By Christenson
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan may hold Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena seeking to uncover any coordination between the tech giant and the Biden administration to censor free speech.
Alphabet has handed over more than 4,000 pages of material to the committee, but has redacted and potentially omitted important information, according to a letter Jordan (R-Ohio) sent Monday to Alphabet attorney Daniel Donovan.
“These redactions do not appear to be based on any applicable privilege – because Alphabet has asserted none – and the Committee requires this material to be produced without redactions,” Jordan wrote.
The GOP chairman told Donovan he expects the tech company to return the requested documents to the Judiciary Committee no later than May 22 – or face “one or more enforcement mechanisms.”
That could include a civil lawsuit, withholding of federal funds or forced congressional testimony from CEO Sundar Pichai and other company executives, but a source familiar with the probe told the committee is leaning toward holding Alphabet in contempt.
“The release of the Twitter Files has shown just how extensively the Executive Branch communicated and coordinated with technology companies regarding content moderation,” Jordan said of their effort.
“We are skeptical that Alphabet’s interactions with the federal government where pressure was applied were any less concerning than those of Twitter.”
Jordan, 59, said Alphabet must share communications with the committee showing interaction between the company and other social media platforms, as well as with its partners like the Global Disinformation Index and subsidiaries such as Mandiant and Jigsaw.
Those communications must include emails and text messages as well as data from Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Signal, WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram messages, he added.
Alphabet’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A Google spokesperson told: “Since December, we have been producing relevant documents in response to the committee’s requests and will continue to work constructively with them.”
The letter comes two months after “Twitter files” journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a Judiciary subcommittee about the federal government’s collusion with tech companies.
“Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system,” Taibbi said at a March hearing of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”
Facebook also pledged to limit the ability of users on its platform to share the same article.
The London-based Global Disinformation Index, which receives State Department funding, also blacklisted The Post and nine other outlets last December, labeling them as “risky” and potential spreaders of false information.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in December called on Facebook and Google to be investigated after Republicans won the House majority.
“These now have become arms of the Democratic Party, arms of the Biden administration,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News at the time.
