitt submitted an amended complaint adding 47 new defendants to their case, making for a total of 67, including of course Fauci and Psaki.
“Throughout this case, we have uncovered a disturbing amount of collusion between Big Tech and Big Government. This egregious attack on our First Amendment will be met with an equally full-hearted defense of the rights of the American people,” Landry said at the time.
“Missouri and Louisiana filed a landmark lawsuit, seeking to expose that the federal government has worked hand-in-hand with social media companies to censor freedom of speech on their platforms. Our lawsuit has done exactly that – we’ve found a staggering ‘censorship enterprise’ that extends to a multitude of federal agencies and implicates government officials at the highest levels of government, but we’re not done yet,” Schmitt added.
“Now, we’ve added 47 additional defendants to our lawsuit, including several FBI agents and more top-ranking White House officials. We’re also asking the Court to allow our offices to take depositions to question these officials under oath. We’re only just getting started,” he continued.
Dovetailing back to Fauci, his alleged “collusion” is particularly troubling because it involved him trying to silence the writers of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Stunning emails reveal Fauci, NIH chief discussing ‘quick and devastating take down’ of anti-lockdown experts https://t.co/jp1S5PSqTO
— Conservative News (@BIZPACReview) December 19, 2021
Written following the initial COVID lockdowns in early 2020, the declaration argued that lockdown policies were not the correct solution to the spread of the coronavirus.
Rather than consider the writers’ arguments, Fauci and others like him sought to silence the writers on the basis that they were spreading “misinformation.”
The evidence of Fauci’s “collusion” stems from an Oct. 8th, 2020 email sent to him by then-National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins calling for “a quick and devastating published take down” of the Barrington Declaration.
“Dr. Fauci replied to Dr. Collins that the takedown was underway. An article in Wired, a tech-news site, denied there was any scientific divide and argued lockdowns were a straw man—they weren’t coming back. If only it were true. The next month cases rose and restrictions returned,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
“Dr. Fauci also emailed an article from the Nation, a left-wing magazine, and his staff sent him several more. The emails suggest a feedback loop: The media cited Dr. Fauci as an unquestionable authority, and Dr. Fauci got his talking points from the media. Facebook censored mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is how groupthink works,” the paper’s editorial board noted in a piece published last December.
A must-read on how Fauci and Collins actively shut down debate from scientists challenging their lockdown approach. And utilized media allies to prop up their flawed approach and their power. https://t.co/V4D3UqKY2u
— Jedediah Bila (@JedediahBila) December 22, 2021
According to the amended complaint, this sort of pressure was applied by a myriad of additional Biden administration officials.
“A veritable army of federal bureaucrats are involved in censorship activities ‘across the federal enterprise.’ There are so many, in fact, that CISA Director Easterly and Matthew Masterson complained in text messages that ‘chaos’ would result if all federal officials were ‘independently’ contacting social-media platforms about so-called misinformation,” the complaint reads.
The complaint also mentions the reportedly now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board.
“On information and belief, as alleged above, the ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ was created to impose a bureaucratic structure on the enormous censorship activities already occurring involving dozens of federal officials and many federal agencies,” it reads.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.
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