Jordan: CISA Chief Dodged Questions About Election Censorship

The director of the agency described as the “nerve center” of the government’s censorship operations has dodged Congress’s questions about the agency’s role in censoring “election-related” speech four times, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan alleges in a letter obtained exclusively by The Federalist.

Jordan alleges that Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly has avoided answering questions from Congress about the extent to which CISA works in conjunction with federal and state governments to “censor lawful speech.”

Under Easterly’s leadership, “CISA is again reportedly working with Democratic-led states to censor election-related speech in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election,” the letter states.

Jim Jordan letter to CISA D… by The Federalist

As I previously uncovered, the key swing state of Pennsylvania’s newly created “Election Threats Task Force” is working “closely” with CISA as part of its efforts to “mitigate threats” to elections, such as speech it deems “misinformation.”

Jordan alleges that Easterly was invited “to testify at a hearing in July 2024 regarding your role in these efforts. After two weeks of discussion with CISA to arrange your testimony, your staff claimed — for the first time — that you were scheduled to be out of town on the date of the potential hearing.”

The letter claims the committee offered three additional dates to reschedule the hearing, but Easterly “waited for over a month to again claim” she was “unavailable on all of the dates offered by the Committee, and refused to provide any dates” on which she “would be able to appear before the Committee.”

The letter requests Easterly “appear for a transcribed interview without any further undue delay.”

A separate letter was also sent to Easterly on Friday reminding her of a congressional subpoena that “compels CISA to produce communications between CISA and other entities discussing content moderation.”

Jim Jordan letter to CISA D… by The Federalist

Jordan previously notified CISA in a March letter that “documents about such partnerships are responsive to the Committee’s April 28, 2023 subpoena.”

But Jordan alleges that “in addition to other defects, CISA appears to have failed to comply with this part of the subpoena’s obligations, having made only two limited productions related to Pennsylvania’s 2024 Election Threats Task Force in five months, consisting of less than 300 total pages and containing no documents dated after March 6, 2024.”

Easterly’s alleged attempt to avoid the congressional inquiry comes months after it was discovered that CISA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and Pennsylvania would work together to “coordinate plans to mitigate threats to the election process … and provide voters with accurate, trusted election information.”

CISA has a long history of working to censor not only speech it disapproves of, but speech that is entirely true but considered to be “malinformation,” which the agency describes as anything “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

During the 2020 election, CISA classified social media posts that expressed concerns about unsupervised mail-in voting as “disinformation,” before flagging them to be censored, according to documents obtained by America First Legal. Internally, however, CISA created a six-point list in October of 2020 warning of the risks to the mail-in voting process.