Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are demanding more documents from the censorship service NewsGuard in their probe of the company’s collusion with federal “misinformation” monitors.

On Friday, House Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky sent a letter to NewsGuard executives “to seek additional documents and communications” from the censorship group related to “present contracts with or grants administered by federal government agencies or any other government entity, including foreign governments.”

NewsGuard is one of the more popular web browser extensions deployed in K-12 classrooms across the country with the support of federal taxpayer funding. The service rates the credibility of online websites and redirects users to news organizations approved as regime friendly. Such ratings have been weaponized to censor non-leftist content with misinformation labels for factual reporting on stories such as Hunter Biden’s laptop.

[RELATED: Meet NewsGuard: The Government-Backed Censorship Tool Billed As An Arbiter Of Truth]

“The protection of First Amendment rights of American citizens is paramount and attempts by government actors to infringe on those rights is dangerous and misguided,” Comer wrote.

The House Oversight chief cited a recent statement from President Joe Biden’s former climate adviser, John Kerry, who complained about “disinformation” at a speech to the World Economic Forum.

“Our First Amendment,” Kerry said, “stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.”

The remark, said Comer, “indicates that tendencies toward censorship and speech restrictions and government entanglement with censorship may have support from senior government officials.”

This week’s letter

No one should be shocked that Pennsylvania’s Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE) system went down for about 90 minutes Thursday morning. The computer system on which most voting activities in the state hinge is a mess, and the state has known this for years.

Speaking on “The Dom Giordano Show” on Philadelphia’s WPHT talk radio, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt described the SURE system as a voter registration database that county boards of elections interface with “all day long.”

When voters register, request a ballot, are sent a ballot, or vote, every move is marked in the Sure System. More than 9 million Pennsylvania residents, every person registered to vote, have data in the SURE System.

“We had an outage for about 90 minutes that prevented many counties from connecting to it earlier this morning, but has been back up for a while now,” Schmidt said. “It was like 9:45 to 11:15 this morning. Voters who applied to vote by mail, whether it’s in person or whatever else, could still do so. It didn’t prevent any of that.”

The SURE System has had problems for a long time.

As I reported for The Epoch Times, in December 2019, Pennsylvania’s then-Auditor General Eugene DePasquale (who is now running for attorney general) wrote a scathing, 192-page report that found “internal control weaknesses in the SURE System related to input and maintenance of voter records. The audit revealed examples of potential inaccuracies, which the report said should be sent to

The Pravda press has asked former President Donald Trump over and over again whether he’ll accept the results of the election if his Democrat opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, wins. Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has heard the question ad nauseam as well. 

CBS News political correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns peppered the former president with the question in late August, as the Democratic National Committee was installing Harris as the party’s nominee following President Joe Biden’s forced exit from his reelection campaign. 

“Will you accept the results of this election?” the reporter asked. 

“Absolutely. I assume it’s going to be a fair election. If it’s going to be a fair and free election the answer is absolutely I will,” Trump said.

Burns pressed with this ridiculous question. “What does fair mean to you?”

“It means the votes are counted. It means that votes are fair,” Trump said. “It means they don’t cheat on the election, they don’t drop ballots, install new rules and regulations that they don’t have the power to do.”

In other words, if leftist activists and Trump-hating elections officials don’t rig this election like they did the last one.  

“They don’t use 51 intelligence agents to give phony reports, which had an affect on the election. They don’t do many of the things that they did in the last election,” he added, referring to the former intelligence officials who signed a letter insisting the Hunter Biden laptop story reported by the New York Post days