Lawsuit accuses President, Karine Jean-Pierre, ‘Mary Poppins of disinformation’ and slew of officials of ‘a disturbing amount of collusion’ with social media firms to quash critical stories

  • Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri are behind the lawsuit 
  • It names 67 government officials or entities as having ‘worked hand-in-hand’ with social media companies to censor stories on elections, COVID, & economy
  • They’re seeking to depose ‘key defendants’ and will ask a judge on Friday
  • ‘This egregious attack on our First Amendment will be met with an equally full-hearted defense of the rights of the American people,’ Louisiana AG Landry said

The Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri are accusing the Biden administration of having ‘worked hand-in-hand’ with social media giants to ‘censor’ news stories that reflect negatively on the White House.

‘Throughout this case, we have uncovered a disturbing amount of collusion between Big Tech and Big Government,’ Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said in a statement on Monday.

‘This egregious attack on our First Amendment will be met with an equally full-hearted defense of the rights of the American people.’

The 164-page lawsuit was filed late last week, but an updated Monday filing indicates that the Republican officials are widening their legal efforts to target 47 more government departments, agencies and officials in addition to the 20 defendants originally listed.

President Joe Biden, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Nina Jankowicz, who was meant to head Biden’s now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board, are among the dozens of defendants listed in the suit.

The board’s critics had decried it as ‘Orwellian’ and mocked Jankowicz as the White House’s ‘Mary Poppins of disinformation’ after a social media surfaced of her singing about the dangers of misinformation to the tune of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.’

It’s also a central focus of the Republican-led lawsuit, which accuses Jankowicz of arranging a ‘cozy’ meeting between Twitter executives and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, as well as other top officials, to discuss ‘public-private partnerships’ and election security.

‘Jankowicz has called for more aggressive censorship of election-related speech by social-media platforms, and has implied that social-media censorship of election-related speech should never relent or be reduced,’ the lawsuit states.

Other topics the Biden administration is accused of working to censor are stories on COVID-19 and more recently, White House officials’ insistence that the US economy is not careening toward a downturn.

‘[S]ocial-media platforms are beginning to censor criticisms of the Biden Administration’s attempt to redefine the word “recession” in light of recent news that the U.S. economy has suffered two consecutive quarters of reduction in GDP,’ the suit claims.

It points to a Fox News article about Facebook fact-checking an economist who claimed the US was in a recession.

‘Thus, Defendants’ conduct alleged herein has created, with extraordinary efficacy, a situation where Americans seeking to exercise their core free-speech right to criticize the President of the United States are subject to aggressive prior restraint by private companies acting at the bidding of government officials.’

The attorneys general argue that such coverage ‘is intolerable’ by First Amendment standards.