Is the Federal Trade Commission retaliating against Elon Musk following his pledge to support free speech on Twitter?
During a July 13 hearing, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) slammed the Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan for her apparent “harassment” and “shakedown” against Twitter after Elon Musk purchased the platform and tried to break up its censorship regime. According to Jordan, Kahn tried to rig a disfavorable audit of Twitter's Trust and Safety operations conducted by private assessor Ernst and Young. Jordan called the situation “even worse than we could have imagined.”
Jordan noted that “The FTC…as is common practice pursuant to the consent order, required Twitter to hire an independent assessor,” whose role is supposed to be objective. Instead, the FTC tried to pressure assessor Ernst and Young into a negative report regardless of reality, Jordan explained.
MRC Vice President Dan Schneider chimed in to criticize Khan’s alleged conduct. “As the FTC Inspector General and others have shown, Lina Khan has corrupted that agency and turned it into a nuclear-armed guided missile against the Biden administration’s political opponents,” Schneider said. “She has engaged in an extortion scheme against the independent auditor and has cooked up the evidence against Twitter to punish Elon Musk for not adhering to a left-wing agenda. She should be added to the growing list of Biden officials who should be impeached.”
Indeed, Jordan read Ernst and Young’s testimony from the court filing: “‘the FTC was so adamant with Ernst and Young conveying that this is absolutely what you will do, and this is going to occur, and you'll produce a report at the end of the day that would be negative about Twitter, that senior Ernst and Young leaders feared that if Ernst and Young resigned as the independent assessor, the FTC would take exception to their withdrawal and create other challenges for Ernst and Young over time.’”
Following both Musk’s Twitter purchase and pressure from Democrat senators and activists, Jordan explained, the FTC ultimately issued a whopping 350 requests for information from the social media platform. “These requests included asking for every communication about Mr. Musk inside the company, and most troubling, for information about Twitter's work with journalist[s] working to shed light on the government-driven censorship practices,” Jordan said, apparently in reference to The Twiter Files.
Jordan again grilled Khan later in the hearing. “Why are you harassing Twitter?” he asked. “You’ve asked for every single communication relating to Elon Musk,” which seems “like an obsession.” He put the FTC’s intrusive requests in the context of the federal government itself engaging in an extensive censorship operation with tech companies.
Musk himself reacted to the bombshell revelation, saying, “Insanely illegal overreach by FTC.” This behavior from Khan’s FTC, Jordan insisted, is the “kind of behavior that occurs in banana republics, not in the United States of America.”
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