ALLUM BOKHARI

Never before seen emails from within Facebook obtained by the House Judiciary Committee led by chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) have shed further light on how the White House and Biden appointed government officials pressured the tech giant to infringe on the First Amendment rights of Americans.

Facebook initially resisted the Judiciary Committee's subpoena of internal communications about White House pressure, leading the Committee to schedule a vote to hold Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress if his company did not turn over the documents.

After this threat of Congressional censure, Facebook appears to have turned over the require documents, which reveal more of the Biden administration's furious pressure campaign against the company to suppress discussion about important issues affecting Americans.

Rep. Jordan posted the material in a long thread earlier today:

In April 2021, a Facebook employee circulated an email for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, writing: "We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the [Biden] White House" to remove posts.

In another April 2021 email, Nick Clegg, Facebook's president for global affairs, informed his team at Facebook that Andy Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden, was "outraged . . . that [Facebook] did not remove" a particular post.

When Clegg "countered that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US," Slavitt disregarded the warning and the First Amendment.

What happened next? Facebook panicked. In another April 2021 email, Brian Rice, Facebook's VP of public policy, raised the concern that Slavitt's challenge felt "very much like a crossroads for us with the [Biden] White House in these early days."