States Seek to Depose Fauci, Other Top Officials in Big Tech–Government Censorship Case

Plaintiffs in the high-profile case that’s uncovered evidence of big tech companies and government officials colluding to censor users are seeking to depose 10 top officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri and other plaintiffs asked a U.S. court in a recent motion to allow them to depose Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser; FBI special agent Elvis Chan, former White House press secretary and current MSNBC pundit Jen Psaki, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a Biden appointee; and Rob Flaherty, deputy assistant to the president.

They also want to question five other officials, including Carol Crawford, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Digital Media Branch.

While emails and other documents uncovered in discovery have revealed an “enormous and far-reaching” censorship enterprise, the discovery “makes very clear that federal officials have frequently engaged in their most telling and probative communications with social media companies orally, not in writing,” plaintiffs said in a joint statement with defendants.

“Perhaps not surprisingly, the more senior the federal official involved, the more likely they appear to have been to rely on oral, rather than written, communications to pressure social-media platforms to censor,” the statement also said.

Fauci, for instance, communicated in a long-shielded phone call with some scientists who went on to write a paper castigating others who were open to the theory that the COVID-19 virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the first COVID-19 cases were detected.

Fauci was also in touch with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but the content of oral communications between the two “is yet to be revealed,” the new filing, dated Oct. 14, says.

Fauci has not made any statements under oath about his communications with big tech firms like Facebook, despite the judge overseeing the case ordering the government to provide answers from Fauci to questions, plaintiffs said.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, the lead plaintiffs and both Republicans, announced recently they planned to seek depositions but had not identified any officials who they would seek to depose.

Proposed Schedule

Plaintiffs want U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee overseeing the case, to greenlight the 10 requested depositions. If Doughty agrees, the depositions would take place during a 30-day window.

Doughty already agreed to the plaintiff’s request to expedite discovery. That led to the production of hundreds of pages of documents, which bolstered plaintiff claims of Big Tech–government collusion.

In that order, Doughty said plaintiffs could alert defendants to any depositions plaintiffs wished to take, and that the parties would then meet to confer on any deposition requests.

If the parties did not agree on the depositions, then they were to file a joint statement outlining their differences.

Doughty has seven days to rule on the new filing, which included objections from the government.

Department of Justice lawyers said that plaintiffs usually take no more than 10 depositions during normal discovery, and taking that many during expedited discovery would be too burdensome.

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