OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
The Biden-Harris Department of Homeland Security is being sued in a big new case that wants the agency to answer a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) question about a task force set up in Pennsylvania to deal with claimed “election threats.”
In a press statement on February 29, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro said that the “Election Threats Task Force” would provide “trusted election information” and “mitigate threats” to elections.
The Department of Homeland Security was told by the Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) that it wanted to know more about Pennsylvania’s work with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). However, court papers first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show that CASA, which is part of DHS, says it has not received any documents or further communication since then.
The Federalist published a story in March that showed the Shapiro administration was working with CISA as part of the task force. This was something that Shapiro did not say directly in his February 29 release.
“In March, the Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) submitted a FOIA request to DHS-CISA in order to uncover communications related to the creation of the Pennsylvania Election Task Force, which is designed to censor election-related speech that it deems as ‘misinformation’. CISA is yet to respond to CASA’s request,” CASA Director James Fitzpatrick told the news outlet.
Federal law mandates that the government respond to FOIA requests within 20 working days of receipt, according to the National Archives. In its lawsuit, CASA is requesting that the court compel DHS to produce the documents within ten days of its decision.
“CASA filed this FOIA request to DHS 145 days ago. We are now 80 days from the election, and the public still has not seen the communications on the creation of this task force, which may be empowered to potentially censor election-related speech in the top battleground state in America,” Fitzpatrick told the DCNF. “We are filing suit to force DHS to comply with the law and immediately provide these records to the American people.”
The task force is made up of several federal and state agencies and offices. In the original press release, Shapiro said that the group would “share information and coordinate plans to mitigate threats to the election process, protect voters from intimidation and provide voters with accurate, trusted election information” and “establish clear, strategic communication and information sharing among public agencies and officials to identify and mitigate threats to the election process.”
It was also in the release that the Democratic governor talked about a website that would “fact-check” comments about how the state’s elections work.
In June, the Supreme Court rejected an earlier court’s order that stopped several government agencies, including CISA, from asking social media companies to remove posts about controversial topics like the COVID-19 response and election integrity.
Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said at a meeting that CISA and other agencies started working with social media companies again in March.
Twitter locked several accounts, including that of Kayleigh McEnany, who was White House press secretary at the time, for sharing a story from the New York Post on October 14, 2020, about what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop when he left it behind. This caused a lot of controversy during the 2020 presidential election.
Several current and former intelligence community officials said at the time that the information on the laptop seemed to be “Russian disinformation.”
However, many reports published long after the election proved that the damaging information on the laptop was real and not part of a Russian intelligence operation.
A number of those stories said that enough voters in some of the swing states that Joe Biden won would have chosen President Trump instead if they had known that the reports were true.
That caused Republicans to say that people in the intelligence community and the media who supported Democrats were censoring and spreading “misinformation.”
