A House panel tasked with investigating whether government agencies have violated civil liberties published a lengthy final report on Friday summarizing two years’ worth of work and findings.
The bulk of the 17,019-page report was made up of transcripts of the 99 closed-door interviews and depositions the panel has conducted, including some that have never been released before. The transcripts featured FBI officials and targets of the panel’s censorship investigation, such as former Twitter executive Yoel Roth.
The panel, called the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and housed under the House Judiciary Committee, had a roughly $20 million budget to work with and far-reaching authority to probe powerful officials across the executive branch.
The report noted that in addition to the interviews, the weaponization committee held 13 hearings, sent hundreds of demand letters to agencies and corporations, and issued nearly five dozen subpoenas.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), who also chaired the subcommittee, characterized its work as a success, saying in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner that it had effectively exposed government wrongdoing.
“The Weaponization Committee conducted rigorous oversight of the Biden-Harris administration’s weaponized government and uncovered numerous examples of federal government abuses,” Jordan said. “Through our oversight, we protected the First Amendment by investigating the censorship-industrial-complex, heard from numerous brave whistleblowers, stopped the targeting of Americans by the IRS and Department of Justice, and created serious legislative and policy changes that will benefit all Americans.”
Government efforts to censor speech were a top focus for the weaponization committee.
The final report touted how its work resulted in Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitting to Jordan that Facebook improperly bent to pressure from the Biden administration and suppressed content about COVID-19. Zuckerberg vowed to “push back” on such government demands in the future.
The report also pointed to Supreme Court justices citing the committee’s findings in Murthy v. Missouri, a decision about social media jawboning. The high court decided 6 to 3 that there were not enough facts established in the case to justify ordering the federal government to stop communicating with social media companies, but the dissenting judges acknowledged that “valuable speech was … suppressed” on numerous platforms because of government pressure.
The weaponization committee also focused heavily on the FBI and gave a voice to agents who felt the FBI’s punishment for whistleblowers — suspending their security clearances — was stifling and prevented rank-and-file employees from speaking up about internal problems.
One such agent was Marcus Allen, a Marine veteran who had a pristine record working at the FBI for 20 years. Allen testified to the committee about how he was suspended without pay indefinitely beginning in January 2022 while senior officials at the bureau followed a slow-moving process to investigate two routine emails Allen sent raising concerns about how the FBI handled the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
The FBI agreed to reinstate Allen more than two years later and pay him back for the time he was suspended. Allen said he felt the process was retaliation for raising honest concerns and that the suspension process upended his life. The DOJ inspector general also took issue with the FBI’s handling of the situation, saying the bureau’s suspension protocols lacked appropriate due process and needed to change.
The weaponization committee also zeroed in on moments that it said demonstrated a “two-tiered system of government” in the report.
They included Attorney General Merrick Garland issuing a directive to the FBI to investigate perceived threats of violence among angry parents at school board meetings, who expressed worries about changes to COVID-19 and transgender policies in school. They also included the FBI Richmond field office identifying in a leaked internal memo a certain type of traditional Catholic that the FBI felt showed a pattern of threatening behavior. After the memo was exposed, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to the committee that he thought it was “appalling” and that the memo had rightly been retracted.
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The subcommittee typically operated in a partisan manner. Ranking member Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) frequently accused her Republican counterparts of pushing inaccurate narratives, such as that the DOJ conspired with the Manhattan district attorney to prosecute Trump on New York state charges of falsifying business records.
Plaskett’s job “has been to constantly, at each and every point, identify falsehoods, let the American people know that their false, and as well show them what in fact the truth is and what the facts are,” Plaskett said in a television interview this year.
Jordan, who will serve as Judiciary Committee chairman again next year, has said he expects the weaponization subcommittee to dissolve at the end of the year and that he plans to fold the work into the broader committee.
