A federal court judge granted Missouri and Louisiana’s motion for expedited discovery in a blow to the Biden administration.
President Biden and several members of his administration are named as defendants in the lawsuit.
Reclaim The Net reported that the ruling allows Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry to formally start the document collection process as the lawsuit moves forward. The defendants have to respond or object to the plaintiffs’ requests within 30 days of receipt.
“The First Amendment obviously applies to the citizens of Missouri and Louisiana, so Missouri and Louisiana have the authority to assert those rights,” the court order obtained by Reclaim The Net said.
The court also rejected the defendants’ argument that producing discovery at this time would be burdensome.
“Certainly, it would be time-consuming to produce the information requested," the court said. "However, this issue involves the alleged violation of a constitutional right – the right of free speech.”
Last month, NewsBusters reported that Schmitt and Landry sued the Biden administration for colluding with social media platforms to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story among others:
“Freedom of speech is the very bedrock of this great nation, and needs to be protected and preserved. The federal government’s alleged attempts to collude with social media companies to censor free speech should terrify Missourians and Americans alike. Recently, my Office filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration for that alleged collusion, and today we’re filing a motion for preliminary injunction to put a stop to it. We may have forced the Biden Administration to forego its Disinformation Governance Board, but there is still a very real threat to Missourians and Americans’ right to free speech. The federal government must be halted from silencing any more Americans, and this motion for preliminary injunction intends to do just that.”
The plaintiffs also claim the administration threatened the companies with government action if they did not cooperate.
"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 companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called ‘disinformation,' ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’" the lawsuit alleged.
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