House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on Thursday subpoenaed President Biden’s former White House director of digital strategy Rob Flaherty to testify about his actions to pressure digital platforms to censor content — ahead of what is expected to be a landmark Supreme Court case centered on his actions.
Flaherty must sit for committee questions on Jan. 11, Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote in the legally binding demand for testimony, which follows unsuccessful attempts to force the ex-administration official to testify in a state lawsuit brought by Missouri and Louisiana, which the Supreme Court will consider in its coming term.
“The Committee has obtained documents that demonstrate the central role you played in communicating the Biden White House’s censorship efforts to social media companies, including the White House’s demands to censor true information, memes, satire, and other constitutionally protected forms of expression,” Jordan wrote to Flaherty, who left the White House in June for a position with Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign.
“Your testimony will inform the Committee’s legislative reforms aimed at preventing the Executive Branch from wielding its immense power to pressure social media platforms to censor disfavored viewpoints,” Jordan wrote.
The pending Supreme Court case, for which oral arguments have not yet been scheduled, follows a lower court ruling restricting the government’s ability to pressure companies to squelch disfavored speech. That ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by the Republican state attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, who argued that the Biden administration was violating Americans’ First Amendment free speech rights.
The lawsuit turned up a large number of documents showing that Flaherty and his team leaned on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, particularly to limit the spread of alleged misinformation about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.
However, attempts to force Flaherty’s testimony in the case, as well as an appearance from former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who proclaimed in July 2021 that Biden aides were “flagging” content for removal, were unsuccessful.
Louisiana US District Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction on July 4 forbidding federal officials from pressuring companies to remove constitutionally protected speech.
Many details about Flaherty’s actions remain murky.
For example, Jordan on Thursday morning released emails acquired by the Judiciary Committee that showed Flaherty also leaned on Google-owned YouTube in the push, but those emails only vaguely refer to White House pressure on company officials — such as an April 2021 internal message that notes that the “White House is very interested in our work on borderline content” without specifically describing that content.
Jordan also issued a subpoena to former White House COVID-19 coordinator Andy Slavitt, who is ordered to testify on Jan. 9.
White House spokesman Ian Sams called the subpoenas “baseless” and a “political stunt,” but didn’t say how or whether the executive branch would seek to resist the demands.
“Yet again, extreme House Republicans are issuing baseless subpoenas just to play to their far-right base with positions way outside the mainstream,” Sams said.
“The Biden Administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” he added.
“Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present.”
An attorney for Flaherty did not immediately respond to a request for comment and Slavitt could not immediately be reached for comment.
Federal efforts to lean on companies to squelch speech online predate Biden’s presidency and intensified after Russian government-linked hackers allegedly obtained and released the emails of prominent Democrats during the 2016 election campaign.
Censorship opponents note that once-restricted content often ends up gaining widespread acceptance — such as a theory that COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese lab that was doing risky research, which Facebook censored through May 2021, but which now is the official view of the FBI and other sections of the US government.
In another instance, Facebook and Twitter censored The Post’s October 2020 reporting on documents from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that showed then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was involved in his son’s foreign business relationships, despite claims to the contrary.
The Post’s reporting was suppressed after the FBI, which had taken possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop in December 2019, claimed that there could be a “hack and leak” operation impacting Biden’s son.
Other instances of censorship have removed primary-source material about significant events in American history.
YouTube, for instance, deleted a video interview that The Post conducted inside the Capitol with a New Yorker who stormed the building to disrupt certification of then-President Donald Trump’s election loss.
The platform claimed in June 2022 that the video spread misinformation about election fraud, but relented after The Post put the censorship on its front page.
Still, YouTube went on to delete other primary-source material from the unprecedented mayhem, including footage released by the House select committee investigating the riot.
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