Election Day is four weeks away and barring some major catastrophe, Republicans are expected to make major gains in offices across the country and win a majority of seats in Congress. A stagnant economy, an unpopular occupant of the White House, reckless warnings of possible nuclear war, and a twisted fixation on mutilating and sexually tormenting children have Democrats on the ropes; even a criminal indictment of Donald Trump, which would be the biggest “October surprise” in political history, is unlikely to save Democrats from self-immolation on November 8.
So, Democrats are once again colluding with Big Tech to censor “disinformation” about the 2022 midterms. Of course, the definition of “disinformation” is open to interpretation—content hostile to the regime, naturally—but the FBI’s point man on the topic recently told reporters the bureau is on the lookout for wrongthink. Elvis Chan, an assistant special agent in charge responsible for the cyber branch of the FBI’s San Francisco field office, met with reporters last week to explain the nature of potential hijinks in the November election.
“People are trying to dispel the disinformation and misinformation that is going on; that there are things that are happening to the election. We don’t see any credible threats at this point,” Chan told a San Francisco television reporter following an October 6 press briefing. “That’s not to say we aren’t monitoring them, we are.”
Chan also said “federal agencies have their eye on misinformation and election lies that often spread through social media” but assured the voting public that “federal law enforcement agencies are sharing data with those social media platforms with the aim of combating election misinformation with the truth.”
He should know about working with social media. According to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt against numerous government agencies and officials for conspiring with media companies to silence free speech, Chan was one of two FBI agents who urged Facebook officials to censor content related to Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election. “Pursuant to the third-party subpoena, Meta [Facebook’s parent company] has identified—Elvis Chan as involved in the communications between the FBI and Meta that led to Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story,” Schmitt wrote. (The other agent was Laura Dehmlow, a section chief for the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, another politically-motivated operation created by FBI Director Christopher Wray in 2017.) Both Chan and Dehmlow are defendants in the lawsuit.
Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly has admitted that FBI agents warned Facebook officials to be on “high alert” for a “dump” of news that could be the result of foreign actors attempting to interfere in the 2020 election; the news dump that followed was the New York Post’s explosive reporting on the laptop, just weeks before Election Day. The company immediately announced it would reduce visibility of the Post’s articles until “fact checkers” could verify it was not the work of a foreign interference campaign. Twitter locked the Post’s account for two weeks and blocked users from sharing articles, flagging the links as “potentially harmful.”
The primary conduit between Big Tech oligarchs and the FBI appears to be Chan. Schmitt’s lawsuit accuses Chan of playing a “critical role for FBI—in coordinating with social-media platforms relating to censorship and suppression of speech on their platforms.”
In a recent podcast interview, Chan—who seems to spend most of his time conducting interviews and speechifying at security conferences rather than investigating cyber crime—bragged that his office “was very involved in helping to protect the U.S. elections in 2020.” This required, Chan admitted, communicating with technology and social media companies “on a weekly basis” to share alleged intelligence about foreign interference in the election. “That’s where the FBI and the US government can actually help companies,” he said.
Regularly corresponding with these companies is easy for Chan; his office is located in the heart of Silicon Valley, home to more than 300 companies tied to Big Tech. One can only imagine how frequently Chan and his FBI colleagues hobnob with the powers-that-be in northern California in swanky hot spots. This also explains why the FBI refuses to investigate Facebook and Twitter for flagrant election interference on a number of fronts; it would be hard for the FBI to investigate companies for doing what the FBI told them to do.
No foreign entity, of course, was responsible for the coverage and distribution of the Hunter Biden laptop story; to the contrary, the flagrant attempt to sway voters by concealing incriminating information about the Biden family was executed by powerful domestic interests including Chan, Big Tech, and the conventional news media. FBI agents in Washington warned that negative reporting associated with Biden’s laptop was a “foreign disinformation campaign” and briefed Republican senators to that effect in the summer of 2020.
Team Biden also did its part to promote the falsehood. “If we see tonight from Donald Trump these attacks on Vice President Biden’s family, I think we need to be very, very clear that what he’s doing here is amplifying Russian misinformation,” a campaign spokeswoman warned on October 22, 2020.
Ironically—or not—Chan himself is a purveyor of general disinformation about American elections. He insists the 2020 election was the safest in history, claiming “there was mostly not voter fraud, despite what you hear on different outlets.”
For years, Chan has promoted the unproven narrative that the Russians attempted to influence the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win. As Twitter sleuth Stephen McIntyre pointed out last week, Chan’s name appears in evidence collected by Special Counsel John Durham in the criminal case against Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for Perkins Coie, the firm representing both the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee in 2016.
That spring, the DNC blamed the Russians for a hack of its email system. Sussmann hired CrowdStrike, a cyber security firm led by a former top FBI official, to investigate the intrusion; the FBI and Sussmann coordinated talking points and scheduled a phone call with Washington Post reporter Ellen Nakashima in June 2016 to leak the results of CrowdStrike’s alleged probe into the source of the hack.
But it wasn’t enough. Sussmann desperately wanted the FBI’s official imprimatur on the Russian hack narrative. In July 2016, another FBI cyber chief asked Sussmann to approve a draft statement for reporters about the stolen emails; Sussmann succeeded in getting the bureau to issue a stronger response that backed his clients’ allegations. Chan’s name first appeared that same month as the FBI continued to help Democrats spin the Russian hack story.
By late September, Sussmann was pushing the FBI to publicly conclude the incursion was the work of Kremlin-based hackers—and that’s when Chan was again looped in. He participated in several email discussions between Sussmann, the Justice Department, CrowdStrike representatives, and other FBI officials in October regarding an FBI examination into the hack and potentially “fake” documents. A call between all the parties, including Chan, took place on October 11, 2016. Afterwards, Sussmann and Chan communicated directly as his office sought to obtain data directly lifted from the DNC system.
It never happened.
And neither did the Russia-based hack of the DNC email system; testimony later revealed CrowdStrike didn’t have evidence that Russian hackers were responsible for the breach. The email hack story, like every other animating aspect of the Russian collusion hoax, turned out to be untrue. But that isn’t stopping Chan from continuing to insist Kremlin operatives influenced the 2016 election.
So, what is Chan up to now? How will he and his Big Tech sycophants silence dissenting views about the 2022 election, either before or after Election Day? With Democrats desperate to stem heavy losses, one can only guess what the FBI has in store this time around. And what are they already planning for 2024?
Regardless, it’s obvious that Chan is not an outlier in the FBI. He is just another sleazy partisan operative disguised as a dutiful FBI agent and more proof that the corrupt rot at the Federal Bureau of Investigation infects every office in the country.