The 2020 election remains one of the most contentious in history, and the more we learn about how deep the government’s interference went, the more disturbing things get.
According to Eric Schmitt, the current attorney general of Missouri and its newly-elected senator, the FBI was having weekly meetings with social media companies prior to election day in 2020 to collude on suppressing information. That was revealed in the deposition of Elvis Chan, the FBI’s liaison in the scheme.
According to Schmitt, the FBI was colluding with social media companies, giving them specific direction on what content to suppress. That means specific URLs and accounts. The social media companies, all led by leftwing hacks at that point, were apparently more than happy to play along.
Regardless, I’m not sure that the minutia of the situation is what’s most important here, and Republicans should avoid letting the FBI out on some technicality. The only thing that actually matters here is that the federal government does not have a role in policing “disinformation” domestically. For my money, they don’t have that mandate in regard to international actors either.
In this case, the FBI was running a complex scheme, colluding with social media companies to target specific accounts and news stories, with seemingly all of the moves made being politically beneficial to Democrats. In doing so, they shut down a verifiably true story about Hunter Biden’s laptop that could have swung the entire election. The suppression of information regarding COVID-19 just so happened to help Democrats as well. What a coincidence, right?
This is dangerous, anti-American stuff. The government should not be sticking its nose into the proliferation of free speech, online or elsewhere. In the case of Hunter Biden, a major American news outlet, The New York Post, was banned and censored for reporting factual information.
And if the FBI is willing to admit this stuff in a sworn deposition, imagine what they aren’t admitting to that took place. Just how deep did the deep-state plot to deny Donald Trump a second term actually go? That’s a question we may never receive an answer to, but Schmitt’s lawsuit is a good start to pulling back the veil on what went on and may still be going on.
Further, with Republicans having retaken the House of Representatives, the time for them to press these issues is now. With Democrats holding the power at the DOJ, there won’t be any criminal charges coming, but it’s still important to expose exactly what the FBI was doing. Hopefully, that will offer enough of a deterrent so this doesn’t happen in 2024, though I’m not going to hold my breath.