Republicans in the US Congress are preparing to establish a new subcommittee, as part of the House Judiciary Committee, that will investigate suspected abuse of power by several federal agencies and departments.
Recent revelations about the FBI’s involvement in censorship on social media platforms, which have become public knowledge thanks to the publishing of Twitter’s internal documents, is not the only instance of those abuses, nor is the FBI the only entity that what is currently referred to as the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government will look into.
The subcommittee is very likely to be formed because several Republican members of the House have made it one of the conditions to support the election of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.
The fact that the planned new subcommittee would function within the Judiciary Committee means it will be able to legislate in case its members establish that there is a need to make some changes – and there has been talk among Republicans lately about making structural changes at the FBI.
When it comes to the FBI, “working” with social platforms to censor speech – not least around the Hunter Biden laptop scandal – on its own, and on the behalf of other government bodies is only one of the issues that could make it to the subcommittee’s agenda; others include what the paper calls the agency’s “sordid Russia-collusion hoax.”
But the new panel reportedly intends to look at the broader picture of both past and present governmental abuses facilitated by technology, collusion with private companies in order to harvest personal data, and establish if agencies are acting in line with the Constitution and laws, but also ethical standards.
While the Twitter Files are extremely important on their own, the subcommittee would be able to use its authority – and powers such as issuing subpoenas and organizing hearings; allowing it to bring the various revelations together into a coherent story that would show the full scope of the abuses detailed in the Twitter documents.
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