Disturbing House report exposes FBI’s First Amendment violations

Just days after federal Judge Terry Doughty issued a stirring Independence Day injunction freezing government speech policing efforts in the landmark Missouri v. Biden case, an appellate court temporarily stayed his order, restoring the fed-led censorship regime.

So for now, the Biden administration can resume the speech-stifling activities that led social media companies to suppress Wrongthink at industrial scale, perpetrating what Judge Doughty had called perhaps the “most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

These activities might include pushing the platforms to censor Americans at the request of foreign powers – even hostile ones – if a stunning new report from the House Judiciary Committee’s Government Weaponization Subcommittee is any indication.

The report shows that in March 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the FBI conveyed requests from Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the SBU, to social media platforms to take down thousands of accounts and posts purportedly tied to Russian influence operations.

But the FBI seemingly didn’t vet the “anti-disinformation” requests to see who the SBU was targeting, or what it was targeting.

Otherwise, the beyond disturbing conclusion, based on the report, is that the FBI knowingly worked with the foreign intelligence service to violate Americans’ First Amendment rights, and advance not only that foreign intel service’s interests, but Russia’s interests.

How?

Well, as the Weaponization Subcommittee’s report shows, the SBU’s takedown requests included Americans’ accounts and posts. Amazingly, one account was @usaporusski, the official Russian-language account of the U.S. State Department. 

Other accounts targeted for censorship belonged to American journalists. 

Twitter flagged this issue for the FBI. When it did, the Bureau showed little concern. “Understood,” said the FBI agent who had forwarded the SBU’s censorship request. “Whatever your review determines and action Twitter deem is appropriate (sic).”

As for the nature of the content the SBU targeted, the agency flagged accounts for censorship for “discrediting the SBU leadership” in the agencies’ words.

That is, a foreign security agency brazenly asked an American security agency to silence people to protect the foreign security agency’s reputation – and our government apparently honored that request.

More astonishing is that despite the U.S. government’s support for Ukraine, the FBI passed along censorship requests to purge content supportive of Ukraine, and speech “critical of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s invasion,” according to the Weaponization Subcommittee’s probe.

Why was the FBI effectively doing the Kremlin’s bidding when cooperating with Ukraine’s intelligence agency?

Apparently because that agency itself was corrupted by the Kremlin.

The SBU was birthed from the KGB after the Soviet Union’s collapse. It inherited “its original staff, structure, and modus operandi,” according to the report. 

Since its advent, it’s not only closely cooperated Russia’s FSB, but Russia has penetrated SBU.

This could be seen in Russian forces’ February 2022 success in capturing Chernobyl with ease. This has been attributed largely to Russia’s influence over the SBU and Ukraine’s security apparatus.

Russia’s infiltration of the SBU seems to have persisted through the period during which it was issuing the takedown requests to the FBI. 

In July 2022, President Volodymyr Zelensky suspended the head of the SBU due to widespread findings of suspected treason in the agency’s ranks. Zelensky disclosed that authorities had opened “651 cases of alleged treason and collaboration…against individuals in law enforcement and in the prosecutor’s office.” 

The day prior to the suspension, authorities arrested the former head of the SBU’s Main Department in Crimea on charges of treason. The close confidante of the soon-to-be-suspended SBU head had reportedly withheld knowledge of Russia’s plans to invade the Ukraine from his agency’s central office. 

It is worth noting that the FBI was no mere passive observer as a conduit for the SBU’s takedown requests. In at least one instance, after Meta did not immediately respond to such a request, an FBI official asked the platform “if these accounts were taken down,” or “if you need some legal process from us” – which is to say, FBI-concocted justification to legitimize the censorship.

“Put simply,” the Weaponization Subcommittee report says, “the FBI worked with and on behalf of a foreign intelligence agency—widely known to be compromised by Moscow at the time—and directly abetted efforts to censor Americans engaging in protected speech. As a result, the FBI agents’ actions had the potential to render substantial aid to the Kremlin’s war effort.”

The report raises myriad questions, none of which FBI Director Christopher Wray provided sufficient answers to during a recent hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

Among them:

• Have other U.S. national security or foreign policy agencies received censorship requests from foreign counterparts and conveyed them to social media platforms? 
• Which foreign counterparts sent those requests?
• On what grounds did they call for the targets to be censored?
• Did they target Americans?
• Did the U.S. government recipients of the censorship requests diligence them before forwarding the requests along to social media platforms?
• What further action did the U.S. counterparts take after originally forwarding said requests?
• How did social media companies’ respond to those requests?
• Are these efforts still ongoing?

In pursuing the mass public-private censorship regime foisted on Americans, congressional investigators appear now to have stumbled upon another scandal: That of either the gross negligence or rank incompetence of national security authorities in handling information received by foreign counterparts, and perhaps worse, their total disregard for Americans targeted by them.