(RightWing.org) – The way America’s constitutional federal republic form of government is set up, Congress exercises oversight authority of the Executive branch so the bureaucracy of the various agencies doesn’t reach beyond the limits of the Constitution of the United States. To that end, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), along with his Republican colleagues Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, have made various efforts to get information from Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Alejandro Mayorkas. The responses they have received have been full of holes, literally.
“The Ministry of Truth”
A brief recap. Sometime in early 2022, the exact timing is somewhat unclear, President Joe Biden directed DHS to set up a “Disinformation Governance Board (DGB),” and then a whistleblower stepped forward and provided documents to Hawley and Grassley. The information they received prompted them to write a letter (dated June 7, 2022) to Mayorkas, which included questions about how many staff working in that department would define “clear, objective facts” when determining what is “mis-, dis-, and mal- information (MDM).”
The Senators also expressed concerns about the political biases of potential DGB employees, mentioning by name the recently appointed Executive Director Nina Jankowicz, who they described as “a known trafficker of foreign disinformation and liberal conspiracy theories.” Examples they provided included her claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a “[former President Donald] Trump campaign product” and multiple tweets promoting the now-debunked claim Trump was using a private computer so he could coordinate with the Russians (perhaps she was confusing that issue with the illegal server Hillary Clinton kept after her time as Secretary of State).
Words [Blank] [Blank] Words
Hawley sent a follow-up letter to Mayorkas dated November 30, 2022, complaining about the six-month lag in responding to the June 7 letter and the fact they “are so heavily redacted [that] most are illegible.” The senator accused the DHS chief of blatantly avoiding transparency and blocking legal Legislative branch oversight.
Conservative non-profit watchdog group Citizens United sought emails and other documents concerning the DGB and the people involved in it through a freedom of information act (FOIA) request to DHS in May 2022. Receiving no response, they were forced to file a federal lawsuit in July of that year to compel the department to provide the information — and they eventually received it. At least, after a fashion, as part of the response was a cover letter saying that of the 340 pages processed up until November 22, 202 of them were partially or totally withheld.
What Hawley claimed he could glean from the information provided by DHS and the original whistleblower documents paint a picture of collusion among the board members and Big Tech companies like Twitter and Facebook (now known as Meta) and their suppression of information that did not toe the line with the Biden administration’s narratives.
In yet another letter Hawley felt obligated to send to Mayorkas dated December 15, his tone became a bit more stern because the secretary and his department did not answer a single question posed from the original June request. He also expressed his concern that another division of the DHS, the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, plans to work “with social media companies to flag MDM” that doesn’t fit with their ideas on the origin of the virus that caused the pandemic, the efficacy of the vaccines used to fight it, and racial justice among others.”
Citizens United President David Bossie provided an exclusive statement to the Just the News website in which he accused the Democrats of being “laser focused on targeting, silencing, and censoring Americans who do not agree with their radical agenda.” This has led some pundits to ponder, if the administration has nothing to hide, why is it going to such great lengths to conceal things?
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