(RightWing.org) – When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, he promised to “bring transparency… back to the government.” The reality seems to be a bit different. The Biden administration believes in transparency when it suits it but is happy to keep things hidden if that’s politically convenient. Now it’s blocking the release of information about the 2020 presidential election.
Emails Show Collusion To Censor
On June 7, journalist Lee Fang released emails that show Justice Department officials and others plotting to block the release of documents about interference in the 2020 election. The contested documents come from the federal government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which was set up by Stanford University and the University of Washington. The EIP was supposed to be nonpartisan, but the House Homeland Security Committee has raised concerns about it working with private organizations to censor social media platforms.
In May, a conservative advocacy group, America First Legal, filed a class action suit against the EIP’s members, accusing the group of being part of the “censorship-industrial complex.” There are real worries about it being politicized — and questions about what part it played in the 2020 election. During the election, the EIP created a system that let activists flag social media posts for the attention of the State Department and Department of Homeland Security (DGS). Those agencies would then request that the posts be deleted.
Who Is Involved?
The emails obtained by Lee Fang show federal officials asking Kate Starbird, a computer science teacher at the University of Washington, which CISA documents have been hit with freedom of information requests. Justice Department lawyers asked Starbird to send them copies of the documents, so they could decide whether to block the requests.
So, what might be in those documents that the administration wants to hide? America First Legal believes they contain details of the EIP’s attempts to censor conservative voices on social media during the 2020 election. Breitbart claims the coalition targeted a range of right-of-center media outlets, as well as President Trump and his sons, Eric and Donald Jr.
If the emails show internal details of the processes EIP used to target conservatives, that could make it easier for people to avoid being censored. It could also anger voters, and with the campaign for the next election starting to gain momentum, Biden doesn’t like that idea. If these documents reveal how the deep state manages to censor Conservatives, they could have a huge influence next November — so it makes sense that Biden wants to keep them under wraps.
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