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--:-- John Bickley: Welcome to an extra edition of Morning Wire. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley, and I'm here with Georgia Howe.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Thanks for joining us, John.
--:-- John Bickley: Today, we're talking about the latest developments in the Biden administration's efforts to censor speech. Joining us now is the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio. Congressman, thank you for coming on.
--:-- Jim Jordan: You bet.
--:-- John Bickley: So, you guys have been doing a lot of digging on this issue of government censorship. What did you find here about this communication between Amazon and the White House?
--:-- Jim Jordan: The White House was pressuring Amazon to ban books. I mean, the best line is probably this internal communication in Amazon. It says, "Is the administration asking us to remove books or are they more concerned about search results and the order or both?"
--:-- Georgia Howe: And it turns out it looks like based on what we found in our investigation, they were trying to downplay certain material, certain books and also potentially remove.
--:-- Jim Jordan: I mean, it's like, and I think maybe the scariest thing is this is after we learned what they were doing, the pressure they were applying to Twitter, after we learned the pressure they were applying to Facebook, after we learned the pressure they were applying to YouTube, and after we learned about this big tech, big government, big media, big academia, all involved with censorship in all those mediums, all those various platforms.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And to be clear, this began right after President Biden took office in 2021, March of 2021. Is that correct?
--:-- Jim Jordan: Sure is.
--:-- John Bickley: You go back to the Twitter, it began the third day. There's this now what this kind of somewhat well-known email from the White House to Twitter where it says, "Please take down this tweet, ASAP." And the tweet is a tweet from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And it has, I think, two sentences in it, which says, "Hank Aaron took the shot as a way to encourage other African-Americans, other black Americans to take the shot and passed away shortly there."
--:-- Jim Jordan: So it was literally sentences that were absolutely true but the White House was saying take it down because they didn't like the context.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And maybe the biggest concern there, well, equal concern there is if you think about it, on the third day of the Biden administration, they're trying to censor the very individual who's gonna run against them in the primary for the Democrat nomination for president.
--:-- Jim Jordan: So censoring your political opponents the third day in office, I think, is kind of scary.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, the emails appear to show some initial reluctance from Amazon to suppress content, but they did eventually cave. Is that fair to say?
--:-- Jim Jordan: I think that is.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And it's funny, there was reluctance. You know, in the end, these big tech companies, whether we're talking Twitter now X or, you know, Meta or YouTube, there always seemed to be some initial pushback, but because this is the federal government applying the pressure, they almost always cave.
--:-- Jim Jordan: One of the real ironies in here was there was actually an internal communication by Nick Clegg when we're talking about Meta here. Nick Clegg is a British citizen, actually a member of the British Parliament, who works at Meta, one of the senior VPs, I believe.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And there's a communication where he says, "This encroaches on the First Amendment."
--:-- Jim Jordan: And I thought the irony that you have someone from the United Kingdom talking about protecting the United States' First Amendment liberties that we enjoy as citizens.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, the name Andrew Slavitt, who was a senior advisor on Biden's COVID-19 response team, comes up a number of times here. He's quoted as asking Amazon, "Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation on Amazon?"
--:-- Georgia Howe: Slavitt also came up a lot in the Twitter and Facebook censorship efforts. What's his role in all this?
--:-- Jim Jordan: Well, he was a guy at the White House, him, Mr. Flaherty. There's another individual who seemed to be on a lot of these communications, worked in the executive office of the president at the White House.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And they're the ones who were, you know, must have been assigned this task to encourage the censorship of American speech on these various platforms.
--:-- Jim Jordan: Because the same names show up, whether it's Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or in this case, Amazon. But it's always done under those, the Miss, Dis, and Mal banner.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And of course, mal-information is this idea that it's all true, like the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweet, true statements. We just don't like what it conveys. We don't like the context or how it framed.
--:-- Jim Jordan: And so we're going to say that needs to be censored as well, which is particularly dangerous.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And then when you think about this whole COVID area so much of the content that they were trying to force these platforms to censor actually turned out to be true.
--:-- Jim Jordan: When you think of all the false things the Biden administration told us about COVID, they said it didn't start in a lab. They said it wasn't gain-of-function research done in the lab. They said it wasn't our tax money used to fund that research done in that lab in Wuhan, China.
--:-- Georgia Howe: They said the vaccinated couldn't get it. The vaccinated couldn't transmit it. They said masks work. They said, you know, all kinds of things that turned out not to be true.
--:-- Jim Jordan: And yet they were trying to censor that. Anyone who disagreed with those, what turned out to be false statements, they were trying to censor those individuals, which I think, again, just compounds the problem here and how serious this all was.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, your committee subpoenaed Slavitt, is that correct?
--:-- Jim Jordan: Yeah, and we're having trouble getting him in here. We have subpoenaed him and Mr. Flaherty. They're objecting.
--:-- Georgia Howe: One of them is left government employment. And one of the rules of the house is if you're no longer working the government, you can have your own counsel when we do a deposition, or you can have agency counsel, but you're not supposed to have both.
--:-- Jim Jordan: And it's just the rules of the house. You can't have like four lawyers sitting there.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So we're in a fight over that. And we'll see how that all shakes out.
--:-- John Bickley: You've kind of addressed this, but to broaden this out a little bit, you've been heading up the weaponization of the government investigations. What's the through line here, the connection with these various findings that you've had in other inquiries in this one?
--:-- Jim Jordan: Big government is trying to censor Americans. I think as Professor Turley, an expert in this area of the law, he says it's censorship by surrogate. They try to farm that out, that censorship out to these tech companies and get them to do it, or to, with the aid of universities, and get them to do it with the Election Integrity Project and the Virality Project, the things we've uncovered and we've done reports on, but it's censorship by surrogate.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Or as some journalists have said, who we've had testify, they call it the censorship industrial complex, where again, it's big government working with big tech, and in some cases, big media and big academia to censor American speech.
--:-- Jim Jordan: And now what we're really starting to see as well is it moves into big finance, because we uncovered a few weeks ago, some disturbing communications where banks, at the urging of the treasury, were giving information to the government the federal government about the purchasing habits of their customers.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Again, I think pretty scary stuff asking the government suggesting and I put that in quotation suggesting that banks look at the purchasing habits of their customers search for key terms like in these online purchases where there's a message associated, did they use the term MAGA? Did they use the term Trump?
--:-- Jim Jordan: And did they buy things at Bass Pro Shop or Cabela's? I mean, scary stuff when they're censoring what you say and then censoring what you get to see on these online platforms, which are now the public square, and then also gathering information on what you purchase.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So I think a large part of our work this year in the Congress on the Committee on the Weaponization of Government will be focused on these financial institutions and what's happening there.
--:-- John Bickley: Final question, what comes next? How are you seeking to hold people and agencies accountable here?
--:-- Jim Jordan: So look, we have legislation that's been introduced that we're going to mark up that says if, in fact, the government was involved in censoring you, you can, federal government, you then have the ability to take them to court and recover damages.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So legislatively, that's one thing we're looking to focus on.
--:-- Jim Jordan: Second, just doing the oversight, just doing the investigations and getting the truth out there makes a difference in and of itself.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I give you two examples. You know, it was about a year or so ago where we learned that the Biden Department of Homeland Security had set up this disinformation governance board, as if some board of federal bureaucrats was going to tell you what you're allowed to say, what you're not allowed to say.
--:-- Jim Jordan: And of course, you guys were great on this. And so many other individuals around the country, we made a big issue of this. And they decided to disband that crazy board that they were trying to form.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Second example, of course, is the IRS announced probably five months ago, Commissioner of the IRS, Mr. Warfall, announced that the IRS will no longer be making unannounced visits to American citizens' homes.
--:-- Jim Jordan: And Mr. Warfall said, well, we're doing this because we're concerned about the safety of our agents. Well, that's just baloney. They're doing it because we caught them knocking on Matt Taibbi's door at the very moment Matt Taibbi was testing in front of the Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government about censorship.
--:-- Georgia Howe: The IRS was knocking on his door. And it turned out, frankly, that they actually owed Mr. Taibbi money. The IRS did.
--:-- Jim Jordan: And we made a big deal of this. And so they've discontinued making unannounced visits to American citizens' homes.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So we're having some impact there. Obviously not enough. And it's why we continue to do our work.
--:-- John Bickley: Congressman, thank you so much for joining us.
--:-- Jim Jordan: You bet. Thank you guys. Take care.
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--:-- John Bickley: That was Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.
