“As Attorney General, I will protect the Constitution, which includes defending the fundamental right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment. The First Amendment is the cornerstone of our republic because the founders understood that the remedy to false speech has always been counter speech, not government censorship,” said Attorney General Bailey. “This case is the most important free speech lawsuit in a generation, as we highlight more than 1,400 facts showing the Biden Administration’s blatant coercion and collusion with Big Tech social media companies to suppress speech it disagrees with. I will not rest until the court blocks unelected bureaucrats from violating our constitutional right to free and open debate.”
“The overwhelming evidence is clear: the highest levels of our federal government are suppressing the First Amendment rights of Americans who have opposing views,” said Attorney General Landry. “This egregious and unlawful viewpoint censorship by the White House, FBI, CDC, CISA, and other agencies not only chills speech; but it also unjustly inflicts grave and irreparable injuries on citizens and states, whose duty it is to protect their fundamental rights.”
Attorneys General Bailey and Landry establish unconscionable federal censorship activities – including, but not limited to:
- Fauci’s involvement in laundering lies into medical journals in an attempt to bury the lab-leak theory (to save himself from embarrassment given that he had been involved in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses).
- White House officials like Rob Flaherty, Andrew Slavitt, and Jennifer Psaki have engaged in a relentless pressure campaign, both in public and in private, to coerce platforms into censoring disfavored viewpoints on social media.
- Surgeon General Murthy and his staff coordinate closely with the White House in this pressure campaign, causing social-media platforms to scramble and assure federal officials that “we hear your call to do more” to censor disfavored viewpoints.
- The CDC flags specific social-media posts for censorship, organizes “BOLO” (“Be On the Lookout”) meetings to tell platforms what should be censored, and serves as the definitive fact-checker with final authority to dictate exactly what speech will be removed from social media.
- Dr. Fauci orchestrated an elaborate campaign of trickery and deception to induce social-media platforms to censor the lab-leak theory and other viewpoints he disfavors.
- The FBI, likewise, deliberately planted false information about “hack-and-leak” operations to deceive social-media platforms into censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.
- The FBI, CISA, and the GEC collude with social-media platforms in hundreds of meetings about misinformation, and those agencies repeatedly flag huge quantities of First Amendment-protected speech to compliant platforms for censorship.
- CISA “switchboards” reports of so-called “misinformation” from state and local governments to platforms for censorship.
- CISA and the GEC are pervasively intertwined with massive government-private censorship enterprises like the Election Integrity Partnership, a collaboration among government, social-media platforms, and activist nonprofits to monitor, track, and censor enormous volumes of Americans’ speech on social media.
- Federal health officials in the Surgeon General’s Office, the CDC, and HHS collaborate in a similar censorship enterprise called the Virality Project, which procures the censorship of enormous quantities of First Amendment-protected speech.
“Altogether, these censorship activities by federal officials and agencies constitute a gargantuan federal “Censorship Enterprise.” This enterprise is highly effective—it has stifled debate and criticism of government policy on social media about some of the most pressing issues of our time. And its activities are flagrantly unconstitutional,” noted Attorneys General Bailey and Landry in their request of the Court to stop to these egregious violations of the First Amendment.
Missouri v. Biden was filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana on May 5, 2022. They filed for a motion for discovery on June 17, 2022, and that motion was granted on July 12, 2022, clearing the way for Missouri and Louisiana to gather discovery and documents from the Biden Administration and social media companies.
Missouri and Louisiana deposed top-ranking officials in the federal government under oath, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, Eric Waldo of the Surgeon General’s Office, Carol Crawford of the CDC, Brian Scully of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Daniel Kimmage of the State Department.
The motion for preliminary injunction can be read here
The proposed findings of fact in support of their motion for preliminary injunction can be read here