On Friday, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Elvis Chan, the lead FBI agent involved in mass social media censorship, to appear for a September 21, 2023 deposition. Last week’s subpoena followed Chan’s failure to appear for a scheduled voluntary interview to face questioning about the federal government’s role in burying the Hunter Biden laptop story in the month before the 2020 election.
While that scandal is much bigger than Chan, he is first in line to untangling the truth about how the government interfered in the 2020 election by running an info op to convince voters the Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Given Chan’s testimony in the civil lawsuit brought by Missouri and Louisiana and several individual plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, as well as since-uncovered documents from Facebook, the importance of questioning Chan cannot be overstated.
What Chan Said
In Missouri v. Biden, the plaintiffs sued the Biden administration and numerous agencies and government officials, including the FBI and Chan. They alleged the federal defendants violated the First Amendment by, among other things, coercing and significantly encouraging “social-media platforms to censor disfavored [speech].” After filing suit, the plaintiffs filed a motion for a preliminary injunction and then obtained an order allowing for expedited discovery.
Since then, the district court has entered a preliminary injunction barring several federal agencies from coercing tech giants into censoring speech. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed the injunction but upheld many of the lower court’s legal conclusions. The Supreme Court is currently considering
