(Headline USA) Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., slammed the Biden administration this week for allegedly withholding information from Congress about the Department of Homeland Security’s push to combat “disinformation.”
Hawley is one of several Republican lawmakers who have demanded answers from DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas after a bombshell report from the Intercept revealed that the agency is still working with Big Tech companies to suppress “disinformation” on a range of topics, including COVID-19.
The DHS even has its own landing page on Facebook, called the Government Reporting System, that allows government officials to directly flag content on Facebook and Instagram that they’d like removed.
Hawley accused the DHS in a letter this week of hiding information about this reporting system from lawmakers, and slammed Mayorkas for a “flagrant disregard of congressional oversight requests and federal law.”
“It is clear from the latest reports that you have deliberately withheld documents from Congress and the American public about your efforts to suppress speech,” Hawley wrote in a letter, according to Fox News.
“While you were publicly announcing that you had disbanded the Disinformation Governance Board, your Department was still ‘having biweekly meetings’ behind closed doors with Facebook to suppress speech,” he continued. “This is unacceptable. You must immediately disclose, publicly, all your efforts to suppress speech.”
Mayorkas is due to appear before the Senate Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees later this week. Hawley sits on both panels.
DHS defended its efforts to crack down on “disinformation,” arguing in a statement that it is “focused on disinformation that threatens the security of the American people, including disinformation spread by foreign states such as Russia, China, and Iran, or other adversaries such as transnational criminal organizations and human smuggling organizations.”
The agency is “charged with safeguarding the United States against threats to its security, including threats exacerbated by disinformation,” the statement added.
