Judicial Watch SUES over Biden Border Crisis!

[INSIDE JW]

NEW: IOWA GOV’T OFFICIALS COORDINATED WITH BIG TECH TO CENSOR
JUDICIAL WATCH ELECTION POSTS

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Last week we released
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records
from the Secretary of State of California revealing how state
officials pressured social media companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google
(YouTube)) to censor election posts. Included were “misinformation
briefing” emails compiled by communications firm SKDK, which lists
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Biden
for President as its top client
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of
2020.

The state agency successfully pressured YouTube to censor a Judicial
Watch video concerning vote by mail and a Judicial Watch lawsuit
settlement about California voter roll clean up.

It turns out that California wasn’t the only state acting in seeming
violation of the First Amendment. The new information from Iowa
revealed below exposes the dirty details of the expanding conspiracy
against free expression.

We received 624 pages
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of
records from the Secretary of State of Iowa showing how state
officials pressured social media companies Twitter and Facebook to
censor posts about the 2020 election.

Included in these records were emails from Iowa state officials to
representatives of Big Tech pressuring these companies to remove some
of Judicial Watch’s posts. The emails show how the state agency
successfully pressured Facebook to censor our post about Iowa’s
management of its voter rolls.

We received the records as a result of a June 2020 Iowa Open
Records lawsuit filed after the Iowa Secretary of State failed to
comply with our February 2020 request for records and communications
about a Judicial Watch report
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regarding
the accuracy of the state’s voter registration rolls (_Judicial
Watch v. Iowa Secretary of State_
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(No.
05771 EQCE085973)). We were represented by Iowa lawyer Alan R.
Ostergren of Des Moines, Iowa.

The records show that officials in the Secretary of State’s office
on multiple occasions contacted officials from Facebook and Twitter to
try to have these companies remove Judicial Watch posts that raised
concerns
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about
Iowa’s failure to maintain accurate election rolls.

On February 3, 2020, at 5:19 p.m., Kevin Hall, the communications
director for the Iowa Secretary of State, wrote in a February 3,
2020, email
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to
Facebook official Rachel Holland:

Rachel,

We’ve been playing whack-a-mole with this false story all day. Is
there anything you can do to help:
[likely
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We’ve told them is fake. They have it PINNED to the top of their
page.

Here’s our rebuttal:
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Holland responded at 6:11p.m., writing:

Hi Kevin,

Circling back with an update regarding the content posted by Judicial
Watch. Our third-party fact checkers have rated this content false,
and we have applied a filter over the content warning users before
they click to see it that the content has been rated false by
independent fact checkers.

Please continue to report violating content to us by
emailing [email protected], and copying me
([email protected]), as I will be on an airplane for the next
couple hours. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns
regarding this or any other matters.
A couple of hours later, Hall followed up, “Thank you! They have new
posts up, doubling down on the false claims.”

And Holland responded, “Thanks for flagging- we’ve got a full team
with eyes on this now and are applying the false filter to similar
articles as well. I’ll send you an additional update shortly!”

That same day, Hall and Maria Benson, the director of communications
at the National Association of Secretaries of State, both tried to
convince
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Twitter
to censor Judicial Watch’s posts but were ultimately unsuccessful.


Hall filed a report with Twitter, and Benson escalated it by looping
in Kevin Kane from Twitter. On February 3, 2020, Benson wrote, “Iowa
Secretary of State has reported the below election misinformation, but
Twitter has declined to take it down. As you can see from the facts
the tweets are clearly wrong. I wanted to bring this to your attention
to hopefully remedy the situation. I’ve cc’d Kevin Hall, their
Communicators Director.”
Kane responded rejecting the request saying, “Thanks Maria – This
was reviewed by our team and is not in violation of our election
integrity policy as it does not suppress voter turnout or mislead
people about when. where. or how to vote. I understand this is not the
outcome you are seeking and appreciate you continuing to report Tweets
to our team.”

In an email the next day, Hall wrote to Kane saying, “Facebook,
thankfully, was helpful. I would suggest perhaps reviewing your
policies at Twitter and putting them more in line with what Facebook
is doing to counter election misinformation.”

After being rejected by Twitter, Benson emailed Brian Scully, an
official at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency, writing on February 3, 2020:

Hey Brian,

Can you report this as well? Hannity is now retweeting and Twitter
isn’t playing ball with us. I’ve cc’d Kevin Hall who you met
Saturday. He’s IA SOS’s Communications Director. He’s been
reporting and playing wack a mole by trying to reply to misleading
tweets.
Scully responded promising to contact Twitter. “Sorry … been out
of pocket a bit. Will reach out to Twitter. Let me know if you get
something.”

These records are yet another example of state officials conspiring
with Big Tech to deny Americans their First Amendment rights. These
records further show that Big Tech censorship is a government scandal:
Iowa government officials worked with Facebook to remove posts they
did not like, and Facebook bowed to this political pressure
immediately. It should be disturbing to all Americans that government
officials are working to censor speech they disagree with and that
these behemoth companies often seem willing to roll over and censor
free speech.

JUDICIAL WATCH SUES OVER ABUSE OF CHILDREN TIED TO BIDEN BORDER CRISIS

Little children are in trouble on the border. Texas welfare officials
received three reports of abuse and neglect at the Freeman Coliseum in
San Antonio, where more than 1,300 migrant children reportedly
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had
been held. The site is one of several
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set
up to handle the recent surge. This came on the heels of claims
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that
multiple facilities where children are being held are unsafe.

To dig into this, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit
against the Department of Health and Human Services for records about
assaults on and abuse of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) in HHS
custody (_Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services_
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(No.
1:21-cv-01190)).

We sued after the HHS denied our February 26, 2021, FOIA request
for:

* All summaries from individual case files of reports of physical
and/or sexual abuse or assault of Unaccompanied Alien Children under
the care of HHS, its sub-agencies, and or volunteer agencies,
contractors, grantees, and sub-grantees, to include all segregable,
non-exempt information.
* Records reflecting aggregated data of physical and/or sexual abuse
and assault of UACs under the care of HHS, its sub-agencies, and or
volunteer agencies, contractors, grantees, and sub-grantees.

We are concerned that the surge of migrants seeking to take advantage
of the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies has resulted
in the foreseeable abuse of children, as overwhelmed federal
authorities are ill-equipped to handle the huge number of children
crossing the border. The unprecedented secrecy and censorship
surrounding these sites compounds the problem and limits
accountability. Our lawsuit aims to expose the full truth about this
particularly troubling consequence of the Biden administration’s
lawlessness on immigration.

This is not a new problem. We uncovered
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HHS records in July 2018 revealing that in multiple cases,
unaccompanied alien children (UACs) processed during the Obama
administration were assaulted by government employees.

We began _investigating_
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this
matter in 2014 when a wave of UACs swamped the southwest border. Since
that time, we have been investigating incidents of violence, drug
trafficking, human trafficking, and other criminal activities, as well
as whether migrant children were being abused while in U.S. shelters.

FACEBOOK’S BRAZEN BAN OF PRESIDENT TRUMP SHOULD CONCERN EVERY
AMERICAN

The Facebook Oversight Board’s decision upholding President
Trump’s Facebook ban undermines the First Amendment and free speech.
The brazen ban of President Trump is already chilling the speech of
other Facebook users and Internet users generally, who fairly worry
about Facebook and Big Tech censoring and deplatforming them.

I have been personally locked out of Twitter for four months over a
tweet previously found not to be in violation
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of
Twitter’s rules.

Judicial Watch previously argued
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that Facebook’s Oversight Board should have reversed the
president’s ban because the ban is an affront to First Amendment
protections of free speech, peaceable assembly, and the right to
petition the government. There is no credible evidence that President
Trump either morally or legally incited violence. He was resoundingly
acquitted by the United States Senate after the impeachment
“prosecutors” failed to produce credible evidence he incited
violence. For Facebook and its Oversight Board to suggest President
Trump incited violence and that complaints about the administration of
an election could incite violence is a political position aligned with
the Left and political opponents of President Trump and his
supporters.

JUDICIAL WATCH REVEALS CENSORED HISTORY OF 2020 ELECTION

We continue to investigate the serious questions concerning the 2020
election. Our chief investigative reporter, Micah Morrison, summarizes
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our efforts in his _Investigative Bulletin_
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Judicial Watch has uncovered critical new details in the secret
history of the 2020 election: how state government officials—at
times interfacing with the Biden presidential campaign—colluded with
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to censor freedom of speech.

The new information raises enormous constitutional and legal
questions. It challenges the conventional wisdom that the companies
are operating solely as private actors and can remove or ban users of
their services as they see fit, with no violation of First Amendment
rights.

The new documents “suggest a conspiracy against the First Amendment
rights of Americans,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
“These documents blow up the big lie that Big Tech censorship is
‘private’—as the documents show collusion between a whole group
of government officials in multiple states to suppress speech about
election controversies.”

In California, we obtained more than 500 pages of documents
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showing
how a state agency, the Office of Election Cybersecurity, tracked
social media commentary and pushed Big Tech to take down posts.
Included in the documents were so-called “Misinformation Daily
Briefings” from the communications firm SKDK. The firm also was
deeply involved in the Biden presidential campaign
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developing its mail-in voting program for four key electoral states:
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

For Big Tech and state officials, questioning the wisdom of mail-in
voting was not allowed. On September 11, 2020, when JW’s Tom Fitton
made the common-sense observation on Twitter that “mailing 51
million ballots to those who haven’t asked for increases risk of
voter fraud and intimidation,” SKDK put him in its “misinformation
brief” to California election security officials.

(In January, Twitter suspended Tom for tweeting another common-sense
observation—“hydroxychloroquine is a safe drug”—a comment he
had several times earlier made on Twitter and which the tech giant
earlier had found not to be in violation of its rules. Read more on
the incident here
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California officials went after Tom again on September 24, falsely
stating that he claimed in a YouTube video that Democrats would
benefit from incorrect voter rolls and ballot collection. In the
video, in fact, Tom was updating viewers about Judicial Watch’s
highly successful, non-partisan lawsuit settlement with Los Angeles
County to clean up voter rolls. Judicial Watch is a national leader in
a non-partisan effort to clean up voter rolls
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California officials directly contacted YouTube complaining about the
Judicial Watch video. Three days later, the video was deleted from
YouTube.

In Iowa, Judicial Watch obtained 624 pages
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of
records revealing how state officials pressured Twitter and Facebook
to censor posts about the 2020 election. Included in the records were
emails pressing the companies to remove Judicial Watch posts.

The emails show how the state agency successfully worked with Facebook
to censor a Judicial Watch post about Iowa’s management of its voter
rolls:

An Iowa state official emailed Facebook official Rachel Holland
complaining that a Judicial Watch story on Iowa’s management of
voter rolls was “false.” (It wasn’t
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The time stamp on the email is 5:19 p.m.

By 6:11 p.m., Facebook hit back. Facebook factcheckers “have rated
this content false,” Holland wrote the Iowa official, “and we have
applied a filter over this content warning users.”

Read more on Judicial Watch’s Iowa case here
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Read more on the California case here
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Of course it’s not just Judicial Watch in the crosshairs of
companies like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. On Wednesday, Facebook
moved to continue its ban on Donald Trump, now a private citizen.
Judicial Watch has argued that the ban is an affront to First
Amendment protections
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of
free speech, peaceable assembly, and the right to petition the
government.

It’s also an ominous sign that Big Tech censorship is growing—and
growing bolder. “If they can ban President Trump,” warned House
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, “all conservative voices could be
next.”

JUDICIAL WATCH SUES FOR RECORDS OF BIDEN DOGS AFTER BITING INCIDENTS

On March 9, 2021, the White House
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confirmed
that President Biden’s dog Major, an adopted German Shepherd, “did
in fact bite someone at the White House, causing a “minor
injury.” Press secretary Jen Psaki said the dogs, “are still
getting acclimated and accustomed to their new surroundings and new
people.”

On March 30, 2021, the White House
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reported
that, “President Biden’s dog Major on Monday afternoon bit another
employee, who then required medical attention.” The encounter
reportedly took place on the White House South Lawn Monday, March 29.

Americans are understandably curious, and we filed a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) suit against the Department of Homeland
Security for communication between Secret Service officials assigned
to the White House regarding the Biden family dogs (_Judicial Watch v.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
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(No.
1:21-cv-01194)).

We sued after the Secret Service failed to process records in a timely
manner in response to a March 10, 2021, FOIA request seeking:

All records of communications between USSS officials responsible for
protection at the White House regarding the Biden family dogs, named
Champ and Major.
On April 12, 2021, the Secret Service replied to Judicial Watch’s
FOIA request saying that they had identified responsive records which
were being processed but have yet to produce them.

The public has a right to know the details about any incident in which
Secret Service personnel were injured by President Biden’s dog. We
have no doubt that Major and Champ are good dogs but politicians and
bureaucrats can’t be trusted to tell us everything.

Until next week …



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