House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed documents from the director of national intelligence on Thursday, saying the documents are necessary to review as part of his committee’s investigation into the federal government’s censorship efforts.
Jordan asked that DNI Avril Haines provide all records of any of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s communications related to the “moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction, or reduced circulation of content,” according to a copy of the subpoena reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
Jordan wrote in an accompanying letter to Haines that her responses to the committee’s prior voluntary requests have been “woefully inadequate.” The subpoena requires Haines to respond to him by Feb. 9.
“It is necessary for Congress to gauge the extent to which ODNI officials have coerced, pressured, worked with, or relied upon social media and other tech companies to censor speech,” Jordan wrote.
The ODNI did not respond to a request for comment.
Jordan referenced examples of government agencies coordinating with social media companies, including X, then known as Twitter, to manage content on the companies’ websites in 2020 and beyond related to controversial topics that included Hunter Biden’s laptop, COVID-19, and the 2020 presidential election.
Jordan has long been investigating how close the coordination was and if the federal government violated the First Amendment by forcing social media companies to censor content that largely disadvantaged conservatives.
The issue took center stage last year in a sweeping preliminary injunction a federal judge ordered in Missouri v. Biden, with the judge saying that “evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario” of the government attempting to “silence the opposition.”
The judge cited among the evidence in the case the routine occurrence of “industry working group” meetings that agencies, including the ODNI, along with the FBI and departments of Justice and Homeland Security, participated in with X, Facebook, Google, and other third-party companies to address “disinformation.”
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An appellate court upheld the judge’s order and demanded the Biden administration cease certain communications with third parties related to content moderation. The Supreme Court is now poised to weigh in on the case, now called Murthy v. Missouri, this year.
The appellate court ruling is stayed in the meantime.
