Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz demanded Wednesday that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas provide any key documents that could shed light on his agency’s ties to Big Tech and alleged efforts to censor online information surrounding the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
Gaetz alleged that Mayorkas’ department has had a “pattern of coercion and collusion” with Big Tech companies, and suggested that DHS may have collaborated to “unconstitutionally” censor the former president through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), according to the letter. Gaetz demanded the DHS to turn over all documents and communications it may have had with social media platforms, internally among DHS personnel as well as federal and state employees from July 13 to July 31 that referenced the Trump assassination attempt.
“These two major scandals at DHS have a single focal point right now, which is the apparent Big Tech censorship and the digital ‘erasing’ of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump,” Gaetz said in the letter.
CISA is an agency within the DHS that worked with the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to monitor and flag and censor online speech from Trump and other Republicans, according to a report from the House Judiciary Committee and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
“Numerous news outlets have reported various irregularities in search results and home pages,” Gaetz said in the letter. “For example, Facebook has acknowledged that it censored an authentic photograph of Donald Trump as ‘false information’ and Google has acknowledged that it excludes and does not autocomplete results for searches relating to the Trump assassination attempt.”
On July 13, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate Trump from a rooftop just 130 yards away from the rally stage in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Leading up to the rally, Crooks had been reportedly spotted by witnesses, flagged by Secret Service and even identified by a local counter sniper nearly 100 minutes before the Republican nominee took the stage.
“The Director of the United States Secret Service (USSS) recently tendered her resignation due to the failures of that agency to adequately service their protectee, Donald Trump, who was the target of the most serious assassination attempt on a United States political figure in a generation or more on July 13, 2024,” the letter reads. “On July 29, 2024, an unnamed USSS counter sniper emailed your department personnel complaints that the USSS is not being cleaned up and that the resignation of a single high-level supervisor was not adequate to address deep structural concerns.”
After the assassination attempt, some internet users began to notice what Gaetz called “irregularities” in the autocomplete search result suggestions for terms like “president Donald” and “assassination attempt of,” which weren’t producing Trump-related search results.
Elon Musk alleged on Monday that Google and other big tech platforms are meddling with the upcoming November election by altering Trump’s autocomplete results on the platform.
(Featured image credit: DHS photo by Tia Dufour)
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