Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has released further evidence of the collaboration between the federal government and private institutions to censor the First Amendment protected speech of Americans, including new files show that the infamous Election Integrity Partnership, which targeted social media posts for censorship during the 2020 election, was created “at the request” of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). One of the examples of the censorship machine in action shared by Jordan is a request to censor a tweet by President Donald Trump including a link to a Breitbart News story.
The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) is a consortium of four organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC), in a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee earlier this year, played a clip unearthed by the Foundation for Freedom Online showing the Atlantic Council , showing the Atlantic Council casually discussing the EIP’s “partners in government… most particularly those in CISA/DHS.”
Now, internal communications from the Atlantic Council obtained by Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) show that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a sub-agency of DHS, was more than just a “partner” of EIP — it was involved in its very creation.
“We just set up an election integrity partnership at the request of DHS/CISA and are in weekly comms to debrief on disinfo, IO, etc,” said a member of the Atlantic Council in the emails.
According to one EIP member, the EIP was created “at the request of CISA.”
The head of the EIP also said that EIP was created after “working on some monitoring ideas with CISA.” pic.twitter.com/OREVF7GEw1
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) November 6, 2023
In another email, head of the election integrity partnership, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos, said that “we are working on some monitoring ideas with CISA.”
It’s worse than that. Watch this 8 minute clip showing the exact timeline chronology in which CISA spawned EIP to censor what the government could not: https://t.co/aSrK7ihVyv pic.twitter.com/xZI1datjfI
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) November 7, 2023
“It’s worse than that,” said Foundation for Freedom Online head Mike Benz, who exposed DHS censorship efforts in a report last year. “Watch this 8 minute clip showing the exact timeline chronology in which CISA spawned EIP to censor what the government could not.”
Jordan provided examples of speech targeted for censorship, which he says included “true information, jokes, and political opinions.” The example Jordan provides to illustrate this point is a tweet by Donald Trump including a link to a Breitbart News story.
What speech was targeted for censorship?
-True information
-Jokes
-Political opinionsHere are a few examples: pic.twitter.com/j5l6pf5kMF
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) November 6, 2023
As Breitbart News previously reported, the Election Integrity Partnership developed a censorship “switchboard” which allowed government the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department could file “tickets” alongside news stories, flagging them so that Big Tech platforms could subsequently suppress or attach warning labels to them.
Via Breitbart News:
News outlets targeted by the EIP included Breitbart News, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Epoch Times, as well as the social media accounts of prominent conservatives Charlie Kirk, Tom Fitton, Jack Posobiec, Mark Levin, James O’Keefe, and Sean Hannity, amongst others.
President Donald Trump was also frequently flagged by the consortium, as well as his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
The extent of collaboration between the government and censorship organizations is the central question of Missouri v Biden, the landmark online free speech case currently before the supreme court. Evidence that DHS was involved in the very creation of arguably the most important private sector censorship partnership of the 2020 election could have an impact on the case.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.