FBI
Still Hiding Biden Twitter Censorship Records
We were in court this week
for a
hearing ordered by U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan in our FOIA
lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for “Twitter
Files” records concerning
Hunter
Biden’s laptop and other censorship. The only issue remaining in the
lawsuit is the FBI’s continued hiding of records
documenting two meetings between Twitter and the Biden FBI.
We filed
the April 2023 lawsuit
against the Justice Department, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence after the FBI
failed to respond to a December 2022 FOIA request for the records of any
FBI official and key Twitter employees between June 2020 and December 2022
(Judicial
Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No.
1:23-cv-01163)).
The lawsuit references Yoel Roth, Vijaya Gadde, and
Jim Baker, who were prominent in internal discussions at Twitter about
censoring the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, as
journalist Matt Taibbi revealed in the December 2022 release of the “Twitter
Files.”
It is frustrating beyond belief for us to have
to go to federal court for basic information on Biden’s abuse of the FBI,
using Twitter to censor and monitor Americans.
Earlier this year, FBI
Director Kash Patel committed
the FBI to a “new era” of transparency:
The FBI
is entering a new era—one
that will be defined by integrity, accountability, and the unwavering
pursuit of justice. There will be no cover-ups, no missing documents, and
no stone left unturned — and anyone from the prior or current Bureau who
undermines this will be swiftly pursued. If there are gaps, we will find
them. If records have been hidden, we will uncover them. And we will bring
everything we find to the DOJ to be fully assessed and transparently
disseminated to the American people as it should be. The oath we take is to
the Constitution, and under my leadership, that promise will be upheld
without compromise.
Through FOIA and other direct
litigation, we continue to investigate and litigate the broad range of
censorship that had been imposed upon tens of millions of
Americans.
In November 2024, we uncovered
records from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealing
an extensive effort by government and non-government entities to monitor
and censor social media posts on fraud during the 2020 election.
In
June 2024, heavily redacted Homeland Security records
from a Judicial Watch FOIA
lawsuit showed state election officials in the days before and after the
2020 election flagging online content deemed “misinformation” and
sending it to the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a DHS-funded
nonprofit, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA),
which is a division of DHS, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which
was created to flag online election content for censorship and suppression,
and others.
In December 2023, Homeland Security records
from the same lawsuit showed a close collaboration between its
Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) and the leftist
Election
Integrity Partnership (EIP) to engage in “real-time narrative tracking”
on all major social media platforms in the days leading up to the 2020
election.
In November 2023, we uncovered Homeland Security records
that showed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
communicating during the 2020 election campaign with the Election Integrity
Partnership (EIP). The CISA records showed government involvement in the
EIP pressure on Google, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit and
other platforms to censor “disinformation.”
In September 2022, we
sued the
Secretary of State of the State of California for having YouTube censor a
Judicial Watch election integrity video. In March 2025, Judicial Watch
asked the Supreme Court of the United States to
review the case.
In July 2021, we uncovered
records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which
revealed that Facebook coordinated closely with the CDC to control the
Covid narrative and “misinformation” and that over $3.5 million in free
advertising was given to the CDC by social media companies.
In May
2021, we revealed
documents
showing that Iowa state officials pressured social media companies Twitter
and Facebook to censor posts about the 2020 election.
In April 2021,
records
from the Office of the Secretary of State of California revealed how state
officials pressured social media companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google
(YouTube)) to censor posts about the 2020 election. Included in these
records were “misinformation briefings” emails that were compiled by
communications firm SKDK, which lists
Biden for President as their top client
of 2020. The records show how the state agency successfully pressured
YouTube to censor a Judicial Watch video concerning mail-in voting and a
Judicial Watch lawsuit settlement about California voter roll clean
up.
CHARGES: Bribed USAID Official Helps Minority
Businesses Get $550 Million in Contracts
The United States
Agency for International Development has been in the news lately as
President Trump’s administration exposes its use as a cash cow for the
Left. Now there’s news of outright bribery at the agency, as our
Corruption Chronicles blog reveals.
In
yet another case that demonstrates the deep-rooted corruption at the
dismantled United States Agency for International Development (USAID) , a
contracting officer at the scandal-plagued State Department offshoot has pleaded
guilty to bribery of a public official for running a decade-long scheme
involving over half a billion dollars in contracts. The criminal operation
was facilitated by a government program that helps socially and
economically disadvantaged businesses by giving them lucrative federal
contracting opportunities through “set-asides and solo-source”
contracts exclusively available to minorities and women without a
competitive bidding process. All the parties involved in this criminal
enterprise, including the veteran USAID employee, are
minorities.
It is important to note that the mainstream media, which
collectively expressed outrage when President Trump dismantled USAID, has
failed to report on the pervasive fraud that has long gripped the foreign
aid agency and still ignores cases like this that support the
administration’s move. Only a few local Maryland news outlets covered
this huge bribery operation because the perpetrators were from the
Baltimore area. The corrupt USAID contracting officer, Roderick Watson, is
from Woodstock, which is just west of Baltimore. Federal prosecutors say he
received over a million dollars in bribes in exchange for using his
position as a trusted overseer of taxpayer money to direct 14 prime federal
contracts to his three buddies, Walter Barnes, a certified Small Business
Administration (SBA) minority business owner, Darryl Britt another minority
business owner and Paul Young, a subcontractor of the men’s companies.
Barnes has
pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery of a public official and
securities fraud. Britt has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery
of a public official and Young has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit
bribery of a public official.
“The defendants sought to enrich
themselves at the expense of American taxpayers through bribery and
fraud,” said Matthew R. Galeotti, head of the Department of Justice (DOJ)
criminal division. “Their scheme violated the public trust by corrupting
the federal government’s procurement process. Anybody who cares about
good and effective government should be concerned about the waste, fraud,
and abuse in government agencies, including USAID.” Galeotti added that
those who engage in bribery schemes to exploit the U.S. Small Business
Administration’s vital economic programs for small businesses— whether
individuals or corporations acting through them—will be held to account.
The U.S.
Attorney for the District of Maryland, where the case is being tried,
emphasized that Watson was entrusted to serve the interests of the American
people and his criminal actions for his own personal gain undermine the
integrity of public institutions. “Public trust is the hallmark of our
nation’s values, so corruption within a federal government agency is
intolerable” the U.S. Attorney, Kelly O. Hayes, said.
The elaborate
scheme began in 2013 when Watson, while a USAID contracting officer, made a
deal with Britt to steer government contracts his way in exchange for
bribes. Britt’s company, Apprio, benefitted from the special minority
exception and therefore did not receive much scrutiny but when it graduated
from the program and was no longer eligible to be a prime business for new
contracts with USAID under the initiative, they brought Barnes onboard. His
minority-owned company, Vistant, shifted to the prime contractor that
cashed in thanks to Watson’s influence between 2018 and 2022. Britt and
Barnes concealed the bribes—cash, computers, cellular phones, jobs for
relatives, down payments on two residential mortgages—by passing them
through Young, the president of another subcontractor to the men’s
businesses. Watson helped his accomplices by manipulating the procurement
process at USAID by, among other things, recommending their companies to
other agency decisionmakers for noncompetitive contracts, disclosing
sensitive procurement information, providing positive performance
evaluations, and approving increased funding and security clearances.
“Watson exploited his position at USAID to line his pockets with bribes
in exchange for more than $550 million in contracts,” according to Guy
Ficco, chief of the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation
(IRS-CI). “While he helped three company owners and presidents bypass the
fair bidding process, he was
showered with cash and lavish gifts.”
Judicial Watch has for years
exposed inherent fraud, waste, and corruption at USAID. Most recently, we
sued
the agency for records involving $27 million in Gaza grants that went to
“Miscellaneous Foreign Awardees.” The Biden administration claimed the
recipients could not be disclosed because the agency’s workers could be
put at risk by Israel. The involvement
of employees of the U.S.-backed United Nations Relief and Works
Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack
on Israel underscores the importance of transparency in who receives
American taxpayer dollars and how the money is
spent.
Until next week,
