President Donald Trump appears to be making good on a number of campaign promises, including those moves aimed at ending practices that, during the previous administration, resulted in wide-scale censorship collusion between the government and large tech companies.
According to a number of insider documents, lawsuits, and Congressional investigations, the reason for this “joint work” in flagging, removing, deplatforming, and committing other forms of free speech violations was most often justified as the need to combat “misinformation” – usually election, or Covid-related.
But critics have for years insisted that the actual result was First Amendment violations, through the exertion of control over speech and therefore public opinion ahead of an election (such as the discrediting of the Hunter Biden laptop story as “misinformation” and an example of supposed foreign interference).
And, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) by all accounts “excelled” at this work.
Now, reports citing unnamed sources “familiar with the matter” say that President Trump has put several CISA employees – specifically those from the Election Security and Resilience team – on administrative leave.
This decision is linked with the DHS recently getting a new director – former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who during her confirmation hearing stated that CISA should act according to its original mission.
Established in 2018, CISA deviated from that mission, particularly during the 2020 presidential election cycle, conservatives say. Currently, CISA does not have a director, while the administration’s next moves are expected to get the agency to “refocus on its mission,” as one spokesperson said.
In the fall of 2023, America First Legal non-profit revealed that CISA’s work (along with the FBI and the 2020 Biden campaign) to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story started the very day it was published in the New York Post.
Ahead of the 2024 election, reports said that CISA had been involved since its inception with the Election Infrastructure Subsector Coordinating Council (SCC), which “coordinated” with federal, state, and local entities, but also the private sector in a “unified government and private sector approach” supposedly securing “election integrity” and combating “misinformation campaigns.”
