House GOP slams Biden's DHS for pushing big tech companies to suppress Americans' free speech during 2020 election

In a letter to the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director Marci Andino House on Wednesday, Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green, R-TN, and Dan Bishop, R-NC, claimed that the agency coordinated with Non-governmental organizations (NGO) and social media companies and "potentially suppressed American's speech." 

The letter obtained by the Daily Mail alleged, "During the 2020 election, the Center for Internet Security (CIS) created a 'misinformation reporting system' that 'allowed election officials to report a case of election infrastructure misinformation to a single source..." which was then reported to social media companies to take down or label as "misinformation." 

"CIS would receive a 'misinformation report' from election officials or the Election Integrity Project (EIP) and CIS would forward reports to CISA's Countering Foreign Interference Task Force, which would forward those reports to social media companies," the letter said. 

The letter noted that CIS's after-action report claimed, "61 percent of cases it 'reported' up the chain to social media companies were taken down or labeled as misinformation." 

"The CIS after-action report makes clear the CISA directly engaged with social media companies to suppress Americans' social media content," the letter claimed. "Alarmingly, CIS notes that for future projects when social media companies are reluctant to participate in the suppression scheme, 'it will be critical to define the role of all involved parties and for those entities, especially the social media platforms to accept their role.'"

"If there was no legal leverage to compel social media cooperation during the 2020 election, was the federal government, through CISA, used as a strong arm?" the letter questions.  

The director of CISA, Jen Easterly, claimed in testimony to Congress in March, "We don't flag anything to social media organizations at all."

The scheme was reported in the release of the Twitter files in March by Journalist Matt Taibbi. The report claimed that "Twitter was more like a partner to the government. wit other tech firms, it held a regular 'industry meeting' with FBI and DHS, and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government."