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	<title> - HEARING ON THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT</title>
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	[House Hearing, 118 Congress]
	[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]





	HEARING ON THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

	=======================================================================

	HEARING

	BEFORE THE

	SELECT SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

	OF THE

	COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

	U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

	ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS

	FIRST SESSION

	__________

	THURSDAY, MARCH 9, 2023

	__________

	Serial No. 118-7

	__________

	Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary


	[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]





	Available via: http://judiciary.house.gov

	______

	U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
	51-505 WASHINGTON : 2023




	COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

	JIM JORDAN, Ohio, Chair

	DARRELL ISSA, California JERROLD NADLER, New York, Ranking
	KEN BUCK, Colorado Member
	MATT GAETZ, Florida ZOE LOFGREN, California
	MIKE JOHNSON, Louisiana SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas
	ANDY BIGGS, Arizona STEVE COHEN, Tennessee
	TOM McCLINTOCK, California HENRY C. ``HANK'' JOHNSON, Jr.,
	TOM TIFFANY, Wisconsin Georgia
	THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky ADAM SCHIFF, California
	CHIP ROY, Texas DAVID N. CICILLINE, Rhode Island
	DAN BISHOP, North Carolina ERIC SWALWELL, California
	VICTORIA SPARTZ, Indiana TED LIEU, California
	SCOTT FITZGERALD, Wisconsin PRAMILA JAYAPAL, Washington
	CLIFF BENTZ, Oregon J. LUIS CORREA, California
	BEN CLINE, Virginia MARY GAY SCANLON, Pennsylvania
	LANCE GOODEN, Texas JOE NEGUSE, Colorado
	JEFF VAN DREW, New Jersey LUCY McBATH, Georgia
	TROY NEHLS, Texas MADELEINE DEAN, Pennsylvania
	BARRY MOORE, Alabama VERONICA ESCOBAR, Texas
	KEVIN KILEY, California DEBORAH ROSS, North Carolina
	HARRIET HAGEMAN, Wyoming CORI BUSH, Missouri
	NATHANIEL MORAN, Texas GLENN IVEY, Maryland
	LAUREL LEE, Florida
	WESLEY HUNT, Texas
	RUSSELL FRY, South Carolina

	------

	SELECT SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

	JIM JORDAN, Ohio, Chair

	DARRELL ISSA, California STACEY PLASKETT, Virgin Islands,
	THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky Ranking Member
	CHRIS STEWART, Utah STEPHEN LYNCH, Massachusetts
	ELISE M. STEFANIK, New York LINDA SANCHEZ, California
	MATT GAETZ, Florida DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Florida
	MIKE JOHNSON, Louisiana GERALD CONNOLLY, Virginia
	KELLY ARMSTRONG, North Dakota JOHN GARAMENDI, California
	W. GREGORY STEUBE, Florida COLIN ALLRED, Texas
	DAN BISHOP, North Carolina SYLVIA GARCIA, Texas
	KAT CAMMACK, Florida DAN GOLDMAN, New York
	HARRIET HAGEMAN, Wyoming

	CHRISTOPHER HIXON, Majority Staff Director
	CAROLINE NABITY, Chief Counsel for Oversight
	AMY RUTKIN, Minority Staff Director & Chief of Staff
	CHRISTINA CALCE, Minority Chief Oversight Counsel
	C O N T E N T S

	----------

	Thursday, March 9, 2023

	Page

	OPENING STATEMENTS

	The Honorable Jim Jordan, Chair of the Select Subcommittee on the
	Weaponization of the Federal Government from the State of Ohio. 1
	The Honorable Stacey Plaskett, Ranking Member of the Select
	Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government
	from the Virgin Islands........................................ 2

	WITNESSES

	Mr. Michael Shellenberger, Journalist, Co-founder, Public, a
	Substack publication
	Oral Testimony................................................. 7
	Prepared Testimony............................................. 10
	Mr. Matthew Taibbi, Independent Journalist
	Oral Testimony................................................. 78
	Prepared Testimony............................................. 80

	LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC. SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING

	All materials submitted for the record by the Select Subcommittee
	on the Weaponization of the Federal Government are listed below 128

	Materials submitted from the Honorable Stephen Lynch, the Select
	Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government
	from the State of Massachusetts, for the record
	An indictment in the U.S. v. The Internet Research Agency,
	U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia
	The Executive Summary to Volume 1 of the Mueller Report
	Materials submitted from the Honorable John Garamendi, a Member
	of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal
	Government from the State of California
	A report entitled, ``Trade-offs between reducing
	misinformation and politically-balanced enforcement on
	social media,'' Working paper, Mohsen Mosleh et al.
	An article entitled, ``False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim
	that Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives,''
	Center for Business and Human Rights, New York University
	Tweets from Ye (Kanye West), submitted by the Honorable Colin
	Allred, a Member of the Select Subcommittee on the
	Weaponization of the Federal Government from the State of Texas
	A report entitled, ``The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry
	Report,'' by the House Permanent Select Committee on
	Intelligence, in coordination with the Committee on Oversight
	and Reform and the Committee on Foreign Affairs, December 2019,
	submitted by the Honorable Dan Goldman, a Member of the Select
	Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government
	from the State of New York
	An email from Clark Humphrey, Executive Office of the Presidency,
	White House Office, January 23, 2021, submitted by the
	Honorable Jim Jordan, Chair of the Select Subcommittee on the
	Weaponization of the Federal Government from the State of Ohio
	A tweet, submitted by the Honorable Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a
	Member of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the
	Federal Government from the State of Florida
	Materials submitted by the Honorable Stacey Plaskett, Ranking
	Member of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the
	Federal Government from the Virgin Islands
	A letter to Mark Zuckerberg from Chad Wolf, the Acting
	Secretary of Homeland Security, June 25, 2020,
	An article entitled, ``Trade-offs between reducing
	misinformation and politically-balanced enforcement on
	social media,'' Working paper, Mohsen Mosleh et al.,
	A letter from David Salvo and Rachael Dean Wilson, Managing
	Director, Alliance for Securing Democracy, March 10, 2023

	APPENDIX

	Statement submitted by the Honorable Gerald E. Connolly, a Member
	of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal
	Government from the State of Virginia


	HEARING ON THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE



	FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

	----------


	Thursday, March 9, 2023

	House of Representatives

	Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government

	Committee on the Judiciary

	Washington, DC

	The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:09 a.m., in
	Room 2141, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Jim Jordan
	[Chair of the Subcommittee] presiding.
	Present: Representatives Jordan, Issa, Massie, Stewart,
	Stefanik, Johnson, Gaetz, Armstrong, Cammack, Hageman,
	Plaskett, Lynch, Sanchez, Wasserman Schultz, Connolly,
	Garamendi, Allred, Garcia, and Goldman.
	Chair Jordan. The Subcommittee will come to order. Without
	objection, the Chair is authorized to declare a recess at any
	time.
	I would ask the gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. Bishop,
	to lead the Committee and those present for the hearing in the
	Pledge of Allegiance.
	All. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States
	of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one
	Nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for
	all.
	Chair Jordan. Welcome, everyone, to the second hearing of
	the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal
	Government. The Chair now recognizes himself for an opening
	statement.
	In the run-up to the 2020 Presidential election, FBI
	Special Agent Elvis Chan, in his deposition in Missouri v.
	Biden, said that he repeatedly, repeatedly informed Twitter and
	other social media platforms of the likelihood of a hack-and-
	leak operation in the run-up to that Presidential election. He
	did it even though there was no evidence. In fact, he said in
	his deposition, that we hadn't seen anything, no intrusions, no
	hack. That he repeatedly told him something was coming.
	Yoel Roth, head of trust and safety at Twitter testified
	that he had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of
	the National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security,
	the FBI, and other folks regarding election security. During
	these weekly meetings, Federal law enforcement agencies
	communicated that they expected a hack-and-leak operation. The
	expectations of the hack and leak operation were discussed
	throughout 2020. He was told they would occur at a period
	shortly before the 2020 Presidential election, likely in
	October. Finally, he said: ``I also learned in these meetings
	that there were rumors that a hack and leak operation would
	involve Hunter Biden.''
	So, what's the government telling? A hack and leak
	operation were coming. How often did the government tell him
	this? Repeatedly for a year. When did the government say it was
	going to happen? October 2020. Who did the government say it
	would involve? Hunter Biden.
	Now think about it. The government had no evidence of any
	intrusions, no evidence of hack and leak, yet for a year they
	tell Twitter that a hack and leak is coming, it's coming in
	October, and it will involve Hunter Biden. No evidence. The FBI
	knows what is going to happen, when it's going to happen, and
	who it's going to involve. Now, that's amazing. That is amazing
	to me.
	Maybe--I mean maybe they get the time right. We're kind of
	used to October surprises every four years. So, maybe they get
	the time right, but they got the time, they got the method, and
	they got the person. That's amazing. It's almost like these
	guys were clairvoyant. How did they know? How did they know?
	Maybe it's because they had the laptop, and they had it for
	a year. They had the laptop, they knew it wasn't hacked, but
	that's not what they told Twitter. They didn't tell Twitter
	that information. Twitter believed, frankly, everything they
	said. In those weekly meetings, the FBI had built a cozy
	relationship with this tech company and others as well, we
	believe. Emails between the FBI and Twitter began with the
	greetings. Hey, Twitter folks. Emails that asked Twitter to
	take down accounts and limit visibility of tweets.
	FBI handed out security clearances to folks at Twitter.
	They communicated with Twitter on this secret teleporter app
	where messages disappear after certain lengths of time. Of
	course, they paid Twitter $3.4 million.
	In addition, on August 6, 2020, the FBI briefed Senators
	Grassley and Johnson. According to the Senators' testimony last
	month in front of this Committee, the briefing was bogus and
	done, so someone could go leak that the briefing had happened
	and undermine the Senators' investigation.
	In September 2020, government-funded think tank gets
	involved. They do a tabletop exercise. The participants include
	The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other mainstream
	media outlets. Facebook is there. Mr. Roth of Twitter is there.
	The organizer was the former CEO of NPR and the former head of
	news at Twitter. Mock exercises hosted by the Aspen Institute.
	The Aspen Institute, which by the way, in 2020, their budget
	was $9.3 million; $5 million from the State Department; $4
	million from USAID. Almost all their budget. Guess the title.
	Guess the title of this exercise. The Aspen Digital Hack and
	Dump Working Group. Guess who the subject was? Guess who the
	subject was? Hunter Biden. That's amazing.
	On October 14, 2020, the New York Post runs a story on the
	Biden laptop, and Twitter takes it down, even though it was
	accurate, and even though it didn't violate Twitter's rules
	of--Twitter's rules. Other social media companies do the same.
	Mainstream press work to downplay and discredit the story.
	Finally, as if on cue, five days later on October 19, 51
	former intel officials signed a letter with the now famous
	sentence: ``The Biden laptop story has all the classic earmarks
	of a Russian information operation.'' Something that was
	absolutely false.
	Our government built a cozy relationship with Big Tech;
	they primed him for a hack-and-leak operation; they funded the
	think tank which further primed Big Tech and big media; they
	leaked information to undermine the good work of two United
	States Senators; and then 51 former intel officials closed the
	deal with their letter.
	Mr. Shellenberger pointed out in his reporting: ``The
	information op was run on us, run on We the People.'' If that's
	not the weaponization of government, I don't know what is. I
	really--I'll get to this in a second--but I want to thank our
	witnesses for being here today. I'll get to this after we allow
	the Ranking Member her opening statement. I'll yield to the
	Ranking Member for an opening statement.
	Ms. Plaskett. Thank you. Before my opening statement, Mr.
	Chair, as a point of order, it's been my understanding that one
	of the witnesses has, within the last half an hour, released
	additional information that the Republicans may, and you as the
	majority, may have been able to review and have information
	about--and if that information is, in fact, going to be used at
	this hearing, I just want the point of order to be recognized
	that the Democrats have not been able to review or see any of
	that information. Will you be using any of the information that
	has recently been released by--excuse me, will you be using any
	of that information?
	Chair Jordan. We'll be using whatever information that our
	staff has put together for us to use at this hearing.
	Ms. Plaskett. You have had that information before this
	hearing began before today?
	Chair Jordan. We use all information that is given to our
	staff, and we will use it to make sure we educate the American
	people on the weaponization--
	Ms. Plaskett. Information that you have not shared with us?
	Chair Jordan. Oh, we think it was posted online with--
	Ms. Plaskett. Within a half--just this half an hour, the
	last 20 minutes. It's not information you want to get to us?
	Chair Jordan. Well, do you want us to get you copy of it,
	because we can make a copy for you?
	Ms. Plaskett. I think we can go online and find a copy. We
	can look on our Twitter account and see it. I just want the
	point of order that you have not shared any of that with us. I
	understand that--
	Chair Jordan. Well.
	Ms. Plaskett. --you may have been looking at this long
	before today's hearing.
	Chair Jordan. We obtained it the same timeframe that was
	posted online.
	Ms. Plaskett. Excuse me, before we continue, is one of your
	colleagues trying to speak to me? Or I think this was a
	conversation between you and me.
	Mr. Issa. I was speaking to a parliamentarian, if you don't
	mind.
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady's time--
	Ms. Plaskett. Oh, OK. OK. All right. Well--
	Chair Jordan. I recognize you for an opening statement.
	Ms. Plaskett. I had a point of order, which I was asking
	you to address.
	Chair Jordan. I answered your question.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. Great. Now, I will get begin my point--my
	opening statement. Three weeks ago, House Oversight had this
	hearing with actual Twitter executives who had actual firsthand
	knowledge about what happened in 2020. That didn't go so well
	for the House Republicans because real evidence showed that
	there wasn't coordination between Twitter and the Federal
	Government as they liked the American people to believe, and
	that all the so-called Twitter files really showed was a
	discussion on content moderation, and that we only got a
	fraction of the discussion.
	So, now we're back again, no surprise. What else have they
	got to talk about? Not what's interested in the American people
	are interested, not what taxpayer dollars have brought us here
	to Washington to do. The Republicans have brought in two of
	Elon Musk's public scribes to release cherry-picked out-of-
	context emails and screen shots designed to promote his chosen
	narrative, Elon Musk's chosen narrative that is now being
	parroted by the Republicans because the Republicans think that
	these witnesses will tell a story that's going to help them out
	politically.
	On Tuesday, the majority released an 18-page report
	claiming to show that the FTC is, quote, ``harassing Twitter.''
	Oh my, poor Twitter, including by seeking information about its
	interactions with individuals before us today. How did the
	report reach this conclusion? By showing two--one, two, single
	paragraphs from a single demand letter, even though the report
	itself makes clear that there were numerous demand letters with
	numerous requests, none of which we've been able to see that
	are more demand letters and more requests of Twitter. In other
	words, the conclusions are based on a fraction of information
	out of context, cherry-picked, surprise, just like the Twitter
	files.
	The majority conveniently forgot to share with the public
	that in May 2022, well before Musk acquired Twitter, the FTC
	had already fined the company 150 million for failing to
	safeguard data, users' data, users, the American people, other
	individuals. It's 150 million users, Twitter had not safeguard
	them.
	Twitter entered into this consent agreement that required
	it to make regular reports to the FTC, and their previous
	consent decree between Twitter and the FTC was entered into in
	2011.
	Elon Musk might not like this requirement, but Twitter had
	issues with FTC long before Musk bought the company, and
	there's nothing political about that. We've asked for the full
	set of documents that Musk must have shared with the
	Republicans on the Committee, but we can draw some logical
	conclusions from what we have been given.
	You know what the Republican report actually shows? Two
	conclusions: First, the FTC has extraordinarily serious
	concerns about Twitter's handling of consumers' data, and that
	there's something going on between congressional Republicans
	and Elon Musk.
	Mr. Chair, Americans can see through this. Musk is helping
	you out politically, and you're going out of your way to
	promote and protect him and to praise him for his work. This
	isn't just a matter of what data was given to these so-called
	journalists before us now. There are many legitimate questions
	about where Musk got the financing to buy Twitter.
	We know for a fact that foreign countries like Qatar, Saudi
	Arabia, and possibly even Russia and China are investors
	presently in Twitter. Do these countries now have access to
	private Twitter user data? What agreements has Elon Musk
	reached with them?
	[Slide.]
	We know how Elon Musk funded the purchase, because it's
	public. Let's look at a slide here. Here's what it shows. Musk
	got $500 million in financing from Binance. That's in highlight
	for you. A crypto exchange platform run by a Chinese
	billionaire. That billionaire has described his funding as a
	small contribution to the cause. I don't know what that cause
	is.
	Musk got $1 billion from Larry Ellison, whose super packs
	spent millions on Republican candidates last cycle, including
	election deniers. Musk got $375 million, highlighted here, from
	Qatar, which has recently been questioned about his lobbying
	practices. Musk got $700 million from Vy Capital, a secretive
	investment fund based in Dubai. Very interesting, as you can
	see down below, the nephew of the Saudi King is Twitter's
	second largest investor at a much larger amount.
	The Chair wants us to think that Elon Musk is the victim.
	The Chair wants us to believe that the Republicans are
	concerned with the Federal Government unfairly going after
	Twitter, and Twitter unfairly taking down conservative posts.
	Just like we did several weeks ago, we're going to show that's
	not what the evidence shows.
	I want to underscore the very real threat posed by Twitter
	files and by the witnesses in front of us today. Here is Yoel
	Roth describing the harassment he and other former Twitter
	employees have faced because of the irresponsible way in which
	the witnesses in front of us and others have released this
	cherry-picked, out-of-context data.
	[Video shown.]
	Ms. Plaskett. Thank you. Mr. Chair, I'm not exaggerating
	when I say that you have called before you two witnesses who
	pose a direct threat to people who oppose them. It's funny when
	people have to go through that.
	Chair Jordan. Crazy is what you're saying?
	Ms. Plaskett. Exactly. This is unacceptable. I'm ready for
	it. I don't know if a lot of other people are. Just as it was
	unacceptable for Kevin McCarthy to provide 41,000 hours of
	sensitive security footage to a biased talking head in an
	effort to rewrite what happened on January 6th. This is a new
	Republican playbook, apparently--
	Mr. Johnson of Louisiana. Mr. Chair.
	Ms. Plaskett. --risking Americans' safety--
	Mr. Johnson of Louisiana. Mr. Chair.
	Ms. Plaskett. --and security to score political points.
	Chair Jordan. Hang on. Hang on.
	Mr. Johnson of Louisiana. The gentlelady's words should be
	struck. We do not accuse witnesses of threatening others. That
	is out of line and outside the rules of this Committee.
	Ms. Plaskett. I'm not striking down that, and I can have an
	opinion about we can do.
	Mr. Johnson of Louisiana. You don't get to determine what's
	struck down.
	You don't get to determine what's struck down.
	Chair Jordan. Well, you do get an opening statement, and
	it's about over.
	Ms. Plaskett. So, let me finish. We know this is because of
	the first hearing the Chair claimed that big government and Big
	Tech colluded to shape and mold the narrative and suppress
	information and censor Americans. This is a false narrative.
	We're engaging in false narratives here, and we are going to
	tell the truth. I yield back.
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady yields back. I would just
	point out the consent decree was in our report. We offered your
	staff also the opportunity to review the FTC letters. You have
	not come over to review those letters. Third, the idea that I
	believe both of these individuals who are getting ready to
	testify, I believe they're both Democrats. The idea that
	journalists who happened to be Democrats.
	Ms. Plaskett. Did you not get that offer at 8 o'clock last
	night?
	Chair Jordan. Your time was--
	Ms. Plaskett. Well, neither of us are in time.
	Chair Jordan. I don't think they're here to help us
	politically. I think they're here to tell us the truth. Oh, by
	the way, the first FTC letter to Twitter after the first set of
	Twitter files, the very first question was, ``Who are the
	journalists you're talking to?'' Who you guys don't care. You
	don't care. You don't want any of the 11 people to see--you
	don't want the American people to see what is happened? The
	full video, transparent--you don't want that, and you don't
	want two journalists who have been named personally by the
	Biden Administration, FTC, in a letter?
	Ms. Plaskett. The Biden Administration is not the FTC.
	Chair Jordan. You're saying they're here to help us.
	They're here to tell their story. Frankly, I think they're
	brave individuals for being willing to come after they've been
	named in a letter from the Biden FTC.
	Ms. Plaskett. Is this your question time now?
	Chair Jordan. No, I'm responding to your ridiculous
	statements you made in your opening statement.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. Well, let's get on with it.
	Chair Jordan. Oh, now, you we want to get on with it--
	Ms. Plaskett. I can say--
	Chair Jordan. --so you can say all the things you want.
	Ms. Plaskett. I've given my opening statement as well as
	you had an opening statement. You said what you needed to say
	in your opening statement, and I as the Ranking Member have
	used my time.
	Chair Jordan. Without objection, all other opening
	statements will be included in the record. We will introduce
	today's witness.
	Matt Taibbi, he's a journalist and author. He's one of the
	authors of the Twitter files. He previously worked for Rolling
	Stone, that right-wing publication, Rolling Stone, where so
	many Republicans work at. He has also written several books
	about American politics and culture. Of course, as I pointed
	out, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out yesterday on the
	front page was named by the FTC.
	Michael Shellenberger is also a journalist, author, and one
	of the authors of the Twitter files. He's also co-founded
	several nonprofits, including Breakthrough Institute,
	Environmental Progress, and the California Peace Coalition,
	another right-wing Republican organization, I'm sure. His work
	often focuses on crime and drug policy, homelessness, and the
	climate. We welcome our witnesses and thank them for appearing
	today.
	We will begin by swearing you in. Will you please stand and
	raise your right hand.
	Do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that
	testimony you are about to give is truth and correct to the
	best of your knowledge, information, and belief, so help you
	God?
	Let the record show both witnesses have answered in the
	affirmative. Thank you, and be seated, please.
	Chair Jordan. We will now start with Mr. Taibbi. You guys,
	I think, understand--you want to go, Mr. Shellenberger? We can
	go with Mr. Shellenberger. We'll start with Mr. Shellenberger.
	You understand how it works. You get five minutes. Make sure
	you hit the microphone so we can all hear. When it gets to
	yellow, it means just like you would expect time to start
	winding up. When it gets to red, it's time to stop. We'll be a
	little bit lenient on the time.
	Mr. Shellenberger, you are recognized for your opening
	statement.

	STATEMENT OF MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

	Mr. Shellenberger. Chair Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett,
	Members of the Committee, thank you very much for inviting my
	testimony.
	In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower
	warned of, quote, ``The acquisition of unwarranted influence by
	the military industrial complex.'' Eisenhower feared that the
	size and power of the complex, or cluster of government
	contractors in the Defense Department would, quote, ``Endanger
	our liberties or democratic processes.''
	How did he mean that? Through, quote, ``domination of the
	Nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations,
	and the power of money,'' he feared public policy would become
	the captive of a scientific technological elite. Eisenhower's
	fears were well-founded.
	Today American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the
	growth and power of a censorship industrial complex run by
	America's scientific and technological elite which endangers
	our liberties and democracy.
	I'm grateful for this opportunity to offer this testimony
	and sound the alarm over the shocking and disturbing emergence
	of State-sponsored censorship in the United States of America.
	The Twitter files, State attorneys general lawsuits, and
	investigative reporters have revealed a large and growing
	network of government agencies, academic institutions, and
	nongovernmental organizations that are actively censoring
	American citizens, often without their knowledge on a range of
	issues.
	I do not know how much of the censorship is coordinated
	beyond what we have been able to document, and I will not
	speculate. I recognize that the law allows Facebook, Twitter,
	and other private companies to moderate content on their
	platforms. I support the right of government to communicate
	with the public, including to dispute inaccurate information.
	Government officials have been caught repeatedly pushing
	social media platforms to censor disfavored users and content.
	Often, these acts of censorship threaten the legal protection
	social media companies need to exist, Section 230.
	If government officials are directing or facilitating such
	censorship, this one law professor, it raises serious First
	Amendment questions. It is axiomatic that the government cannot
	do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly.
	Moreover, we know that the U.S. Government has funded
	organizations that pressure advisors to boycott news media
	organizations and social media platforms that refuse to censor
	and/or spread disinformation, including alleged conspiracy
	theories.
	The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of
	Washington, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research
	Lab, and Graphika have all inadequately disclosed ties to the
	Department of Defense, the CIA, and other intelligence
	agencies. They work with multiple U.S. Government agencies to
	institutionalize censorship research and advocacy within dozens
	of other universities and think thanks.
	It is important to understand how these groups function.
	They are not publicly engaging with their opponents in an open
	exchange of ideas. They aren't asking for national debate over
	the limits of the First Amendment. Rather, they are creating
	blacklists of disfavored people and then pressuring, cajoling,
	and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify,
	and even ban the people on those lists.
	The Censorship Industrial Complex combines established
	methods of psychological manipulation, some developed by the
	U.S. military during the Global War on Terror, with highly
	sophisticated tools from computer science, including artificial
	intelligence. The complex's leaders are driven by the fear that
	the internet and social media platforms empower populist,
	alternative, and fringe personalities and views, which they
	regard as destabilizing. Federal Government officials,
	agencies, and contractors have gone from fighting ISIS
	recruiters and Russian bots to censoring and deplatforming
	ordinary Americans and disfavored public figures.
	Importantly, the bar for bringing in military-grade
	government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has
	moved from, quote, ``countering terrorism'' to, quote,
	``countering extremism'' to countering simple misinformation,
	otherwise known as being wrong on the internet. The government
	no longer needs a predicate of calling you a terrorist or an
	extremist to deploy government resources to counter your
	political activity. The only predicated it needs is simply the
	assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is
	wrong.
	These efforts extend to influencing and even directing
	conventional news media organizations. Since 1971, when The
	Washington Post and The New York Times elected to publish
	classified Pentagon papers about the war in Vietnam,
	journalists have understood that we have a professional
	obligation to report on leaked documents whose contents are in
	the public interest. Yet, in 2020, the Aspen Institute and
	Stanford's Cyber Policy Center urged journalists to, quote,
	``Break the Pentagon Papers principle,'' and not cover leaked
	information to prevent the spread of disinformation.
	Government-funded censors frequently invoke the prevention
	of real-world harm to justify their demands for censorship. The
	censors define harm far more expansively than the Supreme Court
	does.
	Increasingly, the censors say their goal is to restrict
	information that delegitimizes governmental, industrial, and
	news media organizations. That mandate is so sweeping that it
	could easily censor criticism from any part of the status quo
	from elected officials, to institutions, to laws.
	Congress should immediately cutoff funding to the censors
	and investigate their activities. It should mandate instant
	reporting of all conversations between social media executives,
	government employees, and government contractors concerning
	content moderation. Finally, Congress should limit the broad
	permission given to social media platforms to censor,
	deplatform, and spread propaganda. Thank you very much.
	[The prepared statement of Mr. Shellenberger follows:]

	GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


	Chair Jordan. I thank the gentleman for his opening
	statement.
	Mr. Taibbi, you are now recognized for five minutes.
	Mr. Taibbi. Chair Jordan.
	Chair Jordan. Hit that, Mr. Taibbi.

	STATEMENT OF MATTHEW TAIBBI

	Mr. Taibbi. Chair Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett, Members
	of the Select Committee, thank you for having me today. My name
	is Matt Taibbi. I've been a reporter for 30 years and a staunch
	advocate of the First Amendment. Much of that time was spent at
	Rolling Stone Magazine.
	Ranking Member Plaskett, I'm not a so-called journalist. I
	have won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for
	independent journalism, and I've written 10 books, including
	four The New York Times bestsellers. I'm now the editor of the
	online magazine Racket on the independent platform, Substack.
	I'm here today because of a series of events that began
	late last year when I received a note from a source online. It
	read: ``Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what
	censorship and manipulation was going on at Twitter?''
	A week later, the first of what became known as the Twitter
	files reports came out. To say these attracted intense public
	interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a
	Vegas slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage
	of the Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million
	impressions and 30 million engagements.
	It wasn't until a week after the first report, after
	Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other researchers joined
	the search of the files that we started to grasp the
	significance of this story.
	The original promise of the internet was that it might
	democratize the exchange of information globally. A free
	internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information
	flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of
	government everywhere.
	What we found in the files was a sweeping effort to reverse
	that promise and use machine learning and other tools to turn
	the internet into an instrument of censorship and social
	control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be
	playing a lead role.
	We saw the first hint of information communications between
	Twitter executives before the 2020 election, when we read
	things like, ``flagged by DHS,'' or, ``please see attached
	report from FBI for potential misinformation.'' This would be
	attached to an Excel spreadsheet with a long list of names,
	whose accounts were often suspended shortly after.
	Again, Ranking Member Plaskett, I would note that the
	evidence of Twitter-government relationship includes lists of
	tens of thousands of names on both the left and right. The
	people affected include Trump supporters, but also left-leaning
	sites like Consortium and Truth Out, the leftist South American
	Channel Telesur, the Yellow Vest Movement. That, in fact, is a
	key point of the Twitter files; that is neither a left nor
	right issue.
	Following the trail of communications between Twitter and
	the Federal Government across tens of thousands of emails led
	to a series of revelations.
	Mr. Chair, we summarized and submitted them to the
	Committee in the form of a new Twitter files spread which was
	also released to the public this morning.
	We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies
	developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests
	from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the
	HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.
	For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were
	perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same thing,
	including Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership, Newsguard,
	the Global Disin-
	formation Index, and many others, many taxpayer-funded.
	A focus of this fast-growing network, as Mike noted, is
	making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations,
	or sympathies are deemed misinformation, disinformation, or
	malinformation. That last term is just a euphemism for true but
	inconvenient. Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of
	digital McCarthyism.
	Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter
	for deamplification or deplatforming, but to firms like PayPal,
	digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like
	GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-
	abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul
	of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, and algorithmic judge.
	As someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this
	mechanism for punishment and deprivation without due process is
	horrifying.
	Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which
	should be the people's last line of defense in such cases.
	Instead of investigating these groups, journalists
	partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account
	right away, government agencies and NGO's would call reporters
	for The New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who
	in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not
	yet been taken.
	Effectively, news media became an arm of a State-sponsored,
	thought-policing system.
	I'm running out of time, so I'll just sum up and say, it's
	just not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is, however,
	possible becoming technologically possible to instantly define
	and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is
	what we're looking at. This is a grave threat to people of all
	political persuasions.
	The First Amendment and American population accustomed to
	the right to speak is the best defense left against Censorship
	Industrial Complex. If the latter can knock over our first and
	most important constitutional guarantee, these groups will have
	no series opponent left anywhere.
	If there's anything that Twitter files show, it's that
	we're in danger of losing this most precious right, without
	which all democratic rights are impossible.
	Thank you for the opportunity to appear, and I'd be happy
	to answer any questions from the Committee.
	[The prepared statement of Mr. Taibbi follows:]

	GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

	Chair Jordan. Thank you, Mr. Taibbi. We appreciate both of
	your opening statements. The Chair now recognizes the gentleman
	from Louisiana, Mr. Johnson, for five minutes of questions.
	Mr. Johnson of Louisiana. Gentlemen, thank you both for
	being here. It is not surprising that the minority is already
	attacking you in its opening statement. We apologize to both of
	you. You shouldn't be treated that way.
	Some of the defenders of Big Tech and the Biden
	Administration, as we know, have worked very hard to cast
	doubts on legitimacy of your reporting. Some have gone so far
	to State it's irrelevant if Twitter was suppressing speech in
	coordination with the Federal Government.
	This morning, we saw a stunning display of their attack of
	your character. We shouldn't be surprised. This is what the
	defenders of big government corruption do. This is the
	playbook. They destroy the messenger. We just saw it here on
	live television, and everybody can see it for themselves, and
	the whistleblowers, of course, as well.
	Look, that is what we know. What you've documented
	carefully in the Twitter files are a couple of key facts. You
	will hear--the people will hear a lot of things today, but this
	is what we need to know. The Federal Government from Democratic
	Members of Congress, to intelligence agencies, including the
	FBI, used Twitter and other social media companies to censor
	American's speech. If the alarm bells are not going off, then
	you're not paying attention.
	Over the past three years, documents show, they prove what
	you guys have uncovered here. There's communication between
	Twitter and the FBI. It was constant. It was persuasive.
	Twitter was basically an FBI subsidiary before Elon Musk took
	it over. the Twitter files revealed that by 2020, Twitter was
	engaged in open information sharing with the intelligence
	community. Now we know there were many intelligence agencies
	apparently involved in this. The FBI pressured Twitter to act
	on election-related tweets, leading up to the 2022 election. Of
	course, it did it in 2020. Twitter dutifully censored content
	as a result.
	Twitter executives restricted accounts, they censored
	speech, they conflicted with the left's narrative. Twitter has
	used its internal tools to control and manipulate--considered--
	speech considered misinformation. Who was determining that? It
	was the government bureaucrats.
	Documents show that Twitter used visibility filtering to
	restrict certain accounts and posts and removed people from the
	platform altogether. the Twitter files should be a matter of
	bipartisan concern for every Member of Congress and every
	American citizen, because it is a bedrock principle of our
	constitutional system that the government does not get to
	decide what speech is acceptable or true.
	Under the First Amendment, Americans have a right to speak
	freely regardless of whether their speech upsets the preferred
	narrative. In fact, that's when it needs the most vigorous
	protection. Everybody on the left used to believe in that, or
	at least they purported to. Government and media fact checkers
	frequently get things wrong.
	The American people can't and shouldn't rely on so-called
	experts to be the arbiters of truth, disinformation boards, and
	the like. It doesn't what political party you're in, government
	should not suppress important debates and public discourse.
	Gentlemen, let me start with Mr. Taibbi. You have a long
	award-winning journalist career. You've just highlighted
	decades of experience reporting on some of the most complex and
	important issues of our time. Where do you rate your reporting
	on the Twitter files among your whole body of work throughout
	your career? How serious is this?
	Mr. Taibbi. Well, first, Mr. Congressman, thank you for the
	question. I would say I spent 10 years covering the aftermath
	of the 2008 financial crisis. That was, obviously, a very
	serious issue. This Twitter files story and what we're looking
	at now and what we're investigating now, I don't think there's
	any comparison. This is by far the most serious thing that I've
	ever looked at, and it's certainly the mostly grave story that
	I have ever work on personally.
	Mr. Johnson of Louisiana. I want to ask you both the same
	question, and that is, first, has anyone from the Federal
	Government contacted you, during the course of this
	investigation or since you've reported on Twitter files? Now
	two, who do you think is the most egregious Federal Government
	agencies involved in this censorship exercise? Let's start with
	Mr. Shellenberger.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Thank you, Congressman. I have not been
	contacted by anybody in the Biden Administration relating to
	this topic. I would like to echo what Matt just said. This is--
	I've never worked on an issue where so frequently while doing
	it I just had chills go up my spine because of what I was
	seeing happening. I never thought in my own country that
	freedom of speech would be threatened in this way, and it's
	just frightening when you get into it.
	The most recent--our most recent discoveries--I mean, you
	understand the processes that we first raised a bunch of
	concerns around the way Twitter, pre-Elon Musk was censoring
	people and creating blacklists. Very quickly, we discovered
	that we had FBI agents basically--and other government
	officials demanding that Twitter take certain actions. We now
	know that the Department of Homeland Services which has had--
	what's that?
	Mr. Taibbi. Security?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Security. Sorry. Department of Homeland
	Security had tried to create a disinformation board. That went
	away after public backlash. We now realize that they have this
	other enterprise, and they have been building out basically
	mechanisms to proliferate a Censorship Industrial Complex
	around the country to censor on a whole range of issues. So,
	you've seen this censorship industry go from, ``Well, we're
	just fighting ISIS,'' to ``Well, we're just fighting Russian
	disinformation bots,'' to, ``Well, now we need to fight
	domestic misinformation,'' which was just saying we need to
	fight against people who are saying things we disagree with
	online. That's all that means. I mean, it's not a slippery
	slope. It's an immediate leap into a terrifying mechanism that
	I--we only see in totalitarian societies of attempting to gain
	control over what the social media platforms are allowing. So,
	yes, for me it's just--it starts at DHS, but we basically see
	almost every government agency involved in this.
	Mr. Johnson of Louisiana. It's frightening. I'm out of
	time. I yield back.
	Chair Jordan. The gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Lynch,
	is recognized.
	Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I do need to correct the
	record. So, there's been the suggestion here that the FBI and
	other government agencies pressured employees at Twitter to
	validate these theories of foreign influence. When we had Mr.
	Roth, who was the--Yoel Roth, who is the former global head of
	trust and safety at Twitter, so we asked Twitter if there was
	pressure applied. Mr. Roth said, ``No, I would not agree with
	that.'' The FBI--this is his quote,

	The FBI was quite care`ful and quite consistent to request
	review of the accounts, but not to cross the line into
	advocating for Twitter to take any particular action.

	So, that's what Twitter says about the actions of the FBI vis-
	a-vis Twitter.
	Mr. Taibbi, in 2019, Special Counsel Robert Mueller
	unequivocally found that the Internet Research Agency, owned by
	Yevgeny Prigozhin, the same oligarch who runs the Wagner Group,
	carried out an extensive social media disinformation campaign
	to help then-candidate Donald Trump and to hurt Hillary
	Clinton. He also found that the Russian intelligence interfered
	with the 2016 election via a hack-and-release campaign,
	damaging to the Clinton campaign. These particular findings
	came on the heels of the unanimous assessment, on the part of
	United States' 18 intelligence agencies that Russian President
	Putin, quote, ``ordered an influenced campaign in 2016 aimed at
	the Presidential election,'' closed quote.
	They also followed the release of a bipartisan, Senate
	Intelligence Committee report, finding that Russia and Vladimir
	Putin engaged in, and I quote, ``aggressive, multifaceted
	effort to influence the U.S. Presidential election.''
	So, Mr. Taibbi, do you believe that the Russians and their
	oligarch-controlled Internet Research Agency interfered in the
	2016 election via this social media disinformation campaign? Do
	you believe that?
	Mr. Taibbi. Mr. Congressman, my disagreement with the
	issue--
	Mr. Lynch. Well, I think this is basically a yes-or-no
	question. Either you think so or you don't. I don't have a lot
	of time, so--
	Mr. Taibbi. OK. Well, then I'm going to answer not in the
	sense that you're putting it.
	Mr. Lynch. OK.
	Mr. Taibbi. I think all countries engaging in offensive
	information operations, the question is scale.
	Mr. Lynch. Do you believe that the Russians are engaging in
	hacking? Reclaiming my time. That's how it works on now. I'll
	ask the questions, and you try to provide an answer if you can.
	Voice. You have to allow him to answer.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. The gentleman is out of question and
	should not be interrupting a Member asking a question on our
	side, Mr. Chair.
	Mr. Lynch. Reclaiming my time from everyone. Do you believe
	that Russia engaged in a hack-and-release claim damaging to the
	Clinton campaign back in 2016? Again--
	Mr. Taibbi. I don't know, and I would say it's irrelevant.
	Mr. Lynch. Let me ask Mr. Shellenberger. These are pretty
	easy questions. It's just whether you believe it or not.
	Mr. Shellenberger, the same question, do you believe that
	the Russian oligarch-controlled internet research agency
	interfered in the 2016 election?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I think that they tried to.
	Mr. Lynch. OK. Fair enough.
	Mr. Shellenberger, do you believe that the Russians engaged
	in a hack-and-release campaign with respect to the damaging
	information they released regarding the Clinton campaign?
	Mr. Shellenberger. To the best of my awareness, that is
	what happened, yes.
	Mr. Lynch. OK. Fair enough. Thank you.
	Mr. Shellenberger. That's the not the same thing as
	influence.
	Mr. Lynch. I understand. I understand.
	Mr. Taibbi. Also, that material was true.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Lynch. I think--look, let me introduce a couple of
	documents just to reinforce that. We've got--
	Mr. Taibbi. That is not a legitimate predicate for
	censorship.
	Mr. Lynch. Reclaiming my time.
	Mr. Taibbi. Sure.
	Mr. Lynch. The gentleman is out of order.
	So, Mr. Chair, I will ask unanimous consent to enter the
	indictment in the U.S. v. The Internet Research Agency, U.S.
	District Court of the District of Columbia, No. 118-32. I would
	also ask to enter into the record the executive summary to
	volume 1 of the Mueller Report which states: In March 2016, the
	GRU began hacking--this is a Russian agency--began hacking the
	email accounts of the Clinton campaign, volunteers and
	employees, including campaign Chair John Podesta. GRU later
	released additional materials through the organization
	WikiLeaks. The Presidential campaign of Donald Trump showed
	interest in WikiLeaks releases of the document and welcomed
	their potential damage to candidate Clinton. So, I have
	introduced these documents.
	Chair Jordan. Without objection.
	Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I've introduced these
	documents, but it's clear to me that Russia's use of social
	media to interfere in the 2016 election created abundant reason
	for social media platforms to be concerned--
	Chair Jordan. The gentleman's time has expired. Without
	objection, these documents are now entered into the record. We
	now recognize the gentleman from California, Mr. Issa, for five
	minutes.
	Mr. Issa. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'd to continue along in a
	sense the line we've been on just now. Mr. Taibbi, Mr.
	Shellenberger, I'll ask both of you, is it fair to say Russia
	is a bad actor who is trying to do everything they can to
	undermine confidence in the U.S. Government and in our form of
	democracy?
	Mr. Taibbi. I think that's a fair statement.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Issa. OK. Are you familiar with the organization in
	Europe, the Global Engagement Center?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Taibbi. Well, it's an American--
	Mr. Issa. State Department, I'm sorry. Are you familiar
	with the Global Engagement Center's use of European and other
	sources--
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Issa. --to, in fact, determine where Twitter files
	should or shouldn't be, if you will, taken down thousands of
	names and Twitter files, correct?
	Mr. Taibbi. I'm not sure that Global Engagement Center is
	taking down Twitter files. I actually wasn't aware of that. I'm
	sorry.
	Mr. Issa. Well, Twitter and the FBI have used this
	organization and their funding--let me go on to another,
	another--stay on the path I was on.
	You commented that the scale mattered. OK. Would you
	elaborate on scale mattering in the attempt to undermine free
	speech?
	Mr. Taibbi. Absolutely. So, a great example of this is a
	report that the Global Engagement Center sent to Twitter and to
	members of the media and other platforms about what they called
	the pillars of Russian disinformation. Now, part of this report
	is what you would call traditional, hardcore, intelligence-
	gathering where they made a reason evidence-based case that
	certain sites were linked to Russian influence or linked to the
	Russian Government.
	In addition to that, however, they also said that sites
	that, quote, ``generate their own momentum,'' and have opinions
	that are in line with those accounts are part of a propaganda
	ecosystem. Now, this is just another word for guilt by
	association. This is the problem with the whole idea of trying
	to identify which accounts are actually the Internet Research
	Agency and which ones are just people who follow those accounts
	or retweeted them.
	Twitter initially did not find more than a handful of IRA
	accounts. It wasn't until they got into an argument with Senate
	Select Intelligence Committee that they came back with a
	different answer.
	Mr. Issa. OK. So, scale matters, but let me go through a
	couple of quick questions that I think are part of the reason
	that we have this Select Committee. This country has political
	parties and people from the--what might call the extreme left
	and extreme right. Even Congress has people that might be
	considered outside the main street of Republican and Democratic
	thinking. Those people speak regularly, and they have since our
	founding. Is that correct?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Issa. The ACLU and journalists almost always support
	their right to say what they believe, even if you disagree.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Absolutely.
	Mr. Issa. Our Constitution says we will make no law to
	restrain exactly that kind of free speech.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Issa. That includes people who promote the idea that we
	should redistribute all wealth in a communist-type way. As a
	matter of fact, we still have a Communist Party in the United
	States. Isn't that correct?
	Mr. Shellenberger. It is.
	Mr. Issa. So, the limit of free speech historically has
	been incitement to violence or anarchy, the actual overthrow of
	a government. Anything other than that is historically covered
	by the First Amendment?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Issa. So, when we look at the very nature of these--the
	State Department funding to affect domestic U.S. speech, was
	that speech outside the legal bounds? Did it call for
	insurrection or other criminal activities that would destroy
	our government?
	Mr. Shellenberger. No. I mean, we did not--I mean, I'm not
	saying--we're not saying that didn't happen, but we're
	describing people having political arguments online.
	Mr. Issa. Right. So, let me just--because my time is
	limited like everyone. So, it suffices to say that every bit of
	the speech, or virtually every bit of the speech, whether
	foreign or domestic online, fell within the normal protections
	of the First Amendment, and the very act of Federal dollars
	being used to stifle that speech is, in fact, historically what
	we would consider an indictment against the First Amendment
	protection?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Correct.
	Mr. Issa. That is why we have this Subcommittee. That is
	why we're here today. Thank you.
	Chair Jordan. I thank the gentleman. A great point. I now
	recognize the gentlelady from Florida for five minutes.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
	Mr. Taibbi, I want to ask about journalistic ethics and
	information sources. The Society of Professional Journalists
	Code of Ethics asserts that journalists should avoid political
	activities that can compromise integrity or credibility. Being
	a Republican witness today certainly cast a cloud over your
	objectivity.
	A deeper concern that I have relates to ethics of how
	journalists receive and present certain information.
	Journalists should avoid accepting spoon-fed and cherry-picked
	information if it's likely to be slanted, incomplete, or
	designed to reach a foregone, easily disputed, or invalid
	conclusion. Would you agree with that?
	Mr. Taibbi. I think it depends.
	[Slide.]
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Really? You wouldn't agree that a
	journalist should avoid spoon-fed, cherry-picked information if
	it's likely to be slanted, incomplete, or designed to reach a
	foregone, easily disputed, or invalid conclusion.
	Mr. Taibbi. Congresswoman, I've done probably a dozen
	stories involving whistleblowers. Every reported story that
	I've ever done across three decades involve sources who have
	motives. Every time you do a story, you're making a balancing
	test.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. OK. Reclaiming my time. Thank you
	very much.
	Mr. Taibbi. OK.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. I ask you this because before you
	became Elon Musk's handpicked journalist--and pardon the
	oxymoron--you stated this on Joe Rogan's podcast about being
	spoon-fed information. I quote, ``I think that's true of any
	kind of journalism.'' You will see it behind me here.
	[Slide.]
	I think that's true of any kind of journalism. Once you
	start getting handed things, then you've lost. They have you at
	that point, and you got to get out of that habit. You just
	can't cross that line.
	Do you still believe what you told Mr. Rogan? Yes or no?
	Yes or no?
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. OK. Now, you crossed that line with
	the Twitter files.
	Mr. Taibbi. No--
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Elon Musk--it's my time. Please do
	not interrupt me. Elon Musk spoon-fed you his cherry-picked
	information which you must have suspected promotes a slanted
	viewpoint, or at the very least, generates another right-wing
	conspiracy theory. You violated your own standard, and you
	appeared to have benefited from it.
	Before the release of the emails, in August of last year,
	you had 661,000 Twitter followers. After the Twitter files,
	your followers doubled, and now it's three times what it was
	last August. I imagine your Substack leadership, which is a
	subscription, increased significantly because of the work that
	you did for Elon Musk.
	Now, I'm not asking you to put a dollar figure on it, but
	it's quite obvious that you've profited from the Twitter files.
	You hit the jackpot on that Vegas slot machine to which you
	referred. That's true, isn't it?
	Mr. Taibbi. I've also reinvested a lot--
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. No, no, no, no. Is it true that you
	have profited since you were the recipient of the Twitter
	files; you've made money? Yes or no?
	Mr. Taibbi. I think it's probably a wash, honestly.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Nope. You have made money that you
	did not have before, correct?
	Mr. Taibbi. I've also spent money that I didn't have
	before.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. OK.
	Mr. Taibbi. I just hired a whole group of people.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Patently obvious answer. Reclaiming
	my time. Attention is a powerful drug: Eyeballs, money,
	prominence, attention, all of it appoints to problems with
	accuracy and credibility, and the larger points, which is
	social media companies are not biased against conservatives. If
	anything, they ignored their own policies by allowing Trump and
	other MAGA extremists to post incessant lies, endangering
	public safety, and even our democracy. Hypocrisy is the
	hangover of an addiction to attention.
	Now, I want to point out another alleged finding from the
	Twitter files. Mr. Shellenberger, you've referenced several
	times this $3.4 million that the FBI paid to Twitter in 2020
	that was referenced in general counsel Jim Baker's email. I
	first want to confirm that nowhere in the email does Baker say
	that the money was paid to censor information, take down posts,
	suspend accounts, or do anything relating to content
	moderation. Is that correct?
	Mr. Shellenberger. It is.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Thank you. Honest reporting would
	have explained that the $3.4 million was paid to release
	information, not censor it. One of my colleagues on this panel
	repeated your distortions and told Americans this reimbursement
	was used to, quote, ``censor certain stories.'' That's a flat-
	out lie.
	Mr. Shellenberger, are you aware of Section 2706 under the
	Stored Communications Act. It says when social media companies
	comply with subpoenas, warrants, or court orders, it cost them
	money, so they get reimbursed. The FBI makes these requests and
	reimbursements to discover evidence that runs relevant to a
	criminal investigation. Let me repeat that. The FBI makes these
	requests to help catch the bad guys. That helps keep child
	predators off social media sites. It helps keep violent
	criminals off our streets.
	I support the FBI and our law enforcement agencies. It
	would be nice if our Republican colleagues did the same and not
	fabricate explanations for pavements that are designed for
	clear purposes in Federal law. My time is just about wrapped
	up.
	Mr. Shellenberger. May I respond?
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. The truth is that social media
	companies are unregulated monoliths. They pose danger to
	individuals, they allow posts that bring harm, and that's the
	bottom line that this--the other side will not tell you. I
	yield back the balance of my time.
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady had no time to yield back, but
	I will let the gentleman, Mr. Shellenberger, respond. I would
	also point out that I did not say what the FBI paid Twitter
	for.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Mr. Chair, I--
	Chair Jordan. All I said was they paid Twitter $3.4
	million.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Mr. Chair, point of order, I didn't
	ask Mr. Shellenberger a question.
	Chair Jordan. Yes, but the witness wants to respond. The
	witness has been invited as our guest, and frankly they've been
	attacked by the Federal Government.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Well, please do that--
	Chair Jordan. I'm going to let Mr. Shellenberger answer
	that before recognizing Mr. Bishop.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. So, are you going to do that as we
	move down the line of questioners.
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady has not been recognized. You
	had your five minutes. Frankly, I think that's at the
	discretion of the Chair.
	Mr. Shellenberger, you can respond briefly.
	Mr. Shellenberger. I'll be brief, which is that my
	understanding from those files is that Twitter had decided not
	to take that money until recently. So, if you read that email,
	what Stasha, I believe the person that sent it, is saying is
	that they started taking money after previously not taking it.
	I believe that the reason that they had not taken it earlier
	was because they did not want that financial conflict, clouding
	their relationship.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Chair, the money is payment under
	Federal law--
	Mr. Bishop. She's out of order.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. --so that they can cut costs--
	Chair Jordan. The gentleman from North Carolina, Mr.
	Bishop, is recognized for five minutes.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. --for material that they've been
	used asked for.
	Mr. Bishop. I thank the gentleman. Mr. Taibbi, would you
	care to--I'm down here on this end, sir. Would you care to
	respond to the attack on your ethics? You weren't really given
	an opportunity to answer. If you'd be brief. I've got a bunch
	of stuff I want to ask you as well.
	Mr. Taibbi. Sure, just quickly. That moment on the Joe
	Rogan show, I was actually recounting a section from Seymour
	Hersh's book, ``Reporter,'' where he described a scene where
	the CIA gave him a story, and he was very uncomfortable. He
	said that I who had always gotten the secrets was being handed
	the secrets.
	Look, again, I've done lots of whistleblower stories.
	There's always a balancing test that you make when you're given
	material, and you're always balancing newsworthiness versus the
	motives of your sources. In this case, the newsworthiness
	clearly outweighed any other considerations. I think everybody
	else who worked on the project agreed.
	Mr. Bishop. Doesn't it seem like any reporter who breaks a
	blockbuster story is going to get attention, and there may be
	even financial consequences that follow? It seems like as
	surely as the night follows the day, that's the case, right?
	Mr. Taibbi. That is true. Although, I would like to clear
	up some things that have been misrepresented. Not one of us has
	actually been paid to do any of this work. We've all traveled
	on our own. We've hired our personnel on our own. I've just
	hired a pretty large team to investigate this issue--
	Mr. Bishop. Yes.
	Mr. Taibbi. --out of my own pocket.
	Mr. Bishop. The fact that the attempt comes from the dais
	across the aisle to smear you, frankly, I think liberals, if I
	understand that--in your background, you're both good liberals,
	and come in and the Democrats' hostility to what you have
	undertaken is astonishing to behold, but it's part of the
	picture we're seeing.
	In Twitter files No. 15, Mr. Taibbi, you exposed Hamilton
	68, a website associated with a German Marshall Fund that
	purported in a dashboard to identify Russian bot networks and
	became ubiquitously cited by media to identify media stories or
	narratives that supposedly flowed from Russia, from Russia.
	You showed that the front man for Hamilton 68 was Clint
	Watts, a former FBI agent. At Twitter, the trust and safety
	executives were ridiculing Hamilton 68 for the ludicrous
	identifications that it was making, which they could reverse
	engineer and figure out who those accounts were. Then in
	Twitter files No. 17, after disclosing Mr. Watts identity, you
	disclosed that J.M. Berger is the creator of Hamilton 68. Guess
	what? He was a Federal contractor, right?
	Mr. Taibbi. He was, yes. He denies that he worked on it for
	the Global Engagement Center, but he was an employee of theirs
	until about a month before the dashboard's released.
	Mr. Bishop. Just a month before what he said, I believe
	publicly, that the dashboard was the product of three years'
	work.
	So, doesn't it beg sort of the intriguing question whether
	the creation of this fraudulent Hamilton 68 dashboard was
	effectively underwritten by government funding?
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes, I think that's a good question. Certainly,
	the German Marshall Fund, which is the NGO that is at the top
	of the chain in this organization, it's German Marshall Fund,
	then the Alliance for Securing Democracy, and then Hamilton 68.
	They're a Federal contractor. They received over $1 million
	from the Department of Defense. They're the board of the
	Alliance For Securing Democracy, has a former acting head of
	the CIA, former deputy head of the NSA, a Former Chief of the
	DHS on it.
	Mr. Bishop. I want to make it--and the bigger point is hard
	because the example sometimes starts making it.
	I want to introduce you to--or introduce to somebody else.
	I think you've mentioned it in some of your writings. Richard
	Stengel. Do you know who that is?
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes. He's the former--the first head of the
	Global Engagement Center.
	Mr. Bishop. I want the American people to hear from him for
	30 seconds.
	[Audio recording played.]
	Mr. Bishop. Every country does it. Every country does
	propaganda, and they have to do it to their own people, is what
	Mr. Stengel said.
	If I understand correctly, he was the head of the Global
	Engagement Center at its creation, right?
	Mr. Taibbi. He was. In his book ``Information Wars,'' there
	are a number of passages where he talks about creating a whole-
	of-government solution to the information problem. He hastened
	to say that he didn't want to create a, quote, ``information
	ministry.'' What he was describing roughly approximates that.
	Mr. Bishop. In the half minute I've got left, he also was
	associated with Hamilton 68, right?
	Mr. Taibbi. The Global Engagement Center certainly had ties
	to Hamilton 68, yes.
	Mr. Bishop. I think it's closer than that. That'll come
	out.
	Mr. Taibbi. OK. Well, I'd be anxious to hear that.
	Mr. Bishop. I hope I'll get yielded a minute or two from
	somebody else down the way.
	There's all sorts of stuff to disclose. This Committee has
	to uncover, not that single instance, but this system that you
	have described. This is the hope that Americans have to set
	this right, this Committee. That hostility shows what we're up
	against. It's not three pillars to the system; it is four.
	You're seeing the left move to crush you and anybody else who
	tries to expose this.
	I yield.
	Chair Jordan. I thank the gentleman for his great five
	minutes, and would now yield to the gentleman from Virginia,
	Mr. Connolly.
	Mr. Connolly. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
	I don't know what to say after that last one.
	We're fellow Americans and we're elected officials. We're
	trying to get at the truth, and we're trying to participate in
	the process of getting at the truth.
	Mr. Taibbi, you have said that this isn't really a matter
	of right or left, that there are lots of different ideological
	colorations involved in the Twitter files. Is that roughly,
	correct?
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes.
	Mr. Connolly. Mr. Shellenberger, you would agree with that?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Connolly. So, when you release information, have you
	released any information of, for example, right-wing elements
	or the Trump White House attempting to moderate content at
	Twitter?
	Mr. Taibbi. No, not the Trump White House per se, although
	I did report initially in the first Twitter files that the
	Trump White House had made and requested and had been honored.
	Mr. Connolly. Mr. Shellenberger?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I did not find that.
	Mr. Connolly. You haven't found it.
	So, we had a hearing the other day on Twitter, and we had
	four witnesses, three for the majority, one for the minority.
	All four testified under oath they had never received a request
	for content moderation or takedown by the Biden White House,
	but they did from Donald Trump's White House.
	Specifically, the case brought up was an exchange between
	Donald Trump, then President of the United States, and Chrissy
	Teigen, where, he had called her something and she called him
	something back. I won't repeat it.
	This was under oath, confirmed, yes, that happened, and
	that the White House shortly thereafter, after Teigen had her
	email about the President, which was pejorative, that the White
	House called Twitter to try to take down the content.
	Are you aware of that, Mr. Taibbi?
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes. I certainly heard that in the news, yes.
	Mr. Connolly. Did you see that email exchange?
	Mr. Taibbi. No, I have not seen an exchange from the Trump
	White House. I have seen one from Congressman Schiff and one
	from Senator Angus King.
	Mr. Connolly. Yes, nice try. We're talking about the Trump
	White House and people under oath confirming it. My question
	is, in the Twitter files, did Elon Musk or Twitter provide you
	with that exchange with Chrissy Teigen?
	Mr. Taibbi. No. That's probably because the searches that I
	was making--
	Mr. Connolly. Well, probably because it didn't confirm the
	bias that this is all about, as the gentleman from Texas would
	say, the left attempting to control content when, in fact, the
	evidence is the Trump White House most certainly attempted to
	control content on Twitter.
	Mr. Shellenberger, were you aware of that, or is this all
	news to you?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I already answered that question.
	Mr. Connolly. No. I mean specifically the Teigen exchange.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, the Teigen exchange was news to me.
	Mr. Connolly. I'm probably mispronouncing her name. I'm
	sorry.
	So, let me ask, have you, like, combed the so-called
	Twitter files to look at other examples that aren't about the
	Biden White House or the FBI that might, in fact, involve
	people from the right ideologically or from the Republican
	ranks, just to be fair?
	Mr. Taibbi. Well, again, Mr. Congressman, I mentioned
	before we're focused not on the Biden Administration or the
	Trump Administration. In fact, just this morning we released an
	exchange where Twitter talked about vetting the accounts of
	both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. Really, we were looking at the
	intelligence agencies when we were doing this research. As I
	mentioned before, their conclusions targeted people on both the
	left and the right globally, again, including the Yellow Vests
	movement in France, the pro-Maduro accounts in South America,
	and leftist news organizations in America, like Truthout and
	Consortium. Some of those people are my friends actually.
	We found those in intelligence lists that were passed on to
	Twitter, just as we found lists that included ordinary Trump
	supporters.
	Mr. Connolly. Thank you. Reclaiming my time. I appreciate
	that because, in some ways, what you just said undermines the
	premise of this Select Committee, which is that the Federal
	Government has been organized to weaponize against conservative
	voices. Of course, what you've just indicated in your testimony
	is, well, actually that's not the evidence you found.
	Mr. Taibbi. No. I think this Committee--my understanding is
	that they're concerned about the weaponization of the
	government against free speech, which is certainly what we're--
	Mr. Connolly. Thank you. My time has expired, but I
	appreciate your understanding of our Committee. I have a
	different understanding.
	I yield back.
	Chair Jordan. Well, you've got the wrong understanding.
	Last week in the Full Judiciary Committee hearing I introduced
	into the record a story of left-wing journalists who said
	that--talked about the FBI putting a paid informant, a felon,
	in the Black Lives Matter movement in Denver.
	I want to focus on the First Amendment, just like--
	protecting the First Amendment just like these guys do.
	Ms. Plaskett. Point of order, Mr. Chair.
	Are you going to respond after every--
	Chair Jordan. No. I'm taking my five minutes.
	Ms. Plaskett. This is your--
	Mr. Jordan. I can take my five minutes.
	Ms. Plaskett. Oh, it's your five minutes now?
	Chair Jordan. I can take my five minutes when I want to,
	and I'm taking my five minutes now.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. Great. Thank you.
	Chair Jordan. Yes. Well, I would ask for an additional few
	seconds for being interrupted by the Ranking Member.
	The truth is we want to focus on protecting the First
	Amendment.
	Mr. Shellenberger, are you a Republican?
	Mr. Shellenberger. No, I'm not.
	Chair Jordan. You got any pro-Trump bumper stickers on your
	car?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I voted for Biden.
	Chair Jordan. Voted for Biden.
	You don't have any MAGA hats laying around your house,
	right?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I do not.
	Chair Jordan. Yes. You said earlier--both you and Mr.
	Taibbi said, ``this is the most chilling thing you have ever
	seen as journalists.''
	Mr. Taibbi, the same thing. You're not a Republican either,
	are you?
	Mr. Taibbi. No, I'm not.
	Chair Jordan. You didn't vote for Trump.
	I mean, like, this is about protecting the First Amendment.
	Mr. Taibbi, I want to read from your Twitter file No. 9.
	You say this:

	After weeks of Twitter files, the Bureau issued a statement
	Wednesday, referring to the FBI.

	Here's what the FBI said:

	It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are
	feeding the American public misinformation with the sole
	purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.

	You then follow-up--and this is why I think you're an award-
	winning author. You then follow-up:

	They must think we're unambitious if our sole aim is to
	discredit the FBI; after all, a whole range of government
	agencies discredit themselves in the Twitter files.

	Then you go on to--and this particular Twitter file I'm talking
	about what Mr. Bishop was just talking about, the GEC at the
	State Department. You talk about the CIA. You talk about the
	DOD. You talk about the FBI. You talk about the DHS. You talk
	about the Foreign Intelligence Task Force, which is a
	combination of all these. There was one agency you didn't
	mention, because you didn't know at the time, one agency, one--
	you got almost the whole alphabet, but you didn't mention one
	agency, the FTC. You know about them now.
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes, we do.
	Chair Jordan. You know about them now in an up close and
	personal way. You didn't know then, but you do know now.
	On December 2nd, as I said earlier, December 2nd the first
	Twitter file comes out, Mr. Taibbi. I think there are five
	others, including the ones from Mr. Shellenberger. December
	13th, the very first letter that the FTC sends to Twitter after
	the Twitter files, 11 days after the first Twitter file, there
	have been five of them come out. The FTC's first demand in that
	first letter after the Twitter files comes out is: ``Identify
	all journalists''--I'm quoting. ``Identify all journalists and
	other members of the media to whom Twitter worked with.''
	You find that scary, Mr. Taibbi, that you got a Federal
	Government agency asking a private company, who in the press
	are you talking with?
	Mr. Taibbi. I do find it scary. I think it's none of the
	government's business which journalists a private company talks
	to and why. I think every journalist should be concerned about
	that.
	The absence of interest in that issue by my fellow
	colleagues in the mainstream media is an indication of how low
	the business has sunk. There was once a real esprit de corps
	and a camaraderie within media. Whenever one of us was gone
	after, we all kind of rose to the challenge and supported--
	Chair Jordan. Used to be, used to be the case.
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes. That is gone now. We don't protect one
	another.
	Chair Jordan. You know what else used to happen? Democrats
	used to care about protecting First Amendment free speech
	rights, too. Now, it's like, OK, if you're attacking--and I
	said this on the House floor. I said,

	Don't think they won't come for you. Oh, the big tech, big
	media, the cancel culture, they may come for Republicans and
	conservatives now, but they never--the mob is never satisfied.
	They will keep coming.

	Mr. Shellenberger, you know who the chair of the FTC is?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Not personally.
	Chair Jordan. Lina Khan. Lina Khan. You know who she used
	to work for?
	Mr. Shellenberger. My understanding is the Judiciary
	Committee.
	Chair Jordan. Yes, she's worked for these folks, the same
	folks that have been attacking you today, same folks, the chair
	of the FTC, worked for them.
	Here's what they said--here's what she said in a letter
	where they ask about who these journalists--again, they name
	four personally, four journalists by name. You were two of the
	four.
	As I said before, I think it's, frankly, courageous and
	brave of you to show up today when you know the Federal
	Government's got an eye on you personally.
	Here's what they asked for in that letter: ``Any
	credentialing or background check Twitter has done on
	journalists.''
	Now, think about that. The Federal Government is saying we
	want you to do a background check on members of the press.
	Freedom of the press mentioned in the First Amendment. They're
	doing back--they want Twitter to do a background check on you
	before they can talk to you, in America? The FTC led by Lina
	Khan, who used to work for these guys, is asking that question?
	Now we know. Now we all know why. You guys said at the
	outset, this is the most chilling story, and you guys are The
	New York Times best sellers, award-winning journalists. In all
	your time in the journalism field, this issue, most important.
	How this--I think--what did you call it, Mr. Shellenberger,
	this complex? What did you call it?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Censorship industrial complex.
	Chair Jordan. Totally this web of censorship, big
	government, big tech, NGO's, all this web of censorship that
	Mr. Bishop was getting into in his line of questioning, that's
	what this Committee is going to get to. That's not right or
	left. That's not--this is just right of wrong. This is wrong.
	We know it's wrong, and it's about protecting the First
	Amendment.
	I yield back.
	I now recognize the Ranking Member for her five minutes.
	Ms. Plaskett. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
	Mr. Taibbi, the emails and documents you've produced all
	date to around 2020. Is that correct?
	Mr. Taibbi. No. There's a significant portion of them from
	2017 and 2018 as well.
	Ms. Plaskett. Thank you.
	Mr. Shellenberger, what dates do you have?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I believe that we had emails including
	2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019.
	Mr. Taibbi. That's also true.
	Ms. Plaskett. Mr. Taibbi, you said 2018. Do you have 2018
	as well?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I can't remember.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. Thank you.
	Mr. Taibbi, how many employees did Twitter employ in
	approximately the time period of 2020-2021? Do you know?
	Mr. Taibbi. I don't.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. It was 7,500.
	Do you know how many were in its legal team during that
	time period?
	Mr. Taibbi. I don't. I'm sorry.
	Ms. Plaskett. Do you know how many were in its public
	policy team?
	Mr. Taibbi. I don't.
	Ms. Plaskett. Mr. Shellenberger, do you know how many were
	employed in content moderation during that time?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I do not know.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. So, we're looking at thousands of
	employees overall and hundreds in offices were the focus of
	emails and documents you released.
	I will ask you, Mr. Shellenberger, how many emails did Mr.
	Musk give you access to?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I mean, we went through thousands of
	emails.
	Ms. Plaskett. Did he give you access to all the emails for
	the time period in which--
	Mr. Shellenberger. We never had a single--I never had a
	single request denied. Not only that, but the amount of files
	that we were given were so voluminous that there was no way
	that anybody could have gone through them beforehand. We never
	found an instance where anything--there was any evidence that
	anything had been taken out.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. So, you would believe that you have
	probably millions of emails and documents, right? That's
	correct, would you say?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I don't--millions sound too high.
	Mr. Taibbi. No, I think the number is less.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. A hundred thousand?
	Mr. Taibbi. That's probably closer.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Probably, yes.
	Ms. Plaskett. Probably close to a hundred thousand that
	both of you are seeing. Yet, in the Twitter files, Mr. Taibbi,
	you've produced only 338 of those 100,000 emails. Is that
	correct?
	Mr. Taibbi. That's correct, yes.
	Ms. Plaskett. Then, who gave you access to these emails?
	Who was the individual that gave you permission to access the
	emails?
	Mr. Taibbi. Well, the attribution from my story is sources
	at Twitter, and that's what I'm going to refer to.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. Did Mr. Musk contact you, Mr. Taibbi?
	Mr. Taibbi. Again, the attribution from my story is sources
	at Twitter.
	Ms. Plaskett. Mr. Shellenberger, did Mr. Musk contact you?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Actually, no. I was brought in by my
	friend, Bari Weiss. So, the story, there's been a lot of
	misinformation--
	Ms. Plaskett. So, Mr. Weiss brought you in.
	Mr. Shellenberger. --or disinformation about that.
	Ms. Plaskett. Mr. Taibbi--Ms. Weiss. Thank you.
	Mr. Taibbi, have you had conversations with Elon Musk?
	Mr. Taibbi. I have.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. Mr. Taibbi, did Mr. Musk place any
	conditions on the use of the--
	Chair Jordan. Would the gentlelady yield for a second?
	Ms. Plaskett. As long as my time is not used for it.
	Chair Jordan. Are you trying to get journalists to disclose
	their sources?
	Ms. Plaskett. No, I'm not trying to get--no, I'm not. I am
	asking--
	Chair Jordan. Well, it sure sounds like it.
	Ms. Plaskett. Well, if you would let me finish.
	Are you--and you had conversations with him? Not where--you
	said you weren't going to agree to who your sources were. I'm
	not asking you your source. I'm asking you if you had
	conversations with the owner of Twitter. Did Mr. Musk place any
	conditions on your use of the emails or documents?
	Mr. Taibbi. No. In fact, I was told explicitly that we were
	given license to look at present day Twitter as well as past
	Twitter.
	Ms. Plaskett. So, you had unfiltered access to Twitter's
	internal communications and systems?
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes.
	Ms. Plaskett. Would those include H.R. files?
	Mr. Taibbi. No, no, no, no. We did not have access to
	personal information of any kind. In fact, we signed a waiver
	foregoing--
	Ms. Plaskett. Have you produced that waiver to the Members
	of anyone on this Committee or any staff?
	Mr. Taibbi. I'd be happy to produce it.
	Ms. Plaskett. Have you?
	Mr. Taibbi. I haven't, but I'd be happy to.
	Ms. Plaskett. Have you given all the access to what you
	were given by your source to this Committee?
	Mr. Taibbi. No. I would never do that.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. I didn't ask if you had given the
	Committee, the individuals, all the files. No, you have not?
	Mr. Taibbi. No.
	Ms. Plaskett. So, what we're getting is your dissemination,
	your decision as to what was important and not important in
	that, correct?
	Mr. Taibbi. Which is true in every news story.
	Ms. Plaskett. In every story. You have files that you say
	you're sharing, but those files are just a smaller period of
	the files. Is that correct?
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes, but there's--
	Ms. Plaskett. Yes? OK. Thank you.
	The FTC investigation of Twitter, you knew that they were
	investigating Twitter before the time period that Mr. Musk came
	on?
	Mr. Taibbi. I was aware of it, yes.
	Ms. Plaskett. The FTC was concerned with user data being
	hacked or used. Is that correct, that they didn't have enough
	checks and balances on that data?
	Mr. Taibbi. Well, I wasn't privy to that part.
	Ms. Plaskett. Have you seen the consent decree?
	Mr. Taibbi. No, I have not.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. Well, the consent decree is concerned
	with user data, which would be probably the reason that they
	were concerned, if they're giving files to journalists, that
	potentially data about users as well as data about individuals
	and employees would be given to them.
	Mr. Taibbi. My understanding is that they--
	Ms. Plaskett. I didn't ask a question. I didn't ask you a
	question, sir. OK.
	So, do you know that Elon Musk paid $44 billion for
	Twitter? Is that correct, Mr. Shellenberger? Were you aware of
	that?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, I read that.
	Ms. Plaskett. Did you know that he received part of the
	funding from Saudi Arabia as well as Qatar?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I heard that.
	Ms. Plaskett. Did you know that one of those individuals
	who owns Biance was the company Binance--
	Mr. Shellenberger. Binance.
	Ms. Plaskett. --while he has Canadian citizenship, he is a
	Chinese national? Were you aware of that?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I did not know that.
	Ms. Plaskett. OK. That he stated that this was for the
	cause.
	Thank you very much for answering my questions.
	I yield back.
	Chair Jordan. The Chair now recognizes the gentlelady from
	Wyoming for five minutes.
	Will the gentlelady yield for 20 seconds?
	Ms. Hageman. Yes.
	Chair Jordan. I thank the gentlelady for yielding.
	I just think this is interesting. First, the FTC is asking
	for your backgrounds, and now the Ranking Member of the
	Committee on the Weaponization of Government is asking for your
	sources. If that doesn't raise--
	Ms. Plaskett. I never asked them for their sources.
	Chair Jordan. Yes, you did.
	Ms. Plaskett. I did not ask for sources.
	Chair Jordan. You know what--
	Ms. Plaskett. I asked if they were talking to Elon Musk.
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady is not recognized.
	Ms. Plaskett. They said that they were not talking--well,
	you are not going to say I've asked--
	Chair Jordan. I will yield back to the gentlelady. I thank
	her for yielding.
	Mr. Taibbi. With respect, you asked me who gave me the
	files.
	Ms. Plaskett. I asked you who gave it to you, and once you
	said they were your sources, I then asked you if you had spoken
	with Elon Musk. I did not ask you who those sources were, for
	the record, so the record is correct.
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady from Wyoming is recognized,
	and she will receive an additional 20 seconds. The gentlelady
	is recognized for five minutes of questioning.
	Ms. Hageman. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
	Thank you to our witnesses for being here today and all of
	your important work that you have put into writing the Twitter
	files.
	Thank you for your willingness to come here and be
	subjected to the kind of abuse that we've observed, when all
	you're trying to do is talk about the importance of the First
	Amendment and why the Federal Government should not be doing
	what they did and what has been evidenced in the Twitter files.
	I often say that sunshine is the best disinfectant. Boy,
	after listening to you and reading the reports that I have,
	does our Federal Government need to be fumigated.
	Mr. Taibbi, I would like to focus on Twitter files' Part 9.
	Twitter and other government agencies, as I think a lot of the
	evidence you present in this section, touches on the major
	takeaways that are so important for Americans to understand
	about the seriousness of what was found in the Twitter files.
	In your testimony describing the cooperation between the
	Federal Government and tech companies like Twitter, you stated,
	quote,

	A focus of this growing network is making lists of people whose
	opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed to be
	misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation.

	What's interesting to me is that what is missing from that
	list is the word ``unlawful.''
	Mr. Taibbi. That's true, yes.
	Ms. Hageman. So, it notably seems to be missing from the
	FBI's lexicon. In Part 9 of the Twitter files, Mr. Taibbi notes
	that the main conduit sending requests to Twitter would
	routinely label these flags as violations of Twitter's terms of
	service. Even Jim Baker, a Twitter employee at the time and
	someone who was allegedly a former general counsel of the FBI,
	stated, quote, ``But also odd that they are searching for
	violations of our policies.''
	Mr. Taibbi, what was the approximate percentage of the FBI
	requests to Twitter being based on the justification that the
	tweet violated the company's terms of service?
	Mr. Taibbi. Ms. Congresswoman, I would say that was a
	standard disclosure or a standard disclaimer in almost all the
	communications from the FBI to Twitter. There would usually be
	a line in there saying something like, for your consideration,
	we believe the following 207 accounts may have violated your
	terms of service.
	Notably, they very rarely focused on words like ``truth''
	or ``inaccuracy.'' Very often they used the words
	``malinformation,'' ``misinformation,'' or ``disinformation.''
	So, I think they were trying to shift the focus from one idea
	to the other.
	Ms. Hageman. OK. I think that's interesting as well.
	What do you make of the finding that the FBI found that its
	responsibility to police violation of a private company's terms
	of service is a priority over policing violations of U.S.
	Federal law?
	Mr. Taibbi. We've--there were a couple of very telling
	emails that we published. One was by a lawyer named Sasha
	Cardeel (ph), where the company was being so overwhelmed by
	requests from the FBI--and, in fact, they gave each other a
	sort of digital high-five after one batch saying that was a
	monumental undertaking to clear all of these. She noted that
	she believed that the FBI was essentially creating--doing word
	searches keyed to Twitter's terms of service, looking for
	violations of terms of service specifically so that they could
	make recommendations along those lines, which we found
	interesting.
	Ms. Hageman. Do you believe it's the FBI's responsibility
	to police the terms of service for a private company?
	Mr. Taibbi. I do not. I think you cannot have a State-
	sponsored antidisinformation effort without directly striking
	at the whole concept of free speech. I think the two ideas are
	in direct conflict. This is a fundamental misunderstanding, I
	think of a lot of the people who get into this world. Some of
	them, I believe, in a well-meaning way, I think they're
	actually trying to accomplish something positive. What they
	don't understand, what free speech means and what happens when
	you do this, it undermines the whole concept that truth doesn't
	come from--isn't mandated, that we arrive at it through debate
	and discussion.
	Ms. Hageman. Well, in fact, wouldn't you agree with me that
	the First Amendment is broader than Twitter's terms of service?
	Mr. Taibbi. Absolutely, yes, yes.
	Ms. Hageman. Wouldn't you also agree with me that the FBI
	is responsible for complying with the First Amendment, not
	Twitter's terms of service?
	Mr. Taibbi. I would hope so, yes, yes.
	Ms. Hageman. You also highlighted the presence of people
	like Jim Baker at Twitter. Again, I've noted that he is
	allegedly a former FBI employee. Part 9 also speaks of former
	other government association employees working at Twitter.
	What was the extent to which you found former FBI or other
	intelligence community employees working at Twitter, and did
	you find it odd?
	Mr. Taibbi. There was a significant quantity of people who
	had come from the intelligence world or who had worked at State
	agencies. In fact, that was a very common method by which
	members of--people who were currently working in government
	would reach out to Twitter. For instance, we found an email by
	a current State Department official who reached out to a former
	State Department official asking that 14 ordinary Americans
	have their accounts deleted. That was in a recent Twitter files
	release.
	So, yes, there's an extraordinary number of these people. A
	lot of them come from the intelligence world, which we did find
	unusual.
	Ms. Hageman. OK. Thank you very much.
	I yield back.
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady's time has expired. I thank
	her.
	The gentleman from California is recognized for five
	minutes.
	Mr. Garamendi. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
	I still try to figure out where all this is going to go.
	We've heard a lot from our Republican colleagues claiming that
	somehow all this interaction has led to Twitter censoring
	conservative voices. I really want to look at what the evidence
	is that has or has not happened.
	In 2020, Twitter commissioned an objective study to examine
	whether its algorithms disproportionately promote conservative
	or liberal voices. This was a massive study by researchers from
	the University of Cambridge and Berkeley. The analysis examined
	millions of Twitter accounts and 6.2 million news articles that
	were shared within the United States. The study results were
	quite clear. Twitter's algorithms actually amplified
	conservative voices far more than liberal voices.
	So, whatever comes of this question about pressure from the
	Federal Government, at least up until 2020, it didn't have an
	effect.
	A separate study, this one from the Indiana University,
	found that partisan accounts, especially conservative accounts,
	tend to receive more, more followers and follow more automated
	accounts.
	So, Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Shellenberger, are you familiar with
	these studies?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I am.
	Mr. Taibbi. I am, yes.
	Mr. Garamendi. Very good. Then you know that whatever you
	may be trying to tell us, the effect on Twitter didn't happen.
	Mr. Taibbi. No, I don't agree.
	Mr. Garamendi. Excuse me. It's my time. Thank you.
	I can also give you many real analytical studies based on
	actual evidence. Since I have only five minutes, Mr. Chair, if
	I might enter into the record these studies of what actually is
	going on at Twitter with regard to censorship or not
	censorship.
	Mr. Chair, may I enter those into the file?
	Thank you, Mr. Chair. I take that silence as a yes.
	Chair Jordan. Did you identify the document? I'm sorry.
	Mr. Garamendi. Certainly. Two documents--these documents.
	Chair Jordan. What?
	Mr. Garamendi. The studies that were done by universities--
	Chair Jordan. Usually, it takes a little bit more for
	unanimous consent than ``these documents,'' but without
	objection, we'll accept them into the record.
	Mr. Garamendi. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
	These studies found that to the extent that far right
	accounts are being suspended, it's not because of their
	ideology, but because they are spreading conspiracy theories,
	like QAnon. You can see those up on the board. Talk about
	nonsense. QAnons, are you really ready for these dots? Where in
	the country has gone, the rest of the world will go. Q is real,
	on and on.
	They're up there, and they're now part of the file also.
	This type of speech that perhaps our Republican colleagues
	believe social media platforms, all whom, by the way, are
	private companies, not government, are somehow obligated to
	post, no matter how crazy, how offensive a post might be. These
	private companies presumably must advance the lies, conspiracy
	theories, and personal attacks promoted by radicals.
	Now, I'm pretty sure that if the Democrats held a hearing
	today to force FOX News to post certain content, my Republican
	colleagues would be up in arms. This is particularly ironic
	because we know for a fact that FOX News does spread
	disinformation and does so while knowing that the material is
	false.
	We've learned from the Dominion lawsuit that FOX hosts lied
	about the 2020 election. Its executives knew they were lying,
	and yet they were allowed to continue peddling their lies.
	Now, here's a reporter speaking to this issue, a FOX News
	reporter. He said, dangerously insane.

	There's two FOX executives describing FOX's decision to push
	forward election lies as chasing the nuts off the cliff.

	There are two other quotes--two other tweets that I think
	we ought to be aware of, and FOX News was promoting it. They
	were promoting Trump's lies. The quote up there: ``Big protest
	in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.'' A call to
	arms, and all us in this building know the result of that call.
	A second one: ``Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do
	what needed to be done to protect our country.''
	This is the speech that my Republican colleagues would have
	us to believe is being wrongly, quote, ``censored by social
	media companies.'' It's offensive. It's absurd. No private
	company has an obligation to amplify anything and especially
	not messages that strike at the heart of our democracy.
	I yield back.
	Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back.
	The gentleman from Utah is recognized for five minutes.
	Mr. Stewart. Thank you, Chair.
	Thank you, witnesses, for being here.
	I suppose this is maybe a little bit outside your comfort
	zone. You didn't find yourself with this kind of attention when
	you began this endeavor, but I appreciate the courage and the
	commitment you've made to doing that.
	We may not agree on a lot of things when it comes to policy
	and politics, but I think we agree on our concern regarding the
	topic today.
	I'll actually follow on from my Democratic friend and
	colleague and the things that he has said, because I agree with
	him. Private companies, I mean, Twitter, Facebook, they can ban
	whoever they want. They can mute. They can deplatform. They can
	set up whatever policy they want, and they have the ability to
	do that.
	I don't care about that. I agree with that. They should
	have that authority. The thing that we're concerned about is
	when the Federal Government by proxy essentially contracts this
	out, because the Federal Government can't ban speech. They can
	define time and place, but they cannot ban content. Anyone
	would be foolish to think that when the FBI comes to a private
	company and highlights speech and then would expect them to do
	nothing, of course, they would respond to that. The FBI knew
	they would respond to that. The FBI expected them to respond to
	that.
	I could use a couple of analogies, if I could, and they
	sound dramatic, but they're exactly right. It's illegal for the
	United States to assassinate a foreign leader. It would be
	illegal for the United States to pay $3.2 million to someone to
	go assassinate a foreign leader. It's illegal in some cases for
	the United States--or not illegal, but we would have to have a
	policy debate whether we would invade another country. It would
	be illegal for the United States to pay a private company like
	the Wagner Group in Russia to go and fight their battles for
	them.
	That's exactly what the FBI did here. They said, well, we
	can't do this ourselves. We'll contract it out. We'll launder
	this effort through another company.
	I would just ask you to respond to that. Do you think I'm
	overly dramatic or do you think I'm wrong in my
	characterization of what we see here?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I don't. I think that's absolutely
	correct. Freedom of speech is the foundation for our democracy.
	What we have seen here is Federal Government putting
	extraordinary amounts of pressure both on Twitter and Facebook.
	We haven't talked about Facebook, but we now know that we have
	the White House demanding that Facebook take down factual
	information on Facebook doing that. With Matt's thread this
	morning, we saw the government contractors demanding the same
	thing of Twitter, accurate information they said that needed to
	be taken down to advance a narrative.
	Mr. Stewart. I have to interrupt just to agree with you.
	For heaven's sake, again, we've heard over here, well, they
	have FOX News lies. There's a reason that 20 percent of the
	people trust media. Oh, my gosh, if you want to have a
	conversation about lies and deception in the media, I would
	love to engage in that, because we've seen plenty of it over
	the last six years. It's not coming from just FOX News. The New
	York Times, CBS, NBC, every single one of them were saying
	things that they knew was not true. They didn't say it once;
	they said it for years.
	The White House, again, trying to stifle things that they
	know is true, but it doesn't fit their narrative.
	I've got to give one illustration in the few minute--or
	minute I have left. When you have an agent, Mr. Chan, who goes
	to Twitter and says, ``Please see below a list of Twitter
	accounts which we believe violate your terms of service.'' I
	mean, how do you respond to that and defend that? Yes, the FBI
	should be looking at other private companies' policies and then
	highlighting, hey, these people might be violating your
	policies.
	Either one of you. Mr. Taibbi.
	Mr. Taibbi. If I could. No, I think there's--thank you, Mr.
	Congressman.
	There's an important point. In conjunction with our own
	research, there's the foundation, the Foundation For Freedom
	Online which , there's a very telling video that they uncovered
	where the director of Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership
	talks about how CISA, the DHS agency, didn't have the
	capability to do election monitoring, and so that they kind of
	stepped in to, quote, ``fill the gaps legally before that
	capability could be amped up.''
	What we see in the Twitter files is that Twitter executives
	did not distinguish between DHS or CISA and this group EIP. For
	instance, we would see a communication that said, ``From CISA
	escalated by EIP.'' So, they were essentially identical in the
	eyes of the company.
	EIP, by its own data--and this is in reference to what you
	brought up, Mr. Congressman. According to their own data, they
	significantly targeted more what they called disinformation on
	the right than on the left by a factor, I think of about 10 :
	1.
	So, I say that as not a Republican at all. It's just the
	fact of what we're looking at.
	So, yes, we have come to the realization that this bright
	line that we imagine that exists between, say, the FBI, DHS, or
	GEC and these private companies is illusory and that what's
	more important is this constellation of quasi-private
	organizations that do this work.
	Mr. Stewart. Well, and we're over time, so I'll conclude
	reemphasizing this. By a factor of 10 : 1, they tried to mute
	conservative thought, and the Federal Government cannot
	contract out suppression of free expression.
	Mr. Taibbi. No.
	Mr. Stewart. Chair, thank you.
	Chair Jordan. Thank you. The gentleman's time has expired.
	The gentlelady from Texas is recognized for five minutes.
	Ms. Garcia. Thank you, Mr. Speaker--I didn't get that last
	time. I apologize, Mr. Chair.
	Mr. Taibbi, I want to follow-up a little bit on the Ranking
	Member's questions.
	When was the first time that Mr. Musk approached you about
	writing the Twitter files?
	Mr. Taibbi. Again, Congresswoman, that would--
	Ms. Garcia. I just need a date, sir.
	Mr. Taibbi. I can't give it to you, unfortunately, because
	this is a question of sourcing, and I don't give up--I'm a
	journalist. I don't reveal my sources.
	Ms. Garcia. It's not a question of sources. It's a question
	of chronology.
	Mr. Taibbi. No. That's a question of sources.
	Ms. Garcia. Because you earlier said that someone had sent
	you to the internet, some message about whether you would be
	interested in some information.
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes. I refer to that person as a source.
	Ms. Garcia. So, you're not going to tell us when Musk first
	approached you?
	Mr. Taibbi. Again, Congresswoman, you're asking me to--
	Ms. Garcia. You can answer yes or no.
	Mr. Taibbi. You're asking a journalist to reveal a source.
	Ms. Garcia. So, do you consider Mr. Musk to be the direct
	source of all this?
	Mr. Taibbi. No. Now, you're trying to get me to say that he
	is the source. I just can't answer your question about sources.
	Ms. Garcia. Well, he either is or he isn't. If you're
	telling me you can't answer because it's your source, well,
	then, the only logical conclusion is that he is, in fact, your
	source.
	Mr. Taibbi. Well, you're free to conclude that.
	Ms. Garcia. Well, sir, I just don't understand. You can't
	have it both ways, but let's move on because--
	Chair Jordan. No, he can. He's a journalist.
	Ms. Plaskett. No, he can't, because either Musk is the
	source, and he can't talk about it, or Musk is not the source.
	If Musk is not the source, then he can discuss his
	conversations with Musk.
	Mr. Johnson. No one has yielded. The gentlelady is out of
	order. You don't get to speak every time--
	Ms. Plaskett. She's out of order because he's interrupted.
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady is not recognized.
	Ms. Plaskett. Mr. Chair, you're not recognized.
	Ms. Garcia. Mr. Chair, I'd like to reclaim my time.
	Chair Jordan. He has not said that. What he has said is
	he's not going to reveal his source. The fact that Democrats
	are pressuring him to do so is such a violation of the First
	Amendment.
	Ms. Plaskett. We're not. We're asking him about his
	conversations with Musk.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. The gentlelady has not yielded you
	time. You don't get to talk over her.
	Ms. Garcia. I have not yielded time to anybody. I want to
	reclaim my time, and I would ask the Chair to give me back some
	of the time because of the interruption.
	Chair Jordan. We can do that.
	Ms. Garcia. Mr. Chair, I'm asking you if you will give me
	the seconds that I lost.
	Chair Jordan. We will give you that 10 seconds.
	Ms. Garcia. Thank you.
	Now, let's talk about another item when you responded to
	the Ranking Member. You said that you had free license to look
	at everything, but, yet, you, yourself, posted on your--I guess
	it's kind of like a web page--I don't quite understand what
	Substack is--but that: What I can say is that in exchange for
	the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to
	agree to certain conditions.
	What were those conditions? She asked you that question,
	and you said you had none. You, yourself, posted that you had
	conditions.
	Mr. Taibbi. No. The conditions, as I've explained multiple
	times--
	Ms. Garcia. No, sir. You've not explained. You told her in
	response to her question that you had no conditions. In fact,
	you kind of used the word ``license,'' that you were free to
	look at all them, all 100,000 emails.
	Mr. Taibbi. The question was posed was I free to write
	about--
	Ms. Garcia. Sir, did you have any conditions?
	Mr. Taibbi. The condition was that we published on Twitter.
	Ms. Garcia. Sir, did you have any conditions? Yes or no? A
	simple question.
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes.
	Ms. Garcia. All right. Could you tell us what conditions
	those were?
	Mr. Taibbi. The conditions were an attribution, sources at
	Twitter, and that we break any news on Twitter.
	Ms. Garcia. You didn't break it on Twitter. Did you send
	the file that you released today to Twitter first?
	Mr. Taibbi. Did I send--actually I did, yes.
	Ms. Garcia. Sir, I'm asking you today, did you send it to
	Twitter first?
	Mr. Taibbi. The Twitter files thread?
	Ms. Garcia. That was one of the conditions. Yes or no, sir?
	Mr. Taibbi. The Twitter files thread actually did come out
	first.
	Ms. Garcia. Sir, you said earlier that you had to attribute
	all the sources to Twitter first. What you released today, did
	you send that to Twitter first?
	Mr. Taibbi. No, no, no. I posted it on Twitter.
	Ms. Garcia. First? First, sir, or did you give it to the
	Chair of the Committee or the staff of the Committee first?
	Mr. Taibbi. Well, that's not breaking the story. That's
	giving--yes, I did. I did give--
	Ms. Garcia. So, you gave all the information that you did
	not give to the Democrats, you gave it to the Republicans
	first, then you put it on Twitter?
	Mr. Taibbi. Actually, no. The chronology is a little bit
	confused. It's more or less at the same time.
	Ms. Garcia. Well, then, tell us what the chronology was.
	Mr. Taibbi. I believe the thread came out first.
	Ms. Garcia. Where?
	Mr. Taibbi. On Twitter.
	Ms. Garcia. On Twitter. So, then you afterwards gave it to
	the Republicans and not the Democrats?
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes, because I'm submitting it for the record
	as my statement.
	Ms. Garcia. Did you give it to them in advance?
	Mr. Taibbi. I gave it to them today.
	Ms. Garcia. You gave it to them today, but you still have
	not given anything to the Democrats.
	Well, again, I'll move on.
	I wanted to ask, Mr. Shellenberger, the same questions,
	sir. When did you first visit with or get contacted by Mr.
	Musk?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I'm not going to reveal my sources. Like
	I said, I was invited by Bari Weiss, and it was--
	Ms. Garcia. I'm not asking for sources, sir. I'm just
	asking for chronology.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, I was--
	Ms. Garcia. When did you first make contact with Mr. Musk?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I don't know the exact date.
	Ms. Garcia. Was it 2020?
	Mr. Shellenberger. It was December. It was December.
	Ms. Garcia. December of--well, there's a lot of Decembers
	in history.
	Mr. Shellenberger. December of last year.
	Ms. Garcia. Which December?
	Mr. Shellenberger. December of last year, ma'am.
	Ms. Garcia. Last year, 2022?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Ms. Garcia. All right. Now, in your discussion--in your
	answer you also said that you were invited by a friend, Bari
	Weiss?
	Mr. Shellenberger. My friend, Bari Weiss.
	Ms. Garcia. So, this friend works for Twitter, or what is
	her--
	Mr. Taibbi. She's a journalist.
	Ms. Garcia. Sir, I didn't ask you a question. I'm now
	asking Mr. Shellenberger a question.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, ma'am, Bari Weiss is a journalist.
	Ms. Garcia. I'm sorry, sir?
	Mr. Shellenberger. She's a journalist.
	Ms. Garcia. She's a journalist. So, you work in concert
	with her?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Ms. Garcia. Do you know when she first was contacted by Mr.
	Musk?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I don't know.
	Ms. Garcia. You don't know. So, you're in this as a
	threesome?
	Mr. Shellenberger. There were many more people involved
	than that.
	Ms. Garcia. There were many more people involved with it.
	Are you being paid to be here today, either through
	consulting fees--
	Mr. Shellenberger. No.
	Ms. Garcia. --campaign contributions to your next run?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Absolutely not.
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady's time has--
	Ms. Garcia. Do you have an interview scheduled after this
	hearing?
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady's time has expired.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Absolutely not.
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady's time has expired.
	Ms. Garcia. Thank you.
	Chair Jordan. I don't know what to say other than I'll
	recognize the gentleman from North Dakota for five minutes.
	Mr. Armstrong. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll yield my five
	minutes to you.
	Chair Jordan. Oh, I appreciate the gentleman yielding.
	I do think it's worth pointing out that I have cosponsored,
	I think some of my colleagues have cosponsored The Shield Act
	in previous Congresses, with Democrats, to protect what we see
	them trying to do today, protect journalists from having to
	reveal their sources to government. That used to be a shared
	position in the Congress. Unfortunately, as we're seeing now
	multiple occasions, it's not the position anymore.
	Mr. Shellenberger, I want to go to Twitter files' Part 7. I
	related a lot of what you put in there in my opening statement.
	I want to give you as much time as you want, because I'm going
	to read the very first sentence, because something jumped out
	at me when I read the first sentence.
	In Twitter files No. 7, the FBI and the Biden laptop. You
	say this:

	How the FBI and the intelligence community discredited factual
	information about the Biden foreign business dealings both
	after and before the New York Post revealed the contents of his
	laptop on October 14, 2020.

	What stuck--kind of jumped out at me was the way you framed
	it. Because you did it backward from what it's normally said.
	Normally, you would say--the sentence would read: Foreign
	business dealings both before and after.
	I assume you did that for a reason because, in fact, I
	think the next sentence you say: ``Social media companies
	discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and
	after.'' You used the normal customary way in the second
	sentence, but the first sentence strikes me as you were trying
	to emphasize the before component of that statement.
	Now, I want you to just walk us through why you said that,
	because when I read it, it certainly was an operation both
	before and after, as you said, after and before.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Reading through
	the whole sweep of events, I do not know the extent to which
	the influence operation aimed at prebunking the Hunter Biden
	laptop was coordinated. I don't know who all was involved. What
	we saw was--you saw Aspen and Stanford many months before then
	saying, ``Don't cover the material in the hack and leak without
	emphasizing the fact that it could be disinformation.'' OK. So,
	they're priming journalists to not cover a future hack and leak
	in the way that journalists have long been trained to in the
	tradition of the Pentagon Papers made famous by the Steven
	Spielberg movie. They were saying cover the fact that it
	probably came from the Russians.
	Then you have the former general counsel to the FBI, Jim
	Baker, the former deputy chief of staff to the FBI both
	arriving at Twitter in the summer of 2020, which I find what an
	interesting coincidence.
	Then, when the New York Post publishes its first article on
	October 14, it's Jim Baker who makes the most strenuous
	argument within Twitter, multiple emails, multiple messages
	saying, ``This doesn't look real.'' There's people--there's
	intelligence experts saying that this could be Russian
	disinformation. He is the most strenuous person inside Twitter
	arguing that it's probably Russian disinformation.
	The internal evaluation by Yoel Roth, who testified in
	front of this Committee, was that it was what it looked to be,
	which was that it was not a result of a hack-and-leak
	operation. Why did he think that? Because the New York Post had
	published the FBI's subpoena, taking the laptop in December
	2019, and they published the agreement that the laptop computer
	store owner--the computer store owner, rather, had with Hunter
	Biden that gave him permission after he abandoned the laptop to
	use it however he wanted.
	So, there really wasn't much doubt about the providence of
	that laptop, but you had Jim Baker making a strenuous argument.
	Then, of course, you get to--a few days after the October 14
	release, you have the President of the United States echoing
	what these former intelligence community officials were saying,
	which is that it looked like a Russian influence operation.
	Chair Jordan. Yes.
	Mr. Shellenberger. So, they were claiming that the laptop
	was made public by a conspiracy theory and the conspiracy
	theory that somehow the Russians got it, and they--
	Chair Jordan. Right.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Basically, they convinced Yoel Roth that
	it was--they convinced him it was this wild hack-and-leak story
	that somehow the Russians stole it, got the information, gave
	it to the computer store, and it was bizarre.
	So, you read that chain of events, and it appears as though
	there is an organized influence operation to prebunk--
	Chair Jordan. Why? Why do you think they could predict the
	time, the method, and the person? Why could the FBI predict it?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I'm--
	Chair Jordan. Not only did they predict it--they predicted
	it, so did the Aspen Institute.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Chair Jordan. Seemed like everyone was in the know saying,
	here's what's going to happen. We can read the future.
	Why do you think--how do you think they were able to do
	that?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I think the most important fact to know
	is the FBI had that laptop in December 2019. They were also
	spying on Rudy Giuliani when he got the laptop and when he gave
	it to the New York Post.
	Now, maybe the FBI agents who were going to Mark Zuckerberg
	at Facebook and to Twitter executives and warning of a hack and
	leak potentially involving Hunter Biden, maybe those guys
	didn't have anything to do with the guys that had the laptop.
	Chair Jordan. Maybe.
	Mr. Shellenberger. We don't know that.
	Chair Jordan. I know.
	Mr. Shellenberger. I have to say, as a newcomer to this, as
	somebody that thought it was Russian disinformation in 2020--
	everybody I knew thought it was Russian--I was shocked to see
	that series of events going on. It looked to me like a
	deliberate influence operation. I don't have the proof of it,
	but the circumstantial evidence is pretty disturbing.
	Chair Jordan. It's pretty overwhelming. Thank you, Mr.
	Shellenberger.
	I now recognize the gentleman from New York, Mr. Goldman,
	for five minutes.
	Mr. Goldman. Oh, I think it's Mr. Allred first.
	Chair Jordan. Oh, I'm sorry. You just walked in.
	I recognize the gentleman from Texas. Go right ahead.
	Mr. Allred. Well, thank you, Mr. Chair.
	I'd like to ask unanimous consent to enter a few tweets
	into the record.
	Chair Jordan. Sure. Can you identify the tweets?
	Mr. Allred. Let's see, I think staff should have them. Can
	we put the tweets up on the screen?
	Let's take a look at a couple of tweets from Kanye West,
	who now goes by Ye, at the time of these tweets had 32 million
	followers.
	Mr. Taibbi, can you read the tweet on the left? Do you see
	the text there?
	Mr. Taibbi. I actually can't. My eyesight is not so that
	great.
	Mr. Allred. I'll read it to you. It says: ``I'M A BIT
	SLEEPY TONIGHT, BUT WHEN I WAKE UP I'M GOING DEATH CON 3 ON
	JEWISH PEOPLE,'' in all caps. The funny thing is I actually
	can't be anti-Semitic because Black people are actually Jew.
	Also, you guys have toyed with me and tried to blackball anyone
	whoever opposes your agenda.
	Can you see the tweet next to it?
	Mr. Taibbi. I can, yes.
	Mr. Allred. It's a--would you describe it as a Star of
	David with a swastika in the middle of it?
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes.
	Mr. Allred. Should those tweets have been taken down by
	Twitter?
	Mr. Taibbi. I think it's a difficult question. Hate speech
	is protected in the United States.
	One of my heroes growing up was the Ukraine-born author
	Isaac Babel. He gave a speech at the first Soviet Writers
	Congress, and he was asked if any important rights had been
	taken away. He sarcastically answered, No. The only rights that
	have been taken away are the right to be wrong.
	The crowd laughed, but he was making an important point,
	which is that in a free country you can't have freedom without
	the freedom to be wrong.
	Mr. Allred. Let's move on to a couple of other tweets not
	from somebody with 32 million followers.
	This one says: ``Elon now controls Twitter. Unleash the
	racial slurs, K word and N word.''
	The other one says: ``I can freely express how much I hate
	N words now. Thank you, Elon.''
	See, these tweets were taken down, even by Elon Musk
	Twitter, and they should have been because they're hate speech,
	and they lead to real world reactions. In fact, in the 12 hours
	after Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, hate speech of all
	kinds spiked on Twitter, including a 500 percent increase in
	the use of the N word.
	It's not just online. From 2020-2021, hate crimes rose
	almost 44 percent in major cities. So, hate speech online has
	real impacts in life. So, does election misinformation and
	propaganda online.
	Mr. Taibbi, I've read a lot of your work. I respect some of
	it, but you've cast a lot of doubt on Russian interference in
	our elections. Today, you have virtually alleged a vast
	government conspiracy to censor speech. I can tell you that the
	threat to our democracy--
	Mr. Taibbi. Not allegedly.
	Mr. Allred. I'm not asking you a question. I'll let you
	know when I do.
	I can tell you that the threat to our democracy is very
	real, and it's not just the elections that get all the
	headlines. In 2018, in a congressional race, two Kremlin-
	maligned foreign nationals named Lev Parnas and Igor Freeman
	succeeded in funneling illegal Russian money to a Trump-aligned
	super-PAC that spent $1.3 million to support the Republican
	candidate.
	That was my election. My neighbors in east Dallas saw
	advertisements online, in their mailbox, and on their TV, paid
	with Russian money. That's not my opinion. That's a fact proven
	in the Southern District of New York. Both Parnas and Freeman
	were convicted to 21 months and one year, respectively, for
	conspiring to make political contributions by a foreign
	national, along with other campaign finance-related violations.
	We live in an information age where malign actors do want
	to use social media to influence our elections, both big, the
	ones you spend a lot of time talking about, and small like
	mine.
	Mr. Taibbi. Mr. Congressman, may I ask a question?
	Mr. Allred. It should be a bipartisan goal--no, you don't
	get to ask questions here.
	Mr. Taibbi. OK.
	Mr. Allred. It should be a bipartisan goal to ensure that
	Americans, and only Americans, determine the outcome of our
	elections, not fear mongering.
	I think--I hope that you can actually take this with you,
	because I honestly hope that you will grapple with this: That
	it may be possible that if we can take off the tin foil hat
	that there's not a vast conspiracy, but that ordinary folks and
	national security agencies responsible for our security are
	trying their best to find a way to make sure that our online
	discourse doesn't get people hurt or see our democracy
	undermined, and that the very rights that you think they're
	trying to undermine, they may be trying to protect.
	I yield back.
	Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back.
	The gentleman from Kentucky, Mr. Massie, is recognized for
	five minutes.
	Mr. Massie. I want to talk about the weaponization of the
	CDC against the American people. This overlaps with one of the
	Twitter files, No. 13 by my count, actually by Alex Berenson,
	not one of our two witnesses, but I would like your comment on
	it.
	A week before Christmas 2020, the vaccines came out. The
	FDA curated the Pfizer trial results, and then the CDC curated
	the FDA's opinion. The CDC said in their MMWR, which is never
	peer-reviewed--they're very proud it's not peer-reviewed. They
	treat it like science. It's not science. They said that the
	vaccine was 92 percent efficacious for people who had already
	had COVID. The Pfizer trial data said no such thing. In fact,
	there was no support for that claim.
	So, I called up the head of CDC, recorded the conversation,
	the head in Washington, DC. She said she'd get the top
	scientists on the line. There was a snowstorm that day, so I
	was impressed; she got this top scientist on the line. They
	said I was eagle eye Massie. They couldn't believe how that
	statement had made it into their report and that I was
	absolutely correct there was no support for it.
	So, I said ``How are you going to fix it? Are you going to
	redact it? Are you going to change it? What are you going to
	do?'' They said, ``We'll do all of that.'' I said, ``Great.''
	A month later, it was still on their website. I made some
	more phone calls. They brought in an old hand, an old fixer,
	Dr. Schuchat. These are her notes of her phone call with me
	about natural immunity in January when I called them out on it
	again. These are the entirety of her notes that were obtained
	in the FOIA from somebody--a third party.
	I took all my recordings, released them to Sharyl
	Attkisson. She blew the whistle on this. A lot of people have
	forgotten about it.
	Here's why I find it interesting, and I'm going to tie it
	into the Twitter files. By the way, I told them I was not an
	anti-vax. I said the problem with your story is there's a
	misallocation of vaccines which are not available for all the
	old people in Kentucky, but you've got young people in Kentucky
	taking them, because you're telling them on the website, even
	if you've had COVID, go get it. So, that was my complaint.
	On May 10, 2021, Todd O'Boyle--this name will come up in
	the Twitter file later. He is the top lobbyist in Twitter's
	Washington office, who was also Twitter's point of contact in
	the White House. He encouraged the CDC to enroll in the partner
	support program. Oh, OK. The CDC is now a partner with Twitter
	because they're in the partner support program. He said, ``In
	the future, that's the best way to get a spreadsheet like this
	reviewed.''
	Now, this is an email from--between Todd O'Boyle and the
	folks at CDC.
	By the way, let me talk to this, too. These are more of my
	conversations with the CDC, completely redacted, the subject
	thereof.
	Next one, please.
	I also found as a result of the FOIA, CDC tracks every
	tweet that a Congressman puts out, not just Republican, but
	Democrat. They keep the spreadsheet. They make it every week.
	This showed up in the FOIA for me because I'm in their
	spreadsheet that they track.
	Why is this interesting? OK. So, they're tracking
	Congressmen's tweets at CDC. They're enrolled in the partner
	support portal at Twitter. Then I found--this is why--I found
	Alex Berenson's report very interesting, because what he found
	out is that Scott Gottlieb worked hard, and Twitter complied,
	it looks like, to censor a tweet from a doctor about natural
	immunity.
	Guess what? On the same day, that doctor's tweet was
	censored, so were my tweets on natural immunity. Why is this
	important? What is consequential about the date? This is three
	days after the military vaccine mandate came out and a week
	before the Federal vaccine mandates came out.
	This truth was toxic to a narrative that Pfizer was
	spreading that Joe Biden wanted out there so that he could
	force the vaccine on everybody, whether you had natural
	immunity or not.
	Now, I actually--you guys might not agree with me on this.
	I don't think the press gets special privileges on the First
	Amendment. I don't think Congress does. I think every American,
	by virtue of being an American, has the right to free speech
	enshrined in the Constitution.
	So, I'm not so much worried that they censored a
	Congressman, but they disabled all of the comments from my
	constituents. Those are the voices they squelched. My beef is
	not with Twitter, but my beef is with the CDC and these Federal
	agencies.
	I encourage you all, if you can, to find more about this.
	Do you have any--either of you have any comments on this topic?
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes, absolutely.
	Chair Jordan. The gentleman's time has expired, but the
	gentleman may--
	Mr. Massie. I still had three seconds.
	Chair Jordan. --the witnesses may respond. OK.
	Mr. Taibbi. Just quickly, we found just yesterday a tweet
	from the Virality Project at Stanford, which is partnered with
	a number of government agencies and Twitter where they talked
	explicitly about censoring stories of true vaccine side effects
	and other true stories that they felt encouraged hesitancy.
	Mr. Massie. This isn't true.
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes, so they used the word ``true'' three times
	in this email. What's notable about this is that it reflects
	the fundamental misunderstanding of this whole disinformation
	complex--and disinformation complex. They believe that ordinary
	people can't handle difficult truths. So, they think that they
	need minders to separate out things that are controversial or
	difficult for them. Again, that's totally contrary to what
	America is all about, I think.
	Mr. Shellenberger. I will just briefly add, this is very
	disturbing because what they're doing when they're putting
	these labels on there is they're actually also trying to
	discredit you. So, it's not just--it's a form of censorship,
	but it's also a disinformation campaign. I think what Matt says
	is really important to understand--now, we went from--you go
	from a situation where we were fighting ISIS recruiting. Then
	it was Russian disinformation. Now they're in a situation where
	they're wanting to censor true information, accurate facts
	because they're worried that people might behave in ways that
	they don't want them to. That involves mind reading at a level
	that is grossly inappropriate.
	I worry even about making this defense, because let's
	remember, the First Amendment protects our right to be wrong.
	It protects our right to lie. It's bizarre to me that we would
	need to make a defense of the First Amendment and remind people
	that we have a right to be wrong--and being wrong, as Matt was
	explaining, is a big part of being a human being and having a
	democracy.
	So, this is disturbing and showing, and you're absolutely
	right to be outraged by it. There needs to be a full truth and
	reconciliation that I hope everybody would appreciate having on
	this issue, because a lot of bad behavior has come out about
	what they've done.
	Mr. Massie. Thank you. I yield back.
	Chair Jordan. Good job. The gentleman's time has expired.
	We now recognize the gentleman from New York, Mr. Gomez.
	Ms. Plaskett. Actually, excuse me, it's Ms. Sanchez.
	Chair Jordan. Oh, I'm sorry.
	Ms. Plaskett. Mr. Chair, since that went over two minutes
	with them responding, will you give an additional time?
	Chair Jordan. There's a question at the end of someone--
	it's customary if there's a question at the end of someone's
	five minutes and the witnesses haven't responded, we'll give
	them time to do. Many times, you go over, and then don't,
	there's no question.
	Ms. Plaskett. I understand that, but two minutes. OK. Thank
	you.
	Chair Jordan. That's customary, so we'll certainly do that.
	The gentlelady from California is recognized, excuse me.
	Ms. Sanchez. I would like to yield my time to Mr. Goldman.
	Mr. Goldman. Thank you, Ms. Sanchez.
	Mr. Shellenberger, first, I'd just like to compliment you
	on your choice of tie today. It seems like we're on the same
	page. I would also just like to respond to your last point and
	just remind everyone that, of course, we all believe in the
	First Amendment. The First Amendment applies to government
	prohibition of speech, not to private companies.
	I want to talk about your Twitter files No. 7, Mr.
	Shellenberger. Are you aware that Rudy Giuliani was the sole
	source of the hard drive obtained by the New York Post.
	Mr. Shellenberger. That is my understanding.
	Mr. Goldman. Are you aware that Rudy Giuliani had been
	openly cavorting with agents of Russian intelligence throughout
	2020?
	Mr. Shellenberger. That is also my understanding.
	Mr. Goldman. Now, this is the same Russian agent who had
	been feeding information to Senators Johnson and Grassley, I
	might add. Also, are you aware that Rudy Giuliani told The New
	York Times that he did not want anyone to do an analysis of the
	hard drive until it was published?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I was not aware of that exactly, but--
	Mr. Goldman. You don't dispute it?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I don't dispute it.
	Mr. Goldman. Are you aware that one of the New York Post
	reporters for the Hunter Biden story refused to put his byline
	on the story?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Goldman. Are you aware that Fox News called this story,
	quote, ``very sketchy,'' unquote?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I'm aware that somebody at Fox News said
	that, yes.
	Mr. Goldman. Correct. Bret Baier at Fox News said that.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Goldman. Are you aware that the FBI had nothing to do
	Twitter's decision to pause the New York Post story?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I am not aware of that.
	Mr. Goldman. OK. Well, let me read you the testimony from
	Yoel Roth at the hearing we had on February 8. Quote,

	The FBI was quite careful and consistent to request review of
	the accounts, but not to cross the line into advocating for
	Twitter to take any particular action.

	Then Jim Baker said, in response to the Chair's question, when
	he asked, ``Did you talk to the FBI about the Hunter Biden
	story?'' He said, ``To the best of my recollection, I did not
	talk to the FBI about the Hunter Biden story before that day.''
	In other testimony, Yoel Roth said that the information that he
	received from the FBI had nothing to do with the Hunter Biden
	story.
	Now, are you aware that there was an analysis of the hard
	drive that was done by The Washington Post at a later date?
	Mr. Shellenberger. My awareness is that multiple media
	organizations have done analyses and found the--including CBS,
	and found that it was, indeed--the laptop was authentic, and
	that nothing had been changed on it.
	Mr. Goldman. OK. So, let's just get something clear, the
	laptop that the FBI had is different than the hard drive that
	Rudy Giuliani gave to the New York Post? A hard drive, you
	agree with this, is a copy from a laptop, right?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Goldman. You are aware that hard drives can be altered,
	are you not?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Of course.
	Mr. Goldman. OK. So, are you aware that The Washington Post
	analysis of the hard drive showed that it had been altered?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I haven't heard that, but I'm also
	saying CBS verified--
	Mr. Taibbi. Politico.
	Mr. Shellenberger. --and other media organizations have
	verified.
	Mr. Goldman. We're not talking about authenticity. We're
	not talking about authenticity.
	Mr. Shellenberger. You're not really making this argument.
	OK.
	Mr. Goldman. We're not talking about authenticity.
	Mr. Shellenberger. OK.
	Mr. Goldman. We're talking about whether it's been altered.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Goldman. OK. There's no question there's some material
	on the hard drive that is authentic and accurate. Are you aware
	that there's some material that is not?
	Mr. Shellenberger. My understanding is there are copies of
	the hard drive that have been tampered with. That media
	organizations, including CBS, have verified that the laptop in
	question was not tampered with.
	Mr. Goldman. I don't know what the laptop in question, but
	let's move on. Because you said in your Twitter files, am I
	correct, that every single fact in the New York Post story was
	accurate?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Goldman. OK. Do you recall that the first paragraph of
	that Post story said that then-Vice President Joe Biden
	pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor general because he was
	investigating Burisma where Hunter Biden was on the board?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Goldman. I have here, which I'd like to enter into the
	record, the Trump Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report--300 pages
	by the House Intelligence Committee. Did you review this report
	before you said that every fact in this story was accurate?
	Chair Jordan. Without objection, the material will be
	entered in the record.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Did I read that before I wrote the
	Twitter files? No. Aware of the contents--
	Mr. Goldman. If you read this you would have known that
	every single State Department and Trump Administration expert
	on Ukraine said that Vice-President Joe Biden, in concert with
	the European Union and the IMF, was executing official U.S.
	policy by encouraging Ukraine to fire the prosecutor general
	because he was not prosecuting corruption and was not
	prosecuting companies like Burisma. So, that story,
	notwithstanding your allegations, was false. I yield back.
	Chair Jordan. The gentleman yields back. I now recognize--
	the Chair now recognizes the gentleman from Florida, Mr. Gaetz,
	for five minutes.
	Mr. Gaetz. Impeachment nostalgia always warms my heart, but
	we are here focused on a weaponized government, a whole-of-
	government approach that has been turned against the American
	people. While Rudy Giuliani may have been running around with
	the laptop in 2020, what is an indisputable fact is that the
	FBI had the laptop in 2019. It appears that the last round of
	questioning misses the boat, that it's true. The information is
	authentic. The pictures, the videos, the emails--there hasn't
	been a single allegation that there is a single doctored email.
	Unlike what we saw before the FISA courts, where the FBI itself
	was doctoring emails to try to smear President Trump.
	I have to get to a question I'm amazed hasn't been asked of
	the two of you. This FTC consent decree, where it is government
	action subject to rigorous scrutiny under First Amendment
	standards, government action demanding that your names be
	listed. How did it feel when you found out that you were being
	expressly targeted by a government document based on your
	reporting?
	Mr. Shellenberger. It was chilling--I mean, it's
	disturbing. I never thought that would happen in the United
	States of America to be perfectly honest. I've lived in a bunch
	of authoritarian countries. I visited a lot of authoritarian
	countries. I never thought this kind of thing would be going on
	here.
	Mr. Gaetz. The nexus to authoritarianism is the desire to
	control the nature of truth itself. Our understandings change
	about things. We learn new changes. We challenge prior
	assumptions. If a bunch of people in Washington, DC, get to
	decide what the truth is and then enforce it on the country and
	then punish and target those who report on their conduct, we
	are drifting more toward that. How did you feel, Mr. Taibbi,
	when you saw your name?
	Mr. Taibbi. I was upset, obviously. I lived in Russia
	during the nineties and early 2000's, so I was there when Putin
	took power. I was friends with a group of very brave muckraking
	reporters in Russia, many of whom didn't make it. A few of them
	were murdered after Putin came to power.
	So, I've always been conscious of how the risks that other
	reporters take in other countries are inconsiderably severe.
	That's one of the reasons why I'm motivated to protect the
	First Amendment, because our country has the best protections
	for reporters in the world. This kind of thing where the
	government is looking for information about reporters, it's
	usually a canary in the coal mine that something worse is
	coming in terms of an effort to exercise control over the
	press. So, on that level, it's absolutely disturbing.
	Also, the Aspen Institute report that we published today,
	talked about today in the Twitter files thread, one of their
	recommendations was that the FTC be empowered to have unlimited
	power to search all data of private companies so that they
	could more freely and more accurately search the speech of
	ordinary citizens.
	Mr. Gaetz. So, as we're trying to put downward pressure on
	the government's expanding authority to be able to engage in
	what we see mostly from dictatorships, what you're reporting,
	and what you're observing is that, actually, they view this as
	a growth industry, the information business, right?
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes.
	Mr. Gaetz. This Censorship Industrial Complex is a growth
	industry to the government.
	Mr. Shellenberger. I think the key thing to also--yes, and
	the thing to understand is that NSS--
	Mr. Gaetz. What is NewsGuard, and how are they part of the
	Censorship Industrial Complex?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, and by the way, we talk about
	Richard Stengel, he is on the board of NewsGuard. NewsGuard and
	the disinformation index are both U.S. Government funded
	entities who are working to drive advertiser revenue away from
	disfavored publications and toward the ones that they favor.
	This is totally inappropriate.
	Mr. Gaetz. Now, what I'm used to in this town is government
	officials pick their favorite outlets, and they give them the
	best scoops, and they give them the best stories. There's a
	fusion of media and government that has long made me
	uncomfortable. What you're describing now is literally the
	directing of revenue to certain media companies over other
	media companies designed and implemented with the U.S.
	Government funding and support.
	Mr. Shellenberger. That's right.
	Mr. Gaetz. That is an astonishing--if we do not take a look
	at NewsGuard, we have failed. You talked about the brave
	reporting that occurs and what it subjects you to. I would
	suggest there's also political bravery that I have observed.
	While we've only heard from Democrats on this panel, attacking
	you, discrediting you, a lot like they've tried to attack and
	discredit FBI whistleblowers who are truth tellers, there are
	brave Democrats who still believe in free speech. I would
	advise my colleagues to look at the comments of Ro Khanna who
	has been deeply, deeply concerned about this weaponization of
	government. He believes these Twitter files are indeed worthy
	of our focus and our energy, and that is exactly what we are
	going to do. I yield back.
	Chair Jordan. I thank the gentleman. I would now recognize
	the gentlelady from New York.
	Mr. Goldman. I still have my five minutes, Mr. Chair.
	Chair Jordan. Oh, that's right. I forgot.
	Mr. Goldman. I understand why you may not want to.
	Chair Jordan. The gentleman from New York is recognized for
	five minute.
	Mr. Goldman. Mr. Shellenberger, I may have misheard
	earlier, but is it your testimony here today that you disagree
	with the two indictments by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that
	definitively established that Russia interfered in our 2016
	election through social media disinformation and the hack-and-
	leak operation.
	Mr. Shellenberger. No, I don't disagree.
	Mr. Goldman. OK. Mr. Taibbi, do you disagree with those two
	indictments?
	Mr. Taibbi. Well, indictments aren't a thing to do--
	Mr. Goldman. Do you disagree--there are about 40 or 50
	pages. Do you disagree with the evidence outlined in those
	indictments?
	Mr. Taibbi. Well, indictments are just charges.
	Mr. Goldman. I just asked you: Do you disagree with the
	evidence included in those indictments, yes or no?
	Mr. Taibbi. I'm not on the jury of that case. I couldn't
	possibly say yes or no.
	Mr. Goldman. OK. Because you said earlier, I believe, that
	you did not see Russia--that could not confirm that Russia
	interfered in our election in 2016, that you don't believe
	that. Is that your testimony here today, you don't believe that
	they did?
	Mr. Taibbi. I think it's possible that they may have on a
	small scale, but certainly not to what's been reported.
	Mr. Goldman. What's been reported or what's been included
	in the indictments?
	Mr. Taibbi. Well, again, indictments are allegations.
	They're not proof.
	Mr. Goldman. I understand. It's pretty detailed
	allegations.
	Mr. Taibbi. In the Mueller indictment, by the way--
	Mr. Goldman. You should go read the indictment and then
	come back and tell us if you actually think there's no proof of
	it.
	Mr. Taibbi. Well--
	Mr. Goldman. Let me move on, please.
	Mr. Taibbi. Well, some of those things happened by the way
	when the--
	Mr. Goldman. Please, let me move on. That's how this works.
	You should know this by now.
	So, do you disagree with the Special Counsel Mueller's
	conclusion in his report, Mr. Taibbi, that the Trump campaign
	knew about Russia's interference, they welcomed it, and they
	used it for their benefit? You have no reason to disagree with
	that, don't you? You have no information.
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes.
	Mr. Goldman. So, after that foreign interference in our
	2016 election, Twitter and other social media companies
	naturally wanted to work with the intelligence community to
	stop Vladimir Putin from interfering in our elections again.
	Mr. Taibbi, do you think it's a legitimate pursuit of the
	FBI to try to stop foreign interference in our elections?
	Mr. Taibbi. Again, sir, will I be allowed to answer this
	question, or--
	Mr. Goldman. It's a yes-or-no question. Do you think it's a
	legitimate pursuit of the FBI to--
	Mr. Taibbi. It's not a yes-or-no answer. It depends.
	Mr. Goldman. No, no, no, no, no. I'm not asking how. I'm
	saying, as an objective, do you think it's a legitimate
	objective of the FBI to stop foreign interference in our
	elections?
	Mr. Taibbi. I think it's a legitimate objective to stop
	actual foreign interference.
	Mr. Goldman. OK. I don't know what the difference is, but
	that's fine. So, since Russia used social media disinformation,
	according to Special Counsel Mueller, I understand you may
	disagree with the allegations to interfere in our 2016
	elections, are you trying to say that the FBI had no basis to
	inform social media companies about efforts to potentially
	interfere in our elections after 2016?
	Mr. Taibbi. I can tell you that I read internal Twitter
	emails where Twitter expressly talked about the fact that the
	FBI couldn't possibly know more than they did about whether or
	not there was Russian interference, and that, in fact, even
	they couldn't determine which accounts were actually IRA and
	which ones weren't.
	Mr. Goldman. OK. I understand you like to filibuster. That
	was not an answer to my question, but I'll move on.
	Mr. Shellenberger, in all the emails that you reviewed, did
	the FBI ever direct Twitter to take down any accounts or remove
	any posts?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Goldman. They directed Twitter to remove them, or they
	said these may violate your terms and services?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Goldman. Which.
	Mr. Shellenberger. I think that's an accurate use of the
	word ``direct.''
	Mr. Goldman. They said these may violate--you think that
	saying that--saying that these may violate your terms and
	conditions is the same--
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, I do.
	Mr. Goldman. --as directing them to take an account down.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, I think if a police officer says,
	all right, well, you broke the law.
	Mr. Goldman. That's very helpful. That's very helpful. I'm
	glad to know that you think flagging--
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Goldman. --something for a private company to make a
	decision about what they should do is a direction.
	Now, Mr. Chair--
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Goldman. --you have repeatedly said that this Committee
	is all about protecting the First Amendment.
	Chair Jordan. Uh-huh.
	Mr. Goldman. What is unfortunate here is that we are
	talking about Twitter, and that we were not talking about
	Republican government officials around the country who are
	banning books. We are not talking about--
	Chair Jordan. Will the gentleman yield?
	Mr. Goldman. No, I will not. We are not talking about
	Donald Trump jailing his former counsel to prohibit him from
	publishing a book that the President did not want. The former
	President literally jailed his enemy, and we're here talking
	about Twitter. Twitter. Even with Twitter, you cannot find
	actual evidence of any direct government censorship of any
	lawful speech. When I say ``lawful,'' I mean noncriminal
	speech. Because plenty of speech is noncriminal.
	Chair Jordan. I'll give you one. The gentleman's times has
	expired. I'd unanimous consent to enter into the record the
	following email from Clark Humphrey, Executive Office of the
	Presidency White House Office. On January 23, 2021, that's the
	Biden Administration, 4:39 a.m.:

	Hey, folks--this goes to Twitter--Hey, folks, I wanted to use
	the term--they used the term Mr. Goldman just used--wanted to
	flag the below tweet and then wondering if we can get moving on
	the process for having it removed ASAP.

	That is--
	Mr. Goldman. Could you read the below tweet.
	Chair Jordan. Then, if we can keep an eye out for tweets
	that fall in this same genre, that would be great. This is a
	tweet on various--the various--you see the Thomas--
	Mr. Goldman. Can you just--for the fullness of the record,
	can you read the--because I have not seen this--can you read
	the tweet that it's referencing?
	Chair Jordan. I don't have the tweet here with me--
	Mr. Goldman. Oh, shocking.
	Chair Jordan. --but the gentleman's point was--tell us--you
	said, no time did government try to tell Twitter to take that--
	to explicitly remove something.
	Mr. Goldman. No, I said explicitly remove lawful speech.
	Lawful speech. We're going to conflate. The First Amendment
	does not--is not absolute.
	Chair Jordan. This is something from Robert Kennedy, Jr.
	Ms. Plaskett. For the record--
	Chair Jordan. I assume that's lawful speech.
	Ms. Plaskett. --as a point of order, Mr. Chair.
	Mr. Goldman. Because Robert Kennedy, Jr., said it, that's
	why it's lawful speech?
	Ms. Plaskett. Just a minute. Just a minute, Mr. Goldman.
	Chair Jordan. All I'm saying is you said, ``at no time did
	the government explicitly say to take a tweet down.'' Here we
	have it right here from the White House.
	Ms. Plaskett. Mr. Chair?
	Chair Jordan. They couldn't even wait two days. Two days
	into this administration they were asking Twitter to take
	something down. We will get you the underlying tweet.
	Ms. Plaskett. Thank you.
	Chair Jordan. With that I recognize the gentlelady from New
	York.
	Ms. Plaskett. Will you place it into the record as well,
	sir, the underlying tweet?
	Chair Jordan. Robert Kennedy, Jr., is talking about--he's
	talking about Hank Aaron's death after he received the vaccine.
	That's what the tweet is about. We'll give you a copy.
	Ms. Plaskett. Thank you.
	Chair Jordan. I think that's--and I would say one thing,
	that's.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Mr. Chair, I--
	Chair Jordan. I would say one thing, that's--
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Mr. Chair, I ask unanimous consent--
	Chair Jordan. --that's certainly lawful speech.
	Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Mr. Chair, I ask unanimous consent
	to enter the tweet that you referenced into the record of the
	Committee.
	Chair Jordan. Without objection, we'll enter that into the
	record, along with the statement from the White House, the
	Biden White House two days into the administration when they're
	directly attacking the people's First Amendment liberties.
	Chair Jordan. With that I recognize the gentlelady from New
	York for five minutes.
	Ms. Stefanik. I want to yield to Mr. Johnson.
	Mr. Johnson of Louisiana. Thank you. Just to point out,
	quickly, that Mr. Goldman is proving himself to be a master of
	obfuscation. He said, the First Amendment applied to government
	censorship of speech and not private companies. What we're
	talking about and what the Chair just illustrated is that what
	we have here and what your Twitter files show is the Federal
	Government has partnered with private companies to censor and
	silence the speech of American citizens. I yield back to the
	gentlelady.
	Ms. Stefanik. I just came from an open hearing with FBI
	Director Chris Wray. He said under oath that no one from the
	FBI communicated with Twitter regarding the Hunter Biden laptop
	story. Based upon both of your courageous reporting, can you
	address that?
	Mr. Shellenberger. I mean, we saw--like I said, we don't
	know. It's at this point we just have to take his word on it.
	What we saw was a huge amount of FBI communications to Twitter.
	We saw the former deputy Chief of Staff, the former general
	counsel showing up at Twitter, right at the critical period.
	So, I find a lot of suspicious activity. I would like to ask
	him a bunch of questions about that because I find it very
	suspicious and unresolved.
	Ms. Stefanik. Mr. Taibbi, do you have comments on that?
	Mr. Taibbi. We do know that there was a teleporter
	communication that had 10 documents in it just before the story
	broke, but we don't know what those documents were, and so we
	can't suppose.
	Ms. Stefanik. Well, I don't take his word for it. We have
	lots of examples where it has not been--they've not been
	accurate from that particular agency when it comes to
	testifying before Congress. So, it is our job in this Committee
	to get to the truth, to shine sunlight and transparency for the
	American people.
	I want to ask you both about the Aspen Digital Hack and
	Dump Working Group, which involved an 11-day scenario in
	October 2020, that began with the imaginary release of
	falsified record, that's what they claim, related to Hunter
	Biden's controversial employment by the Ukrainian energy
	company, Burisma.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Right.
	Ms. Stefanik. This was if they knew, because they did know.
	So, I would like your comments, Mr. Shellenberger, these were
	the files that you did extensive reporting on about how
	concerning this is, and how this is truly the definition of the
	weaponization against free speech and suppressing accurate
	reporting.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes, so there's actually two things, and
	one of them we just discovered recently, which is there was a
	Stanford Cyber Policy Institute Report which said that--which
	was, in menacing terms, telling journalists that they should
	abandon the Pentagon principle. Again, this is the Pentagon
	paper's principle. This the idea that--if Daniel Ellsberg
	brings you materials he's taken from the Pentagon, about how
	the war in Vietnam is going. The New York Times and The
	Washington Post publish those, that was considered one of the
	greatest moments of American journalism. Here you have Stanford
	Cyber Policy Center saying, you should abandon that principle.
	You should have instead made the issue about, frankly the
	theories about where it might have come from.
	Then you had the Aspen workshop, which was attended, by the
	way The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, Wikipedia,
	Facebook, Twitter, many other journalists where they
	basically--you read it, it's like a kind of programming of the
	journalists that they should not follow this longstanding
	journalistic principle of taking materials from a hack and
	leak, or any other situation and take them seriously. So, I
	mean, you read this, and it feels like a kind of brainwashing
	exercise that Aspen and Stanford were running against American
	journalists in the social media companies.
	Ms. Stefanik. Mr. Taibbi, any comments?
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes, I think there were a couple of moments in
	the Twitter files that really speak to a kind of larger
	problem. In the first Twitter files we saw an exchange between
	Representative Ro Khanna and Vijaya Gadde where he's trying to
	explain the basics of speech law in America. She's seems
	completely unaware of what, for instance, New York Times v.
	Sullivan is. There are other cases like Bartnicki v. Vopper
	which legalized the publication of stolen material. That's very
	important for any journalist to know.
	I think most of these people are tech executives, and they
	don't know what the law is around speech and around reporting.
	In this case, and in 2016, you are dealing with true material.
	There is no basis to restrict the publication of true material
	no matter who the source is and how you get it. Journalists
	have always understood that. This has never been an issue or a
	controversial issue until very recently.
	Mr. Shellenberger. By the way, just one quick thing I'll
	add. That's the exact same strategy of the malinformation,
	misleading--in other words, they were saying, they were saying,
	even if the material you think is true, it could lead people to
	have conclusions that we don't want them to have, and,
	therefore, you should change your journalism because of that.
	So, we're so far down the slippery slope. You've crashed at
	that point. I mean, it's a disturbing trend in journalism and
	social media and in the relationship from the intelligence
	community to these organizations.
	Ms. Stefanik. How have you been targeted since the
	publication of the Twitter files?
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady's time has expired. We'll give
	a quick answer, if we can.
	Mr. Taibbi. Again, I have known journalists who have
	suffered real brutal harms in my career. So, they've said a lot
	of nasty things about me upon Twitter, but it hasn't been so
	bad, I would say. The FTC thing is the only thing that's
	legitimately concerning, and that's not really for my sake,
	it's more because it's a general problem for journalists
	everywhere.
	Mr. Shellenberger. I've been censored on Facebook since the
	year 2020 for writing accurate information in an article that
	went viral. I remain censored. They continue to flag warnings
	on post that I write that have nothing to do with the
	environment. We now know that one of the U.S. Government's
	funded organizations has put out a report that specifically
	targets me and presents disinformation about my own position on
	climate change. So, I've got a lot at stake here.
	Ms. Stefanik. I yield back.
	Ms. Plaskett. Mr. Chair, may I ask unanimous consent to
	enter into the record a letter dated June 25, 2020, to Mark
	Zuckerberg from Chad Wolf, the Acting Secretary of Homeland
	Security, in which he asks Twitter--asks Facebook to keep
	Americans safe by taking appropriate action, consistent with
	your terms of service against content that promotes, incites,
	or assists the commission of imminent legal activities. Those
	committed to protecting free exchange of ideas should not turn
	a blind eye to illegal activity and violence fermenting in your
	platform. This is after the summer in which Black Lives Matter
	protests took place.
	Chair Jordan. Without objection.
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady from Florida is recognized for
	five minutes.
	Ms. Cammack. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to our
	witnesses for appearing here today. I know it doesn't feel
	exactly warm and fuzzy, but believe me, I think what you guys
	are doing is very important.
	[Slide.]
	Ms. Cammack. We're here to discuss the weaponization of
	government. I want to follow-up on my colleague Representative
	Massie's comments on the CDC. Up on the screen, you can see an
	email from October 2020. This is from then-NIH Director Francis
	Collins to Dr. Anthony Fauci. It goes on in to say this
	proposal, talking about the Great Barrington Declaration, is
	from three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary.
	It seems to be getting a lot of attention. Even a signature, a
	co-signature from a Nobel Prize winner.
	A key line in here that I would like to point out. There
	needs to be a, quote,

	. . . quick and devastating published takedown of its
	premises. I don't see anything like that online yet. Is it
	underway? Signed Francis

	Now, what I find interesting is if you fast forward into
	June 2021, the Biden Administration was raging at social media
	companies. There are communications that we can produce, for
	the record, that State we would like you to come combat quote,
	``misinformation.'' Now, we think, so the Twitter files know,
	that Twitter executives were using the term visibility
	filtering, and that really to the best of the American general
	public was shadow banning, correct?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Yes.
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes.
	Ms. Cammack. So, all of a sudden, we saw a rash of
	blacklists created by Twitter at the highest levels that were
	taking down some of the signatories and creators of this very
	Barrington Declaration, correct? This is to both of you.
	Mr. Taibbi. I haven't seen that.
	Mr. Shellenberger. I haven't seen that either.
	Ms. Cammack. So, would you agree that there was a blacklist
	created in 2021.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Oh. Sorry. Yes. Jay Bhattacharya--
	Ms. Cammack. Yes.
	Mr. Shellenberger. --the Stanford professor who I don't
	think anybody considers a fringe epidemiologist was indeed--I'm
	sorry, I didn't piece it together--he was indeed fringe
	visibility filters.
	Ms. Cammack. Correct. So, this blacklist that was created
	that really was used to deplatform a reduced visibility--
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes.
	Ms. Cammack. --create lists internally where people
	couldn't even see their profiles, that was used against doctors
	and scientists who produced information that was contrary to
	what the CDC was putting out, despite the fact that we now know
	that what they were publishing had scientific basis and, in
	fact, was valid?
	Mr. Shellenberger. Absolutely. Not only that, but these are
	secret blacklists. So, Professor Bhattacharya had no idea he
	was on it. I mean, this is East Germany Stasi kind of behavior.
	That's what this is. The Great Barrington Declaration, by the
	way, I was skeptical at the time, but it actually now looks
	pretty good in terms of how response to COVID. Even if it was
	totally wrong, it still deserved--this is the whole point of
	the First Amendment is that--
	Ms. Cammack. Absolutely.
	Mr. Shellenberger. --I think, we all have the experience of
	you're not right until you're wrong a lot. You actually have to
	have that debate and that conversation. So, by repressing that,
	we actually stifled a much broader conversation we could have
	had about how to effectively respond to COVID because they were
	secretly blacklisting people like Jay Bhattacharya.
	Ms. Cammack. I think to the bigger point that Americans are
	concerned about when it comes to the weaponization of
	government, this isn't Republican or a Democrat issue, this is
	an American issue. You had individuals, millions of Americans
	who, in many cases, were being mandated to take an experimental
	vaccine. When those that wanted to consider taking it were
	trying to make an informed decision, you had opinions that were
	being silenced because it didn't fit a specific narrative
	pushed by the Biden Administration, correct.
	Mr. Shellenberger. Absolutely, correct. That's why we use
	the language of disfavored ideas and disfavored people, because
	it doesn't fall neatly among left and right lines. If there's
	anything going on here, it tends to be more of a
	disproportionate blacklisting of more populist voices, or just
	ideas that we would consider slightly outside of the Overton
	window, the mainstream opinion at the time. The Overton window
	moves--
	Ms. Cammack. Right.
	Mr. Shellenberger. --and so, the idea that you're just
	going to narrow the entire--what's acceptable on social media
	to what is mainstream at the time would basically freeze us and
	not allow the society to progress and for knowledge to grow and
	for the democracy to function.
	Ms. Cammack. With the 14 seconds that I have left, Mr.
	Taibbi, you would like to weigh in on any of this that we have
	talked about and why this is a direct threat to Americans
	today, I would appreciate it.
	Mr. Taibbi. Yes, just quickly, again, we yesterday
	discovered this email talking about the suppression of people
	telling their own stories of true vaccine side effects. So,
	these are people who are telling about their own experiences,
	things that happened to them that are true. They're being
	suppressed because what anti-disinformation does is the
	opposite of what the press does. They are aiming for what the
	narrative is. They already know in advance what they're looking
	for. Whereas a journalist goes into a story, does not know what
	the truth is. We often find that the thing we expect to find
	turns out to be completely different. They know in advance what
	they're looking for, and that's why this is so dangerous.
	Ms. Cammack. My time has expired. I yield back. Thank you
	two.
	Chair Jordan. The gentlelady yields back. I want to thank
	our witnesses for being here today. I think maybe if we can get
	this right and stop this--and what I read--with legislation,
	appropriators, whatever it takes, we can stop this. I think in
	the future, people will look back and look at your courage as
	people in journalism, in the press, to come here with what
	you've been facing, what you've had to endure. Now, with the
	idea that the FTC is coming after you, that's something that I
	think is present darn important and certainly noteworthy. So,
	we appreciate you sitting here for 2\1/2\ hours, taking the
	questions you did, but giving so much valuable information to
	this Committee who is--certainly on our side--committed to
	protecting the First Amendment and peoples' right to speak.
	So, that concludes today's hearing. Again, we thank you
	both for being here. Without objection, all Members will have
	five legislative days to submit additional written questions
	for the witnesses or additional materials for the record.
	Without objection, the hearing is adjourned.
	[Whereupon, at 12:42 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]

	All materials submitted for the record by Members of the
	Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal
	Government can be found at: https://docs.house.gov/Committee/
	Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventID=115442.

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