A key constitutional expert who repeatedly has testified before Congress on constitutional issues, teaches at George Washington University Law School and is a commentator for multiple media organizations is warning the nation about the “mendacious” FBI.
Online, that word is defined as “lying, untruthful, false, untrue” and a synonym is “dishonest.”
It’s being applied to the FBI by Jonathan Turley and it is happening after the FBI denied the evidence already seen by the American public that it influenced the 2020 presidential election by telling social media companies to suppress reports on the Biden family scandals that actually were completely true.
“It is not clear what is more chilling: the menacing role played by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Twitter’s censorship program or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role,” Turley commented. “This week saw another FBI ‘nothing-to-see-here’ statement to the release of files detailing how it actively sought to suppress the Hunter Biden story before the 2020 election, gave millions to Twitter, and targeted even satire or tiny posts that did not conform with its guidelines.”
He said it’s clear there was “a system of censorship by surrogate or proxy. The FBI has largely shrugged and said that there is nothing concerning about over 80 agents working on the censoring of posters, including many American citizens.”
He quoted from the FBI’s latest denial of responsibility, in which it said it provides information about accounts to be censored so social media companies “can take whatever action they deem appropriate under their terms of service to protect their platform and protect their customers, but we never direct or ask them to take action.”
This, of course, is the same FBI whose employees were promising each other during the 2016 Trump campaign that they would never allow Trump to be president. They said they would stop it.
They also are the members of the same bureau that, in fact, used made-up claims as evidence so that they could obtain court permission to spy on that Trump campaign.
And they continued using made-up allegations for years, all the while trying to convince the American public that it was “evidence.”
They also are the agents who staged a SWAT-style raid on President Trump’s home in what apparently was a dispute over custody of his presidential papers.
Turley explained Twitter files, now being released by new owner Elon Musk, “show a previously undisclosed back channel of contacts where the FBI nudged Twitter to censor posters and Twitter proceeded to do so. Many are like the Nov. 10th email saying ‘Hello Twitter contacts, FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy.'”
Twitter suspended three of the accounts and reviewed a fourth.
“It is all just friendly chit chat from the ‘Public Sector Engagement Squad’ at FBI’s San Francisco office,” Turley pointed out.
And he noted U.S. taxpayers paid Twitter more than. $3.4 million for its work as directed by the FBI.
The FBI’s denial continued, with its claim, “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”
The bureau also attacked those offering criticism or concern by blasting them as “conspiracy theorists.”
Turley noted, “What is striking about this statement is that the FBI is now adopting the language of pundits on the left that any objections to its role in censorship is a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Rather than acknowledge the concerns and pledge to work with Congress to guarantee transparency, it is attacking free speech advocates who are raising the concern that Twitter had become an agent of the government in censorship. Notably, Twitter itself now believes that such an agency relationship existed.”
He said the statement from the FBI itself confirms Americans’ concerns that the federal agency still was “engaged in framing public opinion and echoing the narrative being advanced by the White House.”
Just the News reported the evidence actually is that “the FBI regularly contacted Twitter employees about content it deemed questionable, paid the social media platform for legal requests and discredited the Hunter Biden laptop scandal before the story was published on it.”
