White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci and top Biden administration officials, including Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, have been served with discovery requests after a federal judge ordered them to comply with discovery requests from a lawsuit alleging government collusion with Big Tech suppression of free speech.
Government officials are accused of working with social media platforms like Twitter to suppress truthful information on COVID-19.
Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is accused of meeting with scientists who soon after he attempted to discredit the theory that the virus COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab.
Fauci has repeatedly cast doubt on the so-called lab leak theory.
But he was caught exchanging messages with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on how COVID-19 information on social media was handled.
Fauci was ordered to identify every worker in his agency who had communicated with a social media platform regarding content modulation and/or misinformation.
He was also ordered to identify all meetings he had on the matter with social media platforms.
Fauci was asked to provide all communications with Zuckerberg from Jan. 1, 2020, to the present, and all communications with platforms related to the Great Barrington Declaration, the COVID-19 strategy authored by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta that Fauci and his former boss, Dr. Francis Collins, criticized publicly and in private.
Discovery requests were also sent to the following:
- White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre
- Former Disinformation Governance Board chief Nina Jankowicz
- Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
And agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Homeland Security.
Subpoenas
The plaintiffs in the suit – Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, also served subpoenas to Meta, Facebook’s parent company; YouTube; Twitter; Instagram; and LinkedIn.
The subpoena also compels the social media platforms to present documents before Aug. 17, including all communications with Jankowicz and other federal officials.
The documents reference how former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told a briefing in July 2021 that officials are “in regular touch with these social media platforms” and that “we’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”
“We will fight to get to the bottom of this alleged collusion and expose the suppression of freedom of speech by social media giants at the behest of top-ranking government officials,” Schmitt, a Republican, said in a statement.
