In another campaign promise as part of his bid to become Speaker of the House, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has vowed to issue subpoenas to all 51 former members of the intelligence community who signed onto an open letter falsely declaring the Hunter Biden laptop story to be “Russian disinformation.”
As reported by the New York Post, McCarthy’s pledge came after the latest round of the “Twitter Files” were released by Elon Musk, revealing the true extent of the company’s past efforts to systematically censor conservatives over liberals. McCarthy has since described Twitter’s newly-revealed conduct as “egregious.”
“Those 51 intel agents that signed a letter that said the Hunter Biden information was all wrong, was Russia collusion, many of them have a security clearance,” said McCarthy. “We’re going to bring them before a committee. I’m going to have them have a hearing, bring them and subpoena them before a committee. Why did they sign it? Why did they lie to the American public?”
The letter, which falsely declared that the Hunter Biden story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” included such signatories as former CIA Director John Brennan and former National Security Council Director James Clapper.
The Twitter Files consist of numerous screenshots of internal messages, documents, backend controls, and other pieces of evidence showcasing just how much Twitter was actively censoring users in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election. Musk has allowed the files themselves to be shared with the public through journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss in lengthy Twitter threads. These files have revealed the coordinated efforts at Twitter to censor the Biden laptop story, the controls that they had at their disposal to shadowban any given user, and the steps that were taken to ban President Donald Trump in the aftermath of the peaceful protests at the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
In addition to focusing on Twitter, McCarthy has also vowed that the new Republican-led House will target Google and Facebook, saying that these Big Tech platforms have “become an arm of the Democratic Party.”