Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) announced Thursday morning that the Senate Judiciary Committee would subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to explain his company’s decision to suppress news about Hunter Biden and suspend the accounts of those sharing it.
“Twitter is actively blocking — right now, this instant — stories from the New York Post alleging corruption and the Biden family receiving millions of dollars from communist China,” Cruz told reporters in the hallway during a break on the last day of Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
“This is election interference, and we are 19 days out from an election. It has no precedent in the history of democracy. The Senate Judiciary Committee wants to know what the hell is going on.”
Cruz said he had verified for himself that when he tried to share Post articles on Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine and China, Twitter attempted to block his account from doing so.
He noted that he had spoken to the committee’s chairman, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and that a subpoena would be discussed in a markup hearing next Tuesday, for a hearing to be held next Friday.
Dorsey would, he said, be asked to “explain why Twitter is abusing their corporate power to silence the press and to cover up allegations of corruption.”
Cruz said that whether the Post stories were true or not, “Twitter and Facebook and Big Tech billionaires don’t get to censor political speech and actively interfere in the election — that’s what they’re doing right now.”
Graham, speaking next to Cruz, noted that the social media companies had never suppressed stories about Russia and President Donald Trump that turned out to be false.
He warned that the tech companies could eventually suppress left-wing speech, too.
“The point is that the power behind these platforms have [sic] been taken to a level that truly is dangerous. … It’s us [Republicans] today, it could be them tomorrow.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) announced that the Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism had also invited Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify.
40 percent of Americans get their news primarily from @Facebook. Their active censorship of @nypost is an attempt to control the news. I will offer a motion to subpoena @Facebook to answer for this censorship
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) October 15, 2020
He called the suppression of the Post story an attempt to “rig” a free election. He called for Zuckerberg to be subpoenaed as well.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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