Conservative Group Sues FBI Over Alleged Big Tech Collusion (Newsmax)
By Luca Cacciatore | Tuesday, 04 October 2022 04:48 PM EDT
America First Legal filed a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday for allegedly failing to disclose communications between the agency and Big Tech companies, court filings showed.
The group, founded by ex-staffers under former President Trump, is specifically targeting the FBI's communications with platforms like Facebook, whose CEO previously admitted to censoring information surrounding the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop.
AFL partner Reed Rubinstein told Fox News: "The evidence is that during the 2020 Presidential election campaign, the FBI conspired and combined with large corporations, including Facebook, to censor and suppress the damning evidence of Biden family corruption and influence peddling found on Hunter Biden's laptop.
"This was done to help Joe Biden and the Democrats win the 2020 election. Now, arrogantly disregarding the law, the FBI is stonewalling AFL's efforts to expose the FBI's emails detailing the tradecraft behind this collusive attack on our elections and identifying the persons inside and outside of government who were responsible for it."
AFL's lawsuit comes less than two months after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed his site limited circulation of the Hunter Biden laptop story on the pretext it was part of a Russian disinformation campaign the FBI warned about.
"The background here is that the FBI came to us — some folks on our team — and was like, 'Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that,'" Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan.
Those comments led Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin to call on Facebook to hand over its communications between members of the organization and government agencies – a request still outstanding.
"The American people deserve to know whether the FBI used Facebook as part of their alleged plan to discredit information about Hunter Biden," the senators wrote to Zuckerberg.