Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan has revealed what he calls "smoking gun" evidence that the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has gathered against Joe Biden, Newsweek reported Tuesday.
The congressman and other Republican filed a legal briefing in an ongoing case, the State of Missouri v. Biden, which accuses the president's administration of government overreach by attempting to suppress information online.
According to Jordan and other committee members, the Biden administration called on Facebook to take down posts that suggest the COVID-19 pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology – a theory that has gained traction in recent months, buoyed by Biden's own Department of Energy concluding in February that the virus likely originated from a lab leak.
"This pressure was direct and coercive. For example, the Administration tried to suppress discussion of COVID's origins: when a Facebook executive asked in July 2021 why the company censored the COVID lab leak theory, an executive in charge of content policy development said, '[b]ecause we were under pressure from the [A]dministration' to do so. The same Facebook executive confessed that the company 'shouldn't have done it,'" the briefing reads.
In another email, a Facebook employee allegedly told CEO Mark Zuckerberg and then-COO Sheryl Sandberg that the company was "facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content."
As Newsweek points out, the Biden administration has previously defended its coordination with social media platforms to take down or throttle content it defined as misinformation as the pandemic unfolded.
"We've increased disinformation research and tracking within the surgeon general's office," then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at a press conference in July of 2021. "We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We're working with doctors and medical professionals to connect medical experts who are popular with our audiences with accurate information and boost trusted content – so we are helping get trusted content out there."