Politics

Republican AGs Demand Info On DHS Agents Who Worked To Censor ‘Disinformation’ Online

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Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana are calling for five current or former national security officials to come clean regarding the federal government’s efforts to allegedly flag election-related “mis-” and “disinformation” for social media companies, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said Friday.

The request comes after a deposition of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) election security agent Brian Scully, released Thursday, revealed further information on participation of the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security‘s intelligence branch and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in meetings with social media firm executives to tackle online “misinformation” during the 2022 election cycle, the document shows. Now, the attorneys general are seeking to obtain testimony from CISA employees Chad Josiah, Rob Schaul, Alex Zaheer, John Stafford and Pierce Lowary, court documents show.

BREAKING: LA and MO request court to order #CISA disclose docs from 5 current/former national security officials after Scully’s depo revealed they are/have directly engaged in routing reports of “disinformation” from government officials to social media platforms for censorship

— AG Jeff Landry (@AGJeffLandry) January 20, 2023

The deposition demonstrated that the Biden administration “weaponized” CISA “to suppress domestic free speech,” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said in a statement.

The demand for information is the latest development in a case filed in 2022 to expose the Biden administration’s “widespread and systematic collusion between Big Tech and Big Government to censor Americans,” as described by Landry.

A motion filed Friday would force the courts to publicly release the CISA agents’ communications.

Previous attempts by the attorneys general to produce the communications “were met with CISA’s failure to search for the information from these five officials or produce any responsive documents from them,” Landry said.

During the meetings, agency representatives discussed foreign threats and domestic terrorism threats, Scully, the CISA executive, says in the deposition. Meetings primarily focused on “high-level things that they might be seeing, actors that might be interested in undermining confidence in the elections,” he said.

Scully worked in the Multi-Domain Management division, which includes coordination between the physical and cyber elements of securing election infrastructure, and served as a pivotal figure in the federal government’s election and speech monitoring plans, Bailey said.

CISA met individually with Facebook in “coordination meetings” prior to the “sync meetings” with other U.S. government agencies and Twitter,
Microsoft, Google, Reddit and sometimes LinkedIn and Wikimedia, Scully said. Scully denied that the agency representatives called out specific social media users or groups as far as he could remember.

“If they had some strategic intelligence, unclassified, strategic intelligence reporting, they might share a quick summary ofthat,” Scully said, adding that the meetings only took place from September 2022 through the midterm elections in November, the documents show. The agency does not have plans to continue the meetings in 2023, Scully said.

CISA representatives in the meetings included Geoff Hale, Kim Wyman, Allison Snell, Luke Beckman and Lauren Protentis, and FBI personnel included  Elvis Chan, Scully’s deposition shows.

CISA, the DOJ, the FBI, ODNI, and DHS did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.