Elections

Reporters say Biden transition team disabled Zoom chat, preventing them from asking questions

Published

2 years ago

December 31, 2020

On a conference Zoom call with President-elect Joe Biden‘s transition team, the team disabled the “chat” function for reporters to ask questions, according to reporters who were on the call.

Reporters on the call had to use a “raise hand” function to register if they wanted to ask a question, Fox News reported.

After the call, where the transition team answered only five questions, The Daily Beast’s Sam Stein and other reporters expressed their frustrations and asked to make the sessions more frequent or longer, as a significant number of questions were ignored.

Stein tweeted that he had been “routinely complaining to them to take more questions.”

The Biden transition team appears to have disabled the public chat function on its transition zoom calls, a place where I and others had been routinely complaining to them to take more questions.
— Sam Stein (@samstein) December 30, 2020

“Hey guys, there [are] tons of folks looking to ask questions and since this is being done once a week, could we PLEASE go longer or at least hold more frequent briefings,” Stein wrote during a Zoom call.

“Any chance you can take a few more questions? There are a lot of folks here with questions,” The Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller added.

“Is there a point in saying we want to ask questions if you only call on the same small group every week?” said White House reporter Andrew Feinberg.

Despite Biden’s campaign team saying “transparency is incredibly important” regarding their relationship with the press, there has been many reports of media suppression or censorship from the left.

After Facebook and Twitter prevented stories about the Hunter Biden probe from being shared on the platforms before the November election, President Donald Trump accused media outlets and social media companies of “conservative discrimination.”

Elections

Judge orders Biden’s DHS to release files on agents accused of censoring election ‘misinformation’

Published

3 days ago

January 27, 2023

Sara Carter Staff

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry made headway in countering federal agents involved in suppressing what liberal tech labeled “misinformation” on social media.

The Attorneys General moved to release testimony from five Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) employees after learning of their participation in the Biden administration’s counter-“disinformation” efforts. On Wednesday, a Louisiana judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release the files.

Court documents dated Jan. 19 show the agents participated. The judge’s motion Wednesday could shed light on a “switchboarding” tactic employed during the 2020 election, according to the order.

The lawsuit alleges that the defendants, which include the named individuals as well as President Joe Biden and top officials from a variety of federal agencies, “colluded and/or coerced social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social media platforms by labeling the content “dis-information,” “mis-information,” and “mal-formation.”

The Daily Caller reports that the five CISA employees allegedly served as a “switchboard” to route requests from federal agencies to censor disinformation to various social media companies, according to the documents.

Switchboard work employed “an audit official to identify something on social media they deemed to be disinformation aimed at their jurisdiction,” top CISA election security agent Brian Skully testified in a deposition released Thursday.

“They couldforward that to CISA and CISA would share that with the appropriate social mediacompanies.”

UPDATE: The judge granted our motion to compel. CISA has 14 days to comply. https://t.co/2bhwQQJTG6

— AG Jeff Landry (@AGJeffLandry) January 25, 2023