Rebecca Zeljko
Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz on Wednesday demanded that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas turn over any key documents that could shed lithe on his agency’s ties to Big Tech and alleged efforts to censor online information about the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
Gaetz alleged that Mayorkas’ department had a “pattern of coercion and collusion” with Big Tech companies and suggested that DHS may have collaborated to “unconstitutionally” censor the former president through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), according to the letter. Gaetz demanded that DHS turn over all documents and communications it may have had with social media platforms, internally among DHS staff, as well as federal and state employees from July 13 to July 31 that related to the assassination attempt on Trump.
“The two biggest scandals at DHS now converge on one issue: Big Tech’s blatant censorship and the digital ‘erasure’ of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump,” Gaetz wrote in the letter.
CISA is an agency within DHS that has partnered with the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to monitor, report, and censor Trump and other Republicans’ online speech, according to report from the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on Federal Armaments.
“Multiple news outlets have reported various irregularities in their search results and on their home pages,” Gaetz said in the letter. “For example, Facebook admitted that it censored an authentic photo of Donald Trump as ‘fake news,’ and Google admitted that it excludes and does not auto-complete search results about the attempted assassination of Trump.”
On July 13, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks tried assassinate Trump from a rooftop just 130 yards from the rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Before the rally, Crooks reportedly mottled by witnesses, flagged by the Secret Service, and even identified by a local countersniper nearly 100 minutes before the Republican Party candidate took the stage.
“The Director of the United States Secret Service (USSS) recently resigned due to the agency’s failure to properly handle their protégé, Donald Trump, who was the target of the most serious assassination attempt on an American political figure in a generation or more on July 13, 2024,” the letter reads. “On July 29, 2024, an anonymous USSS countersniper emailed complaints to your department staff that the USSS was not being cleaned up and that the resignation of one senior executive was not sufficient to address the deep structural problems.”
After the attempted attack, some internet users began to notice what Gaetz called “irregularities” in autocomplete search results. sweetGessays for terms like “President Donald” and “assassination attempt,” which did not produce search results related to Trump.
Elon Musk alleged on Monday that Google and other major tech platforms were interfering in the upcoming November election by changing the results of Trump’s auto-complete responses on the platform.
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Rebecca Zeljko is a reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation.
