January 1, Biden’s DHS Agency “Likely” Breached First Amendment, Court Says

The Biden administration has landed in hot water over allegations of violating the First Amendment. A federal court recently ordered an injunction on a key agency of the Department of Homeland Security, citing probable First Amendment transgressions. This decision was spurred by the agency’s reported collaboration with social media giants to effectively muzzle “election-related speech.”

In a development this Tuesday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals broadened the range of an existing injunction. This move restricts the Biden administration’s communications with major tech corporations and now encompasses the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) under the Department of Homeland Security’s umbrella.

GOP Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, the spearhead of the litigation opposing the Biden administration, painted a grim picture of CISA’s role. He termed it the “nerve center” of the White House’s expansive “censorship enterprise.”

Bailey went on to assert that CISA collaborated with the FBI to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, stating, “CISA was created to protect Americans from foreign attack, and now it has begun targeting its own citizens.”

Fox News Digital recently acquired insights from Bailey, where he elaborated on the court’s discoveries. A trio of judges found that CISA was the principal link between the FBI and social media platforms. They emphasized that CISA collaborated tightly with the FBI to persuade these platforms to overhaul their content moderation policies, especially concerning “hack-and-leak” content.

Diving deeper, the court order pointed out that CISA’s operations, which seemed to be simple “switchboarding” or forwarding flagged posts from state and local election officers to these platforms, concealed a more insidious practice.

The document highlights, “CISA used its frequent interactions with social-media platforms to push them to adopt more restrictive policies on censoring election-related speech.”

Further, it sheds light on CISA’s overreach, revealing that CISA would dictate to these platforms the truth or falsehood of the flagged content. In essence, platforms’ choices to censor were influenced by both CISA’s imposed policies and their judgments on the content’s truth.

The judges in the case did not mince words, concluding, “Thus, CISA likely significantly encouraged the platforms’ content-moderation decisions and thereby violated the First Amendment.”

Originating from a lawsuit by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration, the case aims at top-tier government officials.

The claim is that under the mask of battling “misinformation”, these officials collaborated with mammoth social media companies, leading to the suppression of speech on several contentious issues. Some of these topics include Hunter Biden’s laptop, the roots of COVID-19, and the actual effectiveness of face masks.

To further drive home the gravity of the situation, on July 4, federal Judge Terry A. Doughty of the Fifth Circuit imposed the inaugural injunction. This order blocks White House personnel and federal entities from liaising with tech firms on the matter of social media censorship. Judge Doughty firmly believes such actions probably infringe upon the First Amendment.

Judge Doughty’s stern Independence Day ruling drew comparisons of the government’s pandemic actions to George Orwell’s fictional “Ministry of Truth.”

The order solemnly states, “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Lastly, the Justice Department has taken the matter to the Supreme Court, contending that the government is exposed to “irreparable harm.”

Their argument pivots on the belief that Doughty’s order could potentially obstruct the federal government’s collaborations with social media companies, which aim to protect both the American populace and democratic mechanisms.

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