Tag: foia

FOIA emails may be ‘breadcrumbs’ leading to government-Twitter election censorship collusion

Summer 2022 emails between participants in a federal misinformation subcommittee, recently turned over in response to public records requests, are prompting renewed calls for Congress to investigate the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s role in shaping what Americans can see.

They apparently show a Twitter executive fired by Elon Musk last fall strategizing with a leader in the CISA-blessed Election Integrity Partnership on how to overcome internal objections to their plans for the Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation Subcommittee, part of CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee.

An agency under the Department of Homeland Security that touts itself as the “quarterback for the federal cybersecurity team,” CISA has become a lightning rod for public anger as it has sought to carve itself a role as stealth arbiter of domestic political debate about election security through a network of corporate and nonprofit information control surrogates.

“We may have discovered breadcrumbs showing the close relationship between one of the government’s ordained censorship captains and her Big Tech ally who, as we’ve learned from the Twitter Files, executed government-ordered censorship,” the Functional Government Initiative, which made the initial public records request, told Just the News.

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Department of Health and Human Services is sued after ignoring freedom of information request over censorship demands

Activist group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for all records and communications between the Surgeon General’s office and social media companies about COVID-19 vaccines.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after the HHS refused to adequately respond to a FOIA request filed in March 2022.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

The request was for: “All records, including, but not limited to, electronic mail, texts, memoranda, and handwritten notes, of, regarding, referring, or relating to any efforts of Alexandria Phillips, Communications Director, Office of the Surgeon General, to contact any employee of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Pinterest concerning COVID-19 vaccines.”

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has previously called for censorship of Covid misinformation. In 2021, he published a report titled “Confronting Health Misinformation,” which aimed to “slow the spread of health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.”

The report encouraged platforms to censor vaccine misinformation and other misinformation related to the pandemic.

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Is the FBI’s “Black Identity Extremist” Label Still in Use?

It’s been over five years since the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) “Black Identity Extremist” (BIE) report was leaked to Foreign Policy magazine in early October 2017. The August 3, 2017, report – which alleged that “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement” – drew a torrent of criticism from civil rights and civil liberties groups, as well as a backlash from Black House and Senate members. The fact that the FBI was employing overtly race-based criteria for investigating the political activities of Black Americans brought back ugly memories of the Bureau’s infamous Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) targeting the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Congress, NAACP, and a host of other prominent Black civil rights leaders and organizations from the mid-1950s through at least the late 1970s.

In the two years after the leak of the “BIE” report, FBI Director Chris Wray found himself constantly on the defensive over the report and the FBI’s use of the BIE term. In late July 2019, Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Bureau had abandoned the use of the BIE phrase, with one other FBI official claiming the term had not been used by the FBI since 2018.

FBI documents obtained by the Cato Institute via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit appear to tell a somewhat different story.

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Do These Documents Prove That Call Of Duty Is A Government PsyOp?

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II has been available for less than three weeks, but it is already making waves. Breaking records, within ten days, the first-person military shooter video game earned more than $1 billion in revenue. Yet it has also been shrouded in controversy, not least because missions include assassinating an Iranian general clearly based on Qassem Soleimani, a statesman and military leader slain by the Trump administration in 2020, and a level where players must shoot “drug traffickers” attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border.

The Call of Duty franchise is an entertainment juggernaut, having sold close to half a billion games since it was launched in 2003. Its publisher, Activision Blizzard, is a giant in the industry, behind titles games as the Guitar Hero, Warcraft, Starcraft, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Crash Bandicoot and Candy Crush Saga series.

Yet a closer inspection of Activision Blizzard’s key staff and their connections to state power, as well as details gleaned from documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Call of Duty is not a neutral first-person shooter, but a carefully constructed piece of military propaganda, designed to advance the interests of the U.S. national security state.

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FDA Withholds Autopsy Results of Those Who Died After COVID Shots

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has refused a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to release the autopsy results of people whose deaths were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) after receiving a COVID-19 shot. The FOIA request was submitted by The Epoch Times newspaper.1

“VAERS is a centralized vaccine reaction reporting system that was among the safety provisions secured by parents of DPT (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine injured children in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986,” explains Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). It is jointly operated by the FDA and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).2 3

According to The Epoch Times, the FDA declined to release any autopsy reports of VAERS deaths, even redacted copies, citing FOIA section (8) (A) which allows federal agencies to withhold information from the public if an agency “reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by an exemption,” with the exemption being “personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

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Feds Cooked Up Detailed Propaganda Plan to Push COVID Shots, Documents Reveal

Judicial Watch announced this week that it received 249 pages of records from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) detailing the extensive media plans for a propaganda campaign to push the COVID-19 vaccine.

The records were received in response to an August 2021 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed after HHS failed to respond to an April 19, 2021 request for records related to the Biden HHS “COVID-19 Community Corps” program (Judicial Watch v. HHS No. 1:22-cv-02315).

Judicial Watch is asking for all records regarding the application process; all organizations asking to be chosen to participate; all grants and all communications of representatives of the HHS regarding the program.

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Secret Service says Biden Delaware visitor logs don’t exist, report says

The U.S. Secret Service says it cannot find records identifying any visitors to President Joe Biden’s Delaware homes, according to a Freedom of Information Act appeal from the New York Post. Biden has spent approximately one quarter of his presidency at his Delaware residences.

In a letter dated Sept. 27, Secret Service deputy director Faron Paramore said that “the agency conducted an additional search of relevant program offices for potentially responsive records.”

“This search also produced no responsive records,” Paramore claimed. “Accordingly, your appeal is denied.”

Rep. James Comer (R-KY) slammed the Secret Service’s claims and the Biden administration’s ongoing lack of transparency.

“The claim that there are no visitor logs for President Biden’s Delaware residence is a bunch of malarkey,” Comer told The Post. “Americans deserve to know who President Biden is meeting with, especially since we know that he routinely met with [first son] Hunter’s business associates during his time as vice president.”

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Court Orders Production Of Seth Rich Laptop

Today, a federal judge ordered the FBI to “produce the information it possesses related to Seth Rich’s laptop.”

This case involves a multi-year fight by attorney Ty Clevenger to obtain records relating to the FBI/DOJ investigation of Seth Rich, particularly whether Rich was involved in the hack of the DNC or had communicated with Wikileaks.

This fight dates back to 2017 and includes two FOIA lawsuit. In the first lawsuit, the FBI produced no responsive documents. The parties knew the FBI had something, and so this sparked a second lawsuit – where the FBI somehow found 20,000 pages of potentially responsive documents.

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‘We’ll Leave No Stones Unturned’: Last Living Member of The Monkees Sues the FBI to Get Full, Unredacted File on the Iconic Rock Band

The last surviving member of The Monkees is suing the FBI for full access to the agency’s file on the legendary rock ‘n’ roll band.

George Michael Dolenz, Jr., better known by his stage name, Micky Dolenz, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday.

The litigation comes over a decade after the FBI’s partial file on the band was released and posted on the agency’s website in 2011.

“The television show “‘The Monkees’ is,” the popular group’s file reads before a section of redacted text in the document dated July 26, 1967.

The Los Angeles-based rock band’s file appears to be contained in a broader case file regarding the “Radio-TV Industry” in “the Hollywood area” based on an informant’s impressions. The information on The Monkees is specifically slotted under the title: “Additional Activities Denouncing the U.S. Policy in the War in Vietnam.”

“This series, which has been quite successful, features four young men who dress as ‘beatnik types’ and is geared primarily to the teenage market,” the file says. “During recent weeks, the four stars of the show have been making public appearance tours throughout the U.S.”

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Feds withholding info about deletion of Covid genetic data

The watchdog group Empower Oversight is taking action against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for evading accountability in its legal obligations to disclose “requested” documentation under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

According to Empower Oversight’s court filing, NIH improperly withheld information gathered in response to questions from Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) and Roger Marshall (R-Kansas).

Last year, the Senators asked about the agency’s decision, the request of Chinese researchers, to delete coronavirus genetic sequence information from an NIH database.

NIH has already admitted in the lawsuit that it failed to meet deadlines required by FOIA in responding to Empower Oversight’s request. 

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