Morning Wire - The White House vs. Free Speech: Amazon Files | Sunday Extra

Episode Date: February 18, 2024

Just days into President Biden’s term the White House was pressuring big tech companies to censor speech. We speak to the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, about what he uncovered. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The House Judiciary Committee released emails that seemed to show that Amazon gave into pressure from President Biden's White House to suppress books calling into question the COVID-19 vaccines. In this episode, we talk with the judiciary chair Jim Jordan about what his committee uncovered and what it means for First Amendment protections. I'm Daily Wire, editor-in-chief, John Bickley, with Georgia Howe. It's Sunday, February 18th, and this is an extra edition of Morningwire. joining us now to discuss what the House Judiciary Committee uncovered related to the White House pressuring Amazon to suppress books is the chair of that committee, Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio.

Congressman, thank you for coming on. You bet. 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? 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? And it turns out, it looks like, based on what we found in our investigation,

they were trying to like do not promote so they wanted to downplay certain material, certain books, and also potentially remove books. 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, and then we find out, oh, by the way, the Biden administration was also trying to ban books. Frightening stuff.

And to be clear, this began right after President Biden took off. office in 2021, March of 2021. Is that correct? Sure is. You go back to the Twitter, it began the third day. There's this now what's 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. 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. 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.

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 going to run against them in the primary for the Democrat nomination for president. So censoring your political opponents, the third day in office, I think is kind of scary. Yeah. Now, the emails appear to show some initial reluctance. from Amazon to suppress content, but they did eventually cave. Is that fair to say? I think that is. 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, Netta or YouTube, there always seemed to be some initial pushback. But because this is the federal government applying the pressure, they almost always cave. 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, and there's a communication where he says, this encroaches on the First Amendment. 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, I mean, you almost have to laugh at it if it

wasn't so serious. So yeah, there's always an initial pushback, but in the end, these platforms all seem to comply. 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, quote, who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation on Amazon? Slavitt also came up a lot in the Twitter and Facebook censorship efforts. What's his role in all this. Well, he was the 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. And they're the ones who must have been assigned this task to encourage

the censorship of American speech on these various platforms, because the same names show up, whether it's Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or in this case, Amazon. But it's always done under the missed this and Mao banner. And of course, mal information is. 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's framed. And so we're going to say that needs to be censored as well, which is particularly dangerous. 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. And 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. 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. And yet they were trying to censor that.

Anyone who disagree 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. Now, your committee subpoenaed Slavid, is that correct? Yeah, and we're having trouble getting them in here. We have subpoenaed him and Mr. Flaherty. They're objecting. One of them is left government employment, and one of the rules of the house is,

if you know law or 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, and it's just the rules of the house. You can't have like four lawyers sitting there. So we're in a fight over that, and we'll see how that all shakes out.

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? Big government is trying to censor Americans, I think is 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. 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. Or as some journalists have said, who we've had testified, 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. 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. 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? And did they buy things at Bass Pro Shop or Cabellas? 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. 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. Final question. What comes next? How are you seeking to hold people and agencies accountable here? 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.

So legislatively, that's one thing we're looking to focus on. Second, just doing the oversight, just doing the investigations and getting the truth out there makes a difference in and of itself. 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, you know, board of federal bureaucrats was going to tell you what you're allowed to say, what you're not allowed to say. 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, you know, disband that crazy board that they were trying to form. 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.

And Mr. Warfaw said, well, we're doing this because we're concerned about the safety of our agents. Well, that's his baloney. They're doing it because we caught them knocking on Matt Taibi's door. At the very moment Matt Taibi was testing in front of the select committee on the weaponization of government about censorship, the IRS was knocking on his door. And it turned out, frankly, that they actually owed Mr. Taibi money. The IRS did.

And we made a big deal of this. And so they've discontinued making unannounced visits to American citizens' home. So we're having some impact there. Obviously not enough, and it's why we continue to do our work. And we hope that it's legislation we can get through the House. And ultimately, it'll become law at some point. Congressman, thank you so much for joining us. You bet.

Thank you guys. Take care. That was Judiciary Committee Chair, Jim Jordan. And this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.