But, but how could this happen in California? White man goes on a killing spree. Oh wait he was Oriental. California, the state where Progressives pass the crazy laws saying it’s gun control. And what happens? People die. I know, some loon will say the gun probably came from out of state. Or will say the shooter didn’t kill and injure those folks, his gun did.
The Monterey Park shooter is described as an Asian male. There goes the “white supremacy” narrative out the window. pic.twitter.com/Bvl2PDDnKI
And you have this crazy person who blamed the shooting on whites anyway. We have this.
It didn’t take long for one leftist lunatic to blame white dominant culture for the shooting. She vowed to make it him/her mission to take down the white dominant culture following the shooting.
It doesn't matter what the race, gender, identity, motivation... of the Monterey Park shooter is because white people are bad and I'm here to take down US white dominant culture. pic.twitter.com/VthTpD9KfX
Back in 2014 voters approved 3 billion dollars to build more reservoirs. To this day not a penny has been spent. If done, they would have enough reservoirs to hold water for ten years.
Environmental rules designed to protect imperiled fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta have ignited anger among a group of bipartisan lawmakers, who say too much of California’s storm-water is being washed out to sea instead of being pumped to reservoirs and aqueducts.
Since the beginning of January, a series of atmospheric rivers has disgorged trillions of gallons of much-needed moisture across drought-stricken California, but only a small fraction of that water has so far made it into storage. In the delta — the heart of the state’s vast water system — nearly 95% of incoming water has flowed into the Pacific Ocean, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
“With so much excess water in the system, there is no reason that exports south of the Delta cannot be increased,” read another letter that State Sen. Melissa Hurtado (D-Sanger) and Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains (D-Bakersfield) addressed to Newsom.
“We must make the most of the heavy precipitation we are receiving and use it to our advantage,” Rep. Jim Costa (D-Fresno) wrote in a letter to state and federal officials. He called for increased flexibility on the first flush rule.
Like Comment Share In 2022, there were over 2.76 million illegal migrant crossings at the Southwest border. That’s roughly the population of Chicago, America’s third largest city. To address this unprecedented surge, President Biden recently announced tougher restrictions and made a show of visiting the border himself.
But unlike a decade or two ago, when the immigration debate was mostly about economics, today it’s an issue that’s subsumed by the culture wars and our polarized discourse. Republican governors bus migrants to sanctuary cities and they’re called “xenophobic” and “cruel” by the left. But what happens when a Democratic governor does much the same thing, bussing migrants from Colorado to New York City and Chicago? Is it still a heartless political stunt? Or is all of this just an inevitable consequence of our broken immigration system?
So this week: a debate moderated by guest host Kmele Foster between Alex Nowrasteh and Jessica Vaughan. Are current levels of immigration helping or hurting America? How do we balance humanitarian concerns with America’s economic and security needs? Should we be trying to enforce more or less restrictions at the border? And what exactly should we do to fix our immigration policies?
Alex is the director of Economic and Social Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Jessica is the director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that describes themselves as “pro-immigrant but low immigration.”
While Alex and Jessica couldn’t be more opposite in their approach—Alex favors free immigration, while Jessica argues for restrictionist policies—in this episode of Honestly we look for common ground, debate the facts, and search for solutions.
Investigating the President and the DOJ. AP Photo/Alex Brandon, AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
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Probe Biden Admin over Plan to Hide Classified Docs Scandal.
Is it time for another special prosecutor? Thursday the WP ran a article where the DOJ and the WH were not going to go public with the information about the missing top secret papers found at the Penn Center or Biden’s home. All documents Biden had no right to have. Documents that were Top Secret.
According to the Washington Post on Thursday, the White House and Justice Department not only agreed to obscure the scandal from public view, but they also refused to divulge that the second trove of classified documents was already unearthed at Biden’s home in Wilmington when CBS News first contacted the White House about the initial leak of classified documents illegally stored at the Biden Penn Center.
“CBS News was the first news organization to learn of the matter, contacting the White House on Jan. 6 to ask about the Penn Biden Center documents,” the report continued. “White House officials confirmed the scoop, but since the investigation was ongoing, they decided not to offer any additional details — including the critical information that a second batch of documents had been discovered at Biden’s home.”
This week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) released a policy proposal to ban mask and vaccine mandates in the Sunshine State; no passports, no forced masking in schools, and he wants to prohibit businesses from requiring masks and prevent “employers from hiring or firing based on mRNA jabs.”
This week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) released a policy proposal to ban mask and vaccine mandates in the Sunshine State; no passports, no forced masking in schools, and he wants to prohibit businesses from requiring masks and prevent “employers from hiring or firing based on mRNA jabs.”
“When the world lost its mind, Florida was a refuge of sanity, serving strongly as freedom’s linchpin,” the governor said in a press release. “These measures will ensure Florida remains this way and will provide landmark protections for free speech for medical practitioners.”
“As a health sciences researcher and physician, I have personally witnessed accomplished scientists receive threats due to their unorthodox positions,” said State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo. “However, many of these positions have proven to be correct, as we’ve all seen over the past few years. All medical professionals should be encouraged to engage in scientific discourse without fearing for their livelihoods or their careers.”
In 2021, Governor DeSantis signed legislation to protect Florida jobs and parents’ rights to make health care decisions for their students, banning private employer vaccine mandates and mask mandates across the state. Governor DeSantis continues to safeguard Floridians’ freedoms and ensure no one is discriminated against based on their COVID-19 vaccine status or is subject to a two-tiered test and mask discrimination policy from employers.
The proposal includes the permanent prohibition of mandates that are continuously proven ineffective, including:
Permanently prohibiting COVID-19 vaccine passports in Florida;
Permanently prohibiting COVID-19 vaccine and mask requirements in all Florida schools;
Permanently prohibiting COVID-19 masking requirements at businesses; and
Permanently prohibiting employers from hiring or firing based on mRNA jabs.
Included in Governor DeSantis’ proposal are first amendment rights guarantees for medical professionals, ensuring no one loses their job or medical license for voicing their professional opinions in Florida. The legislation will safeguard medical professionals from discrimination based on their personal religious views.
At an event on Tuesday, DeSantis said that legislators “will pass it this year,” adding, “I’ve already talked to the leadership.”
State troopers stand with a DeKalb, Georgia, police officers on Constitution and International Park in Atlanta on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2023. (John Spink/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
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We want to thank the folks over at FOX.
Protesters in Atlanta, are calling for violence against police officers and law enforcement entities following a police-involved shooting on Wednesday that left a state trooper wounded and one man dead.
The Twitter account Scenes from the Atlanta Forest calls for a “Night of Rage” on Friday to enact “reciprocal violence to be done to the police and their allies,” according to the Scenes from the Atlanta Forest Twitter account.
“Consider this a call for reciprocal violence to be done to the police and their allies. On Friday, January 20th, wherever you are, you are invited to participate in a night of rage in order to honor the memory of our fallen comrade,” the group wrote on Twitter, in an apparent violation of the platform’s terms and conditions.
The account claims to be a part of Defend the Atlanta Forest, one of the multiple groups protesting in an area where the city is set to construct the new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.
State troopers stand with a DeKalb, Georgia, police officers on Constitution and International Park in Atlanta on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2023. (John Spink/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
The Defenders of the Forest said in a statement to Fox News Digital that it is “a broad, diverse, decentralized movement to defend the Atlanta forest.” They went on to say they are only a “news aggregator for the movement” and “not affiliated” with Scenes from the Atlanta Forest.
In another tweet, posted several hours later, the group added: “The police will kill you if given the chance. Now is the time for bravery. Take care of each other. Be dangerous together.”
The group appeared to acknowledge the post was against Twitter’s rule not to incite violence as it said in yet another tweet that its account “is not long for this world.”
The upcoming event comes after a Georgia State Patrol trooper, wearing a bulletproof vest, was shot in the abdomen Wednesday morning. It happened as police tried to clear an encampment near the site where the $90 million Atlanta Police Department (APD) facility will be constructed.
Police at the scene where a Georgia state trooper was shot on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2023. (Fox 5 Atlanta)
The sweep was conducted as “an operation to identify people who are trespassing and committing other crimes on the property,” the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) said.
“At about 9:00 a.m. today, as law enforcement was moving through the property, officers located a man inside a tent in the woods. Officers gave verbal commands to the man who did not comply and shot a Georgia State Patrol Trooper,” GBI said in a statement. “Other law enforcement officers returned fire, hitting the man.”
“Law enforcement evacuated the Trooper to a safe area. The man died on scene,” it added.
The bureau continued: “The injured Georgia State Patrol Trooper was taken to a local hospital where he underwent surgery. A handgun and shell casings were located at the scene. The GBI is working the officer-involved shooting and the investigation is still active and ongoing.”
The identities of the officer and the deceased have not yet been released. The officer was hospitalized and is in stable condition.
DeKalb, Georgia, and Atlanta SWAT members are pictured leaving the Gresham Park command post in Atlanta on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2023. (John Spink/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
“The individual who fired upon law enforcement and shot the trooper was killed in the exchange of gunfire,” GBI director Michael Register said. (John Spink/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
During a press conference, GBI director Michael Register confirmed that the shooting was in self-defense after the now-deceased individual opened fire “without warning” on the trooper.
“An individual, without warning, shot a Georgia State Patrol trooper,” Register told reporters. “Other law enforcement personnel returned fire in self-defense and evacuated the trooper to a safe area. The individual who fired upon law enforcement and shot the trooper was killed in the exchange of gunfire.”
Four others were arrested at the scene and taken to the DeKalb County Jail. Charges are pending.
“They’re endangering the community and the citizens around this area,” Register said of the encampment and the protesters, FOX 5 Atlanta reported.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp also commented on the shooting and said he and his family were praying for law enforcement officers.
“Marty, the girls, and I are praying for this brave Trooper and public safety officers across all law enforcement agencies today,” he tweeted Wednesday morning. “As our thoughts remain with him and his family, our resolve also remains steadfast and strong to see criminals brought to justice.”
The joint task force formed to combat ongoing criminal activity at the APD site includes the GBI, Atlanta Police Department, Georgia Attorney General’s Office, DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office, Georgia State Patrol, FBI, DeKalb County Police Department, Department of Natural Resources, and the Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA).
Georgia state troopers stand along Key Road in Atlanta on Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2023. (John Spink/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Defend the Atlanta Forest held a vigil Wednesday evening at the Little Five Points Square to “memorialize the forest defender” that was “murdered by the police,” it announced on Twitter.
“Today the police shot and killed a forest defender below the canopy of our beloved forest,” the group said. “No one can bring our friend back to us. An innocent life has been taken and the machines continue.”
“We will not go quietly into this dark night,” it added.
“Police killed a forest defender today, someone who loved the forest, someone who fought to protect the earth & its inhabitants,” the group continued in a tweet.
And: “This is why we organize to stop Cop City. And we will. In honor of their life, and the lives of everyone killed and imprisoned by the police.”
The group also announced another event on Jan. 21, where members are encouraged to “wear black in mourning” for the dead member.
These events come amid heightened tension between protesters and the police, involving several arrests over several months over the APD construction.
“The Atlanta Police Department seeks to turn 300 acres of forest into a tactical training compound featuring a mock city. This project was announced to the shock of community members who had been given no opportunity to weigh in on the proposal. The entire process has been shadier than the forest itself,” Defend the Atlanta Forest’s website reads.
According to the group, they are explicitly protesting the new “Cop City” as it will “hyper-militarize law enforcement” and “will serve as a national model of police militarization and budgetary bloat.”
The group names the 2020 death of George Floyd and others as its motivation to protest police violence.
A man holds up his hands while marching following the guilty verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin on April 20, 2021, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Elijah Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images)
People march following the guilty verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin on April 20, 2021, in Atlanta. (Elijah Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images)
The group also claims it does not advocate for violence and that “no one has been harmed by participants in this movement.”
Last week, anarchists in Atlanta also targeted Brasfield & Gorrie, the general contractor of the police facility, and spray-painted graffiti on its buildings.
“B&G stop cop city,” the graffiti read, according to photos. “We have the numbers,” another spray-painted message read.
Also, last month, police arrested five people at the APD site location. They were also charged with domestic terrorism.
On Dec. 14, the GBI wrote: “Yesterday, December 13, 2022, our agents assisted APD and other local, state, and task force members in an operation to remove barricades blocking some of the entrances to the training center.”
“Prior to yesterday’s operation, APD and other agencies had made several arrests over the past few months for the ongoing criminal activity at the site location. Some of the criminal activities include carjacking, various crimes against persons, destruction of property, arson, and attacks against public safety officials. Law enforcement continues to address the criminal acts committed by the individuals that continue to occupy the area of the proposed training site,” it said.
Atlanta’s authorities arrested Francis Carroll, age 22, of Maine, Nicholas Olson, age 25, of Nebraska, Serena Hertel, age 25, of California, Leonardo Vioselle, age 20, of Macon, Georgia, and Arieon Robinson, age 22, of Wisconsin, on Dec. 13, 2022. (DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office/Georgia Bureau of Investigation)
The arrested individuals included Francis Carroll, age 22, of Maine, Nicholas Olson, age 25, of Nebraska, Serena Hertel, age 25, of California, Leonardo Vioselle, age 20, of Macon, GA, and Arieon Robinson, age 22, of Wisconsin.
“After police cleared the area of concern, which included makeshift treehouses, they found explosive devices, gasoline, and road flares,” the GBI said in its statement on Jan. 14.
DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston said those who were arrested had attacked firefighters and police officers with rocks and weapons as the officers removed barricades blocking some entrances to the site, according to FOX 5 Atlanta.
The investigation into the activities at the APD site is active and ongoing. Anyone with information is encouraged to contact local law enforcement or the GBI at 1-800-597-TIPS.
President Joe Biden’s Justice Department reportedly permitted the president’s personal attorneys to search for classified documents in separate locations without security clearances or the FBI present.
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President Joe Biden’s Justice Department reportedly permitted the president’s personal attorneys to search for classified documents in separate locations without security clearances or the FBI present. I wonder if they realize that the DOJ folks who made this decision will be called to testify, and Biden will have to hire outside lawyers if this goes to a trial. Maybe a sitting President can’t be charged, but Biden’s lawyers can be charged. Tampering with Evidence.
WASHINGTON—The Justice Department considered having FBI agents monitor a search by President Biden’s lawyers for classified documents at his homes but decided against it, both to avoid complicating later stages of the investigation and because Mr. Biden’s attorneys had quickly turned over a first batch and were cooperating, according to people familiar with the matter.
After Mr. Biden’s lawyers discovered documents marked as classified dating from his term as vice president at an office he used at a Washington-based think tank on Nov. 2, the Justice Department opened an inquiry into why and how they got there. Mr. Biden’s legal team prepared to search his other properties for any similar documents, and discussed with the Justice Department the prospect of having FBI agents present while Mr. Biden’s lawyers conducted the additional searches.
Instead, the two sides agreed that Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys would inspect the homes, notify the Justice Department as soon as they identified any other potentially classified records, and arrange for law-enforcement authorities to take them.
Those deliberations, which haven’t previously been reported, shed new light on how the Biden team’s efforts to cooperate with investigators have thus far helped it avoid more aggressive actions by law enforcement.
In the week since news reports first surfaced about the documents, the incident has drawn parallels to the discovery of a much larger number of documents at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, which federal agents obtained a warrant to search in August after more than a year of negotiations between Mr. Trump’s lawyers, the National Archives and the Justice Department and after Mr. Trump’s lawyers said all documents had been returned.
Mr. Trump’s supporters have accused the Justice Department of a double standard in treatment; Mr. Biden’s supporters have pointed to the president’s legal team’s cooperation and swift moves to inform the Justice Department of the documents’ discovery as a key difference. Mr. Biden has said he doesn’t know what the documents are or how they wound up at his office at the Penn Biden Center or his Delaware home. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was director of the Washington think tank from 2017 to 2019, told reporters on Tuesday that he was unaware that government documents had been stored there.
Biden ‘Cooperating Fully’ With DOJ as Garland Appoints Special CounselPlay video: Biden ‘Cooperating Fully’ With DOJ as Garland Appoints Special Counsel
President Biden said Thursday a “small number” of classified documents from his time as vice president were found at his home and in his personal library. Attorney General Merrick Garland outlined the decision to appoint a special counsel to investigate. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
The discussions and the Justice Department’s willingness to let the Biden lawyers do the searches unsupervised also suggest federal investigators are girding for a monthslong inquiry that could stretch well into Mr. Biden’s third year in office.
One reason not to involve the FBI at an early stage: That way the Justice Department would preserve the ability to take a tougher line, including executing a future search warrant, if negotiations ever turned hostile, current and former law-enforcement officials said.
Representatives of the FBI and Justice Department declined to comment. In a call to reporters about the investigation, White House spokesman Ian Sams said the president and his team were cooperating fully with the special counsel review “so that it can proceed swiftly and thoroughly.”
The White House revealed on two separate days last week that documents had been located at the president’s Delaware residence, as well as those found at a garage there in December. Part of the reason the new documents were revealed separately is that Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys don’t have security clearances to handle classified documents and had to set aside any material that could qualify as such. Richard Sauber, special counsel to Mr. Biden, who has that clearance, accompanied Justice Department personnel to retrieve documents, when they discovered additional pages with classification markings.
Attorney General Merrick Garland last week assigned a former top prosecutor in the Trump administration, Robert Hur, to serve as special counsel investigating the discovery of the documents in the locales associated with Mr. Biden. Justice Department officials were concerned that an FBI presence as the Biden team hunted for documents could complicate investigators’ ability to execute search warrants or subpoena documents as the investigation proceeds, some of the people said, in a sign that investigators are considering the possibility of a grand jury investigation into the matter.
Mr. Hur is expected to begin his job as special counsel by the end of the month, after he winds down his work as a defense lawyer at the law firm Gibson Dunn, people familiar with his appointment said.
Robert Hur has been appointed special counsel in the Biden documents investigation.PHOTO: MICHAEL MCCOY/REUTERS
Soon after the initial discovery in November, Mr. Garland tasked the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Chicago, John Lausch, with reviewing the documents, with an eye toward determining whether a special counsel should be appointed.
Mr. Lausch told Mr. Garland on Jan. 5 that he thought a special counsel was warranted given the many unanswered questions about the documents, and Mr. Garland quickly agreed, the people said.
Mr. Hur is expected to grapple with legally and politically thorny considerations that could be reminiscent of those from the last special counsel related to a sitting president, potentially including whether to pursue in-person testimony from Mr. Biden. During the 2017-19 special counsel inquiry led by Robert Mueller into Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign and any links between that effort and the Trump campaign, investigators tried for more than a year to interview then-President Trump before ultimately settling for written testimony.
Mr. Sams declined to say whether Mr. Biden would sit for an interview with the special counsel if asked.
Legal experts said an open-book strategy could help shorten Mr. Hur’s inquiry and keep it from dragging out over Mr. Biden’s presidency.
“My goal would be to get everybody interviewed by Robert Hur as quickly as possible—not throw up roadblocks, not assert privileges, and get this thing over with,” said Neil Eggleston, who served as White House counsel in the Obama administration.
The Justice Department investigation into the Biden documents comes as another special counsel is already deep into a parallel inquiry into the classified documents at Mr. Trump’s Florida home.
Former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida was searched by FBI agents last year.PHOTO: MARCO BELLO/REUTERS
The FBI in August executed a search warrant at the property, believing more such documents remained there based on witness interviews and security-camera footage. They removed dozens of boxes containing additional documents, many of which were mixed in with clothing and news clippings. Prosecutors later disclosed they were investigating whether anyone sought to obstruct their inquiry, in addition to whether anyone should be prosecuted for mishandling the documents. Mr. Trump has called the Justice Department’s moves a witch hunt and said he did nothing wrong.
The Justice Department has sought to keep the two inquiries separate by assigning them to different teams, according to people familiar with the matter. The Biden White House has highlighted differences between the two inquiries, stressing in particular how their cooperative stance compares to the Trump team’s resistance to turn over records to the National Archives after repeated requests. Mr. Trump’s legal team later clashed with the Justice Department over the appointment of an outside arbiter, known as a special master, to review documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
Yet the Biden team’s bumpy rollout of its discoveries—it only confirmed the document discoveries after news reports and has offered few new details—complicates its attempt to draw a hard distinction between Mr. Biden’s actions and those of Mr. Trump, said John Fishwick, who served as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia during the Obama administration.
“He is the sitting president, there’s no reason for him to hold back anything about this,” Mr. Fishwick said. “It makes it harder to say it’s apples and oranges, and it undercuts the argument that you were different.”
"Part of the reasons are our politics are inflamed, is we do not have an unbiased media. We don't," Sen. Ron Johnson said. | Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
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IF you watched Sunday’s meet the press, you would have seen Chuck Todd taking the defensive position for the Biden cartel. The good Senator wasn’t having any of it. Todd wanted to talk about Trump and Trumps son in law. Todd seems to forget that it’s the Biden cartel that is under investigation.
Sen. Ron Johnson said Sunday that media coverage of his proximity to 2020 election denial was a “smear” in a contentious interview with host Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“This has been a complete smear job against me,” Johnson (R-Wis.) said. Todd had asked Johnson about a moment after the 2020 election in which Johnson allegedly considered helping to send an alternative slate of Wisconsin electors to then-Vice President Mike Pence.
McCabe asking the DOJ to ignore House Investigation. CNN Photo
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CNN’s Andrew McCabe Says DOJ Should NOT Cooperate With GOP Biden Classified Docs Probe: ‘Take A Very Hard Line Against That’
Former FBI Deputy Director and CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst Andrew McCabe said the Justice Department should not cooperate with the House GOP’s investigation into President Joe Biden’s classified documents case.
Friday afternoon, Ohio Republican Congressman and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jim Jordanannounced an investigation into President Joe Biden’s classified documents issue with a letter that also offered a defense of ex-President Donald Trump. and attacked the Justice Department’s conduct in Trump’s case.
On Friday night’s edition of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, anchor Anderson Cooper asked McCabe what impact Jordan’s probe would have and McCabe emphatically urged the DoJ not to cooperate with it:
COOPER: Chairman Jim Jordan announced this House Judiciary Committee investigation, into the DOJ actions, related to the President’s handling of the classified documents, today. How much does that impact the DOJ ongoing investigation?
MCCABE: Well, I think that DOJ will likely – I certainly would advise them, if they were willing to listen to my advice, I would advise them to take a very hard line against that.
There is a clear precedent here of not sharing information, from an ongoing criminal investigation, with Congress. And I think the DOJ is in a very strong position, to resist, on those grounds.
Who knows what comes of that resistance? Maybe DOJ leadership starts getting subpoenaed. And ultimately, that fight will end up in the courts. And that could drag things out. That’s going to be an additional distraction to DOJ. But it shouldn’t disrupt the actual conduct of the investigation. So, that’s a – it’ll be a separate but related set of stressors that DOJ has to deal with.
COOPER: And, right now, I mean, you have a sitting President, you have a former President, who has already declared a candidacy, both under investigation, by separate Special Counsels, appointed by the Attorney General. This seems pretty unprecedented, no?
MCCABE: It’s absolutely unprecedented. I can’t think of another situation, even remotely like it.
I think it was a very astute move, by the Attorney General, to appoint a Special Counsel, in the Biden inquiry. I think it’s essential that these inquiries are treated exactly the same, at their inception, given the same sort of resources, and attention, and priority and, of course, special counsels.
But, at this point, Anderson, they become entirely different, and totally independent. The facts are very different. The way their respective teams are treating their interactions, with DOJ, will be very different. And they could come to very different results.
Here’s the piece, originally published in the Wall Street Journal online yesterday and in the print edition today.
Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media.Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily. The emails emerged Jan. 6 in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private plaintiffs represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
On March 14, 2021, Mr. Flaherty emailed a Facebook executive (whose name we’ve redacted as a courtesy) with the subject line “You are hiding the ball” and a link to a Washington Post article about Facebook’s own research into “the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy,” as the paper put it. “I think there is a misunderstanding,” the executive wrote back. “I don’t think this is a misunderstanding,” Mr. Flaherty replied. “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy—period. . . . We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game. . . . This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”
On March 21, after failing to placate Mr. Flaherty, the Facebook executive sent an email detailing the company’s planned policy changes. They included “removing vaccine misinformation” and “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation.” Facebook characterized this material as “often-true content” that “can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.” Facebook pledged to “remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content.”
In that exchange, Mr. Flaherty demanded to know what Facebook was doing to “limit the spread of viral content” on WhatsApp, a private message app, especially “given its reach in immigrant communities and communities of color.” The company responded three weeks later with a lengthy list of promises.
On April 9, Mr. Flaherty asked “what actions and changes you’re making to ensure . . . you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse.” He faulted the company for insufficient zeal in earlier efforts to control political speech: “In the electoral context, you tested and deployed an algorithmic shift that promoted quality news and information about the election. . . . You only did this, however, after an election that you helped increase skepticism in, and an insurrection which was plotted, in large part, by your platform. And then you turned it back off. I want some assurances, based in data, that you are not doing the same thing again here.” The executive’s response: “Understood.”
On April 14, Mr. Flaherty pressed the executive about why “the top post about vaccines today” is Tucker Carlson “saying they don’t work”: “I want to know what ‘Reduction’ actually looks like,” he said. The exec responded: “Running this down now.”
On April 23, Mr. Flaherty sent the executive an internal memo that he claimed had been circulating in the White House. It asserts that “Facebook plays a major role in the spread of COVID vaccine misinformation” and accuses the company of, among other things, “failure to monitor events hosting anti-vaccine and COVID disinformation” and “directing attention to COVID-skeptics/anti-vaccine ‘trusted’ messengers.”
On May 10, the executive sent Mr. Flaherty a list of steps Facebook had taken “to increase vaccine acceptance.” Mr. Flaherty scoffed, “Hard to take any of this seriously when you’re actively promoting anti-vaccine pages in search,” and linked to an NBC reporter’s tweet. The executive wrote back: “Thanks Rob—both of the accounts featured in this tweet have been removed from Instagram entirely for breaking our policies.”
President Biden, press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy later publicly vowed to hold the platforms accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship. On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked Mr. Biden his “message to platforms like Facebook.” He replied, “They’re killing people.” Mr. Biden later claimed he meant users, not platforms, were killing people. But the record shows Facebook itself was the target of the White House’s pressure campaign.
Mr. Flaherty also strong-armed Google in April 2021, accusing YouTube (which it owns) of “funneling” people into vaccine hesitancy. He said this concern was “shared at the highest (and I mean the highest) levels of the WH,” and required “more work to be done.” Mr. Flaherty demanded to know what further measures Google would take to remove disfavored content. An executive responded that the company was working to “address your concerns related to Covid-19 misinformation.”
These emails establish a clear pattern: Mr. Flaherty, representing the White House, expresses anger at the companies’ failure to censor Covid-related content to his satisfaction. The companies change their policies to address his demands. As a result, thousands of Americans were silenced for questioning government-approved Covid narratives. Two of the Missouri plaintiffs, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, are epidemiologists whom multiple social-media platforms censored at the government’s behest for expressing views that were scientifically well-founded but diverged from the government line—for instance, that children and adults with natural immunity from prior infection don’t need Covid vaccines.
Emails made public through earlier lawsuits, Freedom of Information Act requests and Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files had already exposed a sprawling censorship regime involving the White House as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies. The government directed tech companies to remove certain types of material and even to censor specific posts and accounts. Again, these included truthful messages casting doubt on the efficacy of masks and challenging Covid-19 vaccine mandates.
The First Amendment bars government from engaging in viewpoint-based censorship. The state-action doctrine bars government from circumventing constitutional strictures by suborning private companies to accomplish forbidden ends indirectly.
Defenders of the government have fallen back on the claim that cooperation by the tech companies was voluntary, from which they conclude that the First Amendment isn’t implicated. The reasoning is dubious, but even if it were valid, the premise has now been proved false.
The Flaherty emails demonstrate that the federal government unlawfully coerced the companies in an effort to ensure that Americans would be exposed only to state-approved information about Covid-19. As a result of that unconstitutional state action, Americans were given the false impression of a scientific “consensus” on critically important issues around Covid-19. A reckoning for the government’s unlawful, deceptive and dangerous conduct is under way in court.
Ms. Younes, litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, represents the private plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden. Dr. Kheriaty is a senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and one of the plaintiffs.
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