EXCLUSIVE — An ex-Twitter executive behind the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story suggested a Department of Homeland Security advisory committee “meet with” a group covertly blacklisting conservative media, documents show.
The DHS-housed Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s since-disbanded Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation Subcommittee has come under heightened scrutiny from Republicans over its alleged “censorship” of disfavored speech. In June 2022, then-subcommittee member and Twitter chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde cited several entities, including the State Department-backed Global Disinformation Index, she considered worth coordinating with the subcommittee, according to emails obtained by the watchdog Functional Government Initiative and shared with the Washington Examiner.
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“Here are some follow up ideas for groups that might be helpful to us to meet with,” Gadde, who listed GDI as an expert on COVID-19 issues, wrote in a June 7, 2022, email to then-member and University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, as well as other members and DHS employees. Starbird, who Republicans have slammed for her role with the university’s Center for an Informed Public, “which formed in 2019 around a shared mission of resisting strategic misinformation,” notably sat in June 2023 for a transcribed interview and deposition before the House Judiciary Committee.
GDI has been the subject of numerous congressional investigations following Washington Examiner reports on how it pocketed roughly $960,000 combined from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and government-backed National Endowment for Democracy nonprofit group — which later announced it will no longer fund GDI. A British think tank, GDI has been feeding blacklists of conservative websites to advertisers with the intent of stripping their revenues.
“The subcommittee did not connect with the GDI [and] Dr. Starbird stands behind the work,” Michael Grass, a spokesman for the University of Washington, told the Washington Examiner. Grass linked to a March statement from the university’s Center for an Informed Public claiming the subcommittee “did not participate in or recommend for others to participate in any activities related to social media platform moderation or other activities that could be construed, even broadly, as ‘censorship.'”
Still, Functional Government Initiative spokesman Pete McGinnis said the Gadde email raises concerns — since “GDI has been one of the biggest culprits of actively pushing to censor conservative voices.”
“These documents reveal that in the wake of public outcry over the Disinformation Governance Board, the instinctive response by disinformation captains such as Vijaya Gadde and Kate Starbird was to seek the support and partnership of GDI, an organization with clear political bias,” McGinnis told the Washington Examiner.
The ex-Twitter executive did not reply to a Washington Examiner request for comment. She alleged while testifying in Congress in February that “at no point did Twitter otherwise prevent tweeting, reporting, discussing, or describing the contents of Mr. Biden’s laptop.” However, Gadde also noted that the company “had not fully appreciated the potential impact” of its policy suppressing content “on the free press and others,” adding that Twitter later “admitted its initial action was wrong.”
Other groups that Gadde cited in her June 2022 email as “useful in thinking about and addressing issues related to misinfo” included the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, records show. The lab previously flagged to Twitter more than 40,000 accounts alleged to have engaged in “inauthentic behavior” while boosting Hindu nationalism, documents show. The Shorenstein Center was shuttered by Harvard earlier this year after former Director Joan Donovan cast doubt on the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The ex-Twitter executive also said the Stanford Internet Observatory, which the House Judiciary panel subpoenaed in April over “censorship” concerns, and Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership were authorities on “civic integrity and elections.” CISA previously teamed up with the partnership in 2021 on a report finding the government flagged around 4,800 posts to social media companies around the 2020 presidential election, with 35% being removed, labeled, or blocked in some way, the Intercept reported.
The Gadde email, which has not been reported on until now, is a window into how CISA’s heavily scrutinized “misinformation” subcommittee sought to interact with third parties Republicans say have selectively censored right-leaning voices on the internet. Gadde reportedly signed off on Twitter’s move before the 2020 election to block links from being shared in connection to a New York Post story based on Hunter Biden’s infamous abandoned laptop. Twitter CEO Elon Musk fired Gadde in October 2022 after his takeover of the company.
Weeks before Gadde’s June 2022 suggestion email, on May 26, CISA’s Megan Tsuyi emailed Starbird and told the professor that the subcommittee “should not be socializing its work with outside parties” or “soliciting feedback on the recommendations from outside parties,” according to an email obtained by the Washington Examiner.
“The level of bias and corruption within our executive branch institutions is no longer surprising,” Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, told the Washington Examiner. “We simply cannot allow censorship of free speech by the federal government through CISA, the FBI, or DOJ to continue. There will be consequences for violating our First Amendment rights.”
CISA’s “misinformation” subcommittee was under the agency’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, which launched in June 2021, but was been disbanded, the House Judiciary Committee and its Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government said in a June report. The report alleged that CISA has been “censoring Americans’ political speech,” citing its apparent ties to Big Tech.
“The CSAC’s Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation Subcommittee convened throughout 2022, held its final meeting in September and formally stood down in December after it had answered its taskings and provided recommendations to CISA,” Scott McConnell, a CISA spokesman, told the Washington Examiner.
While CISA Director Jen Easterly testified before Congress in March that the agency doesn’t “flag anything to social media organizations at all,” the DHS’s inspector general office said in August 2022 that CISA, starting in 2018, began “notifying social media platforms or appropriate law enforcement officials when voting-related disinformation appeared in social media,” documents show.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, CISA Executive Director Brandon Wales said the agency “does not and has never censored speech or facilitated censorship.”
“Every day, the men and women of CISA execute the agency’s mission of reducing risk to U.S. critical infrastructure in a way that protects Americans’ freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy,” Wales said. “In response to concerns from election officials of all parties regarding foreign influence operations and disinformation that may impact the security of election infrastructure, CISA mitigates the risk of disinformation by sharing information on election literacy and election security with the public and by amplifying the trusted voices of election officials across the nation.”
In April, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed Easterly as part of an effort to obtain records on alleged censorship. Republicans have often pointed to how CISA’s committee drafted a report in June 2022 demanding the agency review “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper-partisan media, talk radio, and other online resources” and help shape the “information ecosystem,” according to documents.
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As a whole, the GOP has grown increasingly frustrated with what they say are the Biden administration’s efforts to crack down on conservative speech online. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in early July blocking administration officials from contacting social media companies to thwart content. The government then sought and failed to reverse the ban this week.
A source close to the House Judiciary Committee noted that its investigation into CISA remains ongoing. The panel’s June report charged that the agency is “exceeding its statutory authority” through “censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries.”
GDI did not return a request for comment.
