Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, used a familiar refrain in an effort to bludgeon and continue censoring conservative free-speech platform Parler: Russia did it.
On Monday, Maloney drafted a letter to Parler CEO Jeffrey Wernick to demand information about its financing and potential ties to foreign entities.
“Since the attacks, numerous Parler users have been arrested and charged for their roles, with the Department of Justice citing in several instances the threats that individuals made through Parler in the days leading up to and following the attack,” Maloney said. “Individuals with ties to the January 6 assault should not—and must not—be allowed to hide behind the veil of anonymity provided by shell companies.”
No evidence has suggested that Parler—which counts among its top financial backers prominent Fox News contributor Dan Bongino—has any ties to Russian funding.
However, the Washington Post, run by far-left former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, breathlessly claimed that the free-speech platform might have allowed alleged Russian disinformation to remain on its site without baselessly censoring or contextualizing it.
The dubious claim echoed those made by Democrats for years during their fishing expeditions to undermine former president Donald Trump—even as social-media publishers like Twitter and Facebook, as well as Amazon, draw increasingly on their ties to China as a major financial backer.
House Democrats have even remained silent on the Chinese infiltration within their own ranks after Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., was revealed to have maintained a sexual relationship with a Chinese honey-trap spy.
According to Maloney, who cited a “report” from the disreputable clickbait site BuzzFeed, Parler might also have offered Trump a 40% ownership stake in the platform.
The deal was never finalized, and it appears Trump had no involvement in it, if he even had knowledge of it.
“The president was never part of the discussions,” former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale told BuzzFeed.
“The discussions were never that substantive,” he continued. “And this was just one of many things the campaign was looking into to deal with the cancel culture of Silicon Valley.”
Nonetheless, Maloney pounced on the possibility that those negotiations may have been tantamount to bribery.
