President Joe Biden’s Justice Department reportedly tried to coerce a university to delay the release of records that would blow the lid off of its censorship activities.
Independent investigative journalist Lee Fang reported that senior officials of Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) went into panic mode when people bagan probing the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) efforts to target some political content on social media. The officials “intervened to slow the release of public records that might have shed more light on the nature of the federal government’s anti-misinformation crusade,” Fang wrote, after he filed a records request.
Fang and journalists from a couple of outlets had separately filed public records requests with the University of Washington’s (UW) government-funded think tank run by UW Associate Professor Kate Starbird, he wrote. Starbird was also on the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency’s (CISA) “Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation” advisory subcommittee, one of the last remnants of Biden’s defunct, tyrannical Disinformation Governance Board. Fang has reportedly since obtained documents on the matter, despite the DOJ trying to delay the records release. The DOJ even pondered legal action to block documents’ release.
Western District of Washington Assistant U.S. Attorney Annalisa Cravens emailed Starbird about the records requests that the university had been receiving, according to a screenshot of an email Fang included in his report. “Could we please see a copy of any relevant CISA documents that you may plan to produce?” Cravens asked in the email. “[W]e would also ask to have an extension of time before the records are produced so that we can have time to review them and assess whether we’ll have to file suit to protect them from disclosure.”
Fang noted that it is unclear exactly which documents were withheld as a result ofgovernment interference. He said he received multiple notifications from UW seeking deadline extensions for complying with his request. The documents he sought were finally released after March congressional hearings on the same subject.
The DOJ can block information releases if such releases could undermine national security, Fang noted. He added, however, that this exception has been abused a number of times. Starbird has also made “exaggerated claims of harassment to dismiss journalistic interest.”
Biden’s DHS clearly isn’t too thrilled about its dirty laundry potentially being aired out.
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