WASHINGTON, D.C. – The FBI is currently the subject of a lawsuit filed by conservative legal group America First Legal (AFL), which alleges that the agency had plotted with Big Tech companies to censor information posted online about the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” news story prior to the 2020 presidential election.
AFL, headed up by former Trump White House advisor Stephen Miller, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in a Washington, D.C., federal court Tuesday. According to court documents, AFL claims that the FBI’s communications with tech and social media companies such as Facebook to “censor news and information” about the laptop were illegal because they failed to publicize them.
Hunter Biden originally left his laptop in a Delaware repair shop in 2019, which was later seized by the FBI after it was revealed there was compromising – and potentially illegal – information on it; said information has driven calls for investigations into the troubled son of President Joe Biden and his alleged illicit business dealings with foreign governments and businesses.
AFL had originally sent a FOIA request to the FBI in August, asking for a public release of the agency’s communications with Facebook during a period of time ranging from October 1 and November 15 in 2020; however, the FBI rejected the request, calling it “overly broad” and prompting AFL to file their lawsuit this week.
In the court documents, AFL claims that the FBI and tech companies conspired to “interfere” with the election between then-President Donald Trump and his challenger – and eventual winner – Joe Biden.
“The evidence is that the FBI and Big Tech, including Facebook, colluded to interfere with the 2020 Presidential election first by falsely and maliciously labeling the laptop ‘Russian disinformation’ and then by censoring and/or discrediting all news about its contents,” the lawsuit reads. “Now, barely a month before the 2022 midterm election, FBI officials continue to suppress information of great interest to American voters and stonewall AFL’s request for records relating to the FBI’s collusive scheme with Facebook to censor news and information about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
The CEO of Meta – the parent company of Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that he had instructed his social media platform to censor the Hunter Biden Laptop story in 2020 after the FBI had reached out to him. Likewise, Twitter had temporarily suspended the account of the New York Post – the media outlet that had originally broken the story – after they had tweeted out the article about the laptop, which at the time was derided as being full of Russian propaganda but was later revealed to be true.
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