X CEO, Elon Musk say Biden-Harris FTC is ‘targeting’ platform for ‘political reasons’

In response to the bombshell report, Yaccarino wrote on X, “The FTC Commissioners clearly targeted our company for political reasons. To say this is troubling is an understatement. We’ve worked in good faith for years with the FTC and thought they had been as well. We need answers immediately.”

Musk responded to Yaccarino's post, and said, "They sure did," in agreement with her on the subject.

According to the report, Biden-appointed FTC Chair Lina Khan introduced a consent decree against the company following Musk's acquisition of then-Twitter in Oct. 2022.

Khan denied that was the reason, claiming the FTC was considering enforcing the consent decree, a court-approved settlement agreement, before Musk’s acquisition. However, documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee revealed that after the Space X CEO bought the social media platform, Khan “called for an immediate vote” days after the deal was announced.

According to the committee, the FTC uses consent decrees to “settle claims of wrongdoing and impose specific requirements on a company,” and FTC lawyers can demand information from the company after it has entered a consent decree.

The committee revealed that in October 2019, then-Twitter “self-reported a violation of its existing consent decree with the FTC and cooperated with a six-month investigation into its security practices. By March 2021, Twitter and the FTC had tentatively agreed to a settlement to resolve the FTC’s security and privacy concerns, but Acting-Chair Rebecca Slaughter did not act to finalize the consent decree.”

In June 2021, Khan took over the leadership of the FTC and instructed staff to restart the negotiations. In March 2022, Twitter as well as the FTC agreed to a consent decree that was nearly identical to the previous one.

However, it was only after Musk announced he planned to acquire the company that Khan demanded an “immediate vote to finalize the settlement.” According to the committee, the FTC “weaponized its regulatory authority” against the social media platform and Khan rushed the vote without letting commissioners take time to review the evidence against the company.

Khan even admitted in an email to commissioners that she was questioned about the rush: “The urgency is due to Elon Musk’s purchase of the company this week,” despite her routinely claiming that was not the case.

In less than three weeks, the FTC voted to accept the decree and referred it to the Biden-Harris DOJ, which then filed it in federal court. After the consent decree went into effect on May 26, Khan’s FTC began “harassing” Twitter and even demanded Twitter produce all communications with Musk, even those that did not contain security information, the committee alleged.

The committee wrote, “The only reasonable explanation, then, for requiring all communications remotely related to Musk would be as a tool for the FTC to harass Musk.”