Established Fact
The most constitutionally significant documented fact in this investigation is CISA’s own internal acknowledgment that no government agency possessed “the explicit mandate to monitor and correct election mis- and disinformation,” and that the EIP was created to fill this acknowledged “critical gap” in government legal authority. This language – documented in internal CISA communications obtained by congressional subpoena and confirmed in CISA Director Krebs’ congressional testimony – is a government agency’s confession that it knowingly operated a censorship system designed to perform functions the First Amendment prohibited it from performing directly. The mechanism – routing government-initiated suppression requests through academic intermediaries to convert them into “platform terms-of-service violations” rather than government censorship orders – is precisely the “laundering” of government censorship that Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58, 67 (1963), held to violate the First Amendment even when the government’s requests are informal. The EIP was used to target entire “narratives” – viewpoints – not specific false factual claims. It targeted speech from the sitting President, from congressional candidates, from sitting Senators, from whistleblowers, and from private citizens. The DNC participated and the RNC did not. CISA scrubbed its website of references to its domestic censorship activities in 2023 after congressional oversight began – a form of evidence destruction.
Citations
Ticket Dataset, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSbP06KE51ds51-Ha6MXkuyoWuCLW168Wz9CMBbhe1BV1IVLxG660eDBUpaVw_Hs5KdhvTvOLS7BUit/pubhtml?widget=true&headers=false | Weaponization Committee in U.S. Congress
The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election, https://www.eipartnership.net/report | Election Integrity Partnership
Censorship Industrial Complex: CensorshipIndustrialComplexWHReport_Appendix_part5.pdf.| Weaponization Committee in U.S. Congress
EIP, A Statement from the Election Integrity Partnership (Oct. 5, 2022), https://www.eipartnership.net/blog/a-statement-from-the-election-integrity-partnership (“Both the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee were invited to submit tickets. . .. The Republican National Committee was contacted on July 28, 2020. They did not respond to our inquiry and did not submit any referrals.”)
“The Democratic National Committee ended up sending four reports to the EIP.”; EIP Jira Ticket Report, at 38 (citing House Judiciary Committee, Transcribed Interview of Alex Stamos (June 23, 2023), at 8) (“While the EIP invited both the DNC and RNC, the RNC declined to respond. . .. The DNC not only accepted the invitation, but also submitted Jira tickets.”), https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/EIP_Jira-Ticket-Staff-Report-11-7-23-Clean.pdf.
EIP Statement, supra note 1 (describing the four DNC submissions: (1) a voting-by-mail claim that “received little traction and was closed without action”; (2) a Facebook political ad making “false claims about vote-by-mail fraud in an attempt to raise money,” which had already been disabled by Facebook and was referred to Facebook as such; (3) a list of “spammy content farms” most of which fell “outside the tight scope of the EIP” with no platform referrals made; and (4) a report that led EIP to discover “two linked Facebook pages attempting to mislead American voters using Facebook Ads,” one of which incorrectly claimed completed ballots had been thrown out — Facebook suspended that ad upon EIP notification).