(FreedomBeacon.com)- During depositions in the lawsuit brought by Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana, an FBI supervisory special agent testified last week that the bureau conducted regular meetings with Big Tech companies ahead of the 2020 presidential election to discuss “disinformation” and the tech platforms’ efforts to censor it.
On Tuesday, lawyers deposed FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan as part of the ongoing lawsuit against the Biden administration that accuses high-ranking government officials of colluding with social media companies “under the guise of combatting misinformation” to censor free speech.
Elvis Chan initially attempted to quash the subpoena, but on November 14, Louisiana federal Judge Terry A. Doughty ordered his deposition, arguing that Chan “had authority over cybersecurity issues for the FBI” in San Francisco and “played a critical role for the FBI in coordinating with social-media platforms related to censorship.”
Chan, who works at the FBI’s San Francisco field office, was questioned under oath about his alleged “critical role” in “coordinating with social media platforms” about “censorship and suppression of speech on their platforms.”
During his deposition, Chan admitted that he along with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and senior officials from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency held regular meetings with the social media companies to warn against attempted “Russian disinformation” head of the 2020 election. Initially, those meetings were held quarterly, then monthly, then, as the election got closer, weekly.
Chan testified that in those meetings, the FBI warned the social media companies that there could be Russian “hack and dump” or “hack and leak” operations.
Chan’s testimony confirms one item from the so-called “Twitter Files” that were released last Friday by independent journalist Matt Taibbi.
The first round of “The Twitter Files” featured the internal documents that revealed Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post’s October 2020 report on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop under the claim that the report was based on “hacked” material. At one point in his Twitter thread, Taibbi notes that several sources at Twitter recalled receiving a general warning from Federal law enforcement about possible foreign hacks.
