A Louisiana-based federal judge ruled that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Dr. Anthony Fauci will have to turn over emails sent to social media companies on the subject of censorship and misinformation of online content.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who are both Republicans, filed a lawsuit in May accusing President Joe Biden‘s administration of working in tandem with social media companies to suppress free speech, with specific allegations tied to information regarding elections and COVID-19.
The attorneys general have been deliberating for months with the White House over which documents need to be shown in the lawsuit. On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty ruled the Biden administration must hand over Fauci’s and Jean-Pierre’s relevant emails within 21 days despite objections from the Justice Department, which cited executive privilege and presidential communications privilege.
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“This Court believes Plaintiffs are entitled to external communications by Jean-Pierre and Dr. Fauci in their capacities as White House Press Secretary and Chief Medical Advisor to the President to third-party social media platforms. The White House has waived its claim of privilege in relation to specific documents that it voluntarily revealed to third parties outside the White House,” Doughty, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote.
The crux of the lawsuit focuses on how social media companies handled claims about the origins of COVID-19, as well as how Big Tech platforms limited the reach of a New York Post article in November 2020 about information found on a laptop that once belonged to the president’s son, Hunter Biden.
In their initial filing, Landry and Schmitt argue that “having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left, senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.'”
The pair of Republican attorneys general already obtained records earlier this month showing multiple federal agencies’ officials contacted social media companies to develop content moderation strategies. One of the emails revealed the Department of Health and Human Services and Facebook personnel worked together to take down groups on the platform.
Schmitt, who is running for Senate, released a statement celebrating Doughty’s ruling.
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“The American people deserve answers on how the federal government has colluded with social media companies to censor free speech on these major platforms,” Schmitt wrote. “We will continue to fight to uncover more of this vast censorship enterprise.”
The Washington Examiner contacted the White House, HHS, and Facebook’s parent company Meta for a response.
