90 Miles From Tyranny : 2023-09-17

On Thursday, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena compelling FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan to appear for a deposition before the Committee next month. Chan was scheduled to be interviewed by the Committee on September 15, but failed to appear after negotiations between the Bureau and the Committee broke down.

For months, the Department of Justice and the FBI have been stonewalling the Committee’s requests to interview Chan, who played a key role in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story on social media ahead of the 2020 election.

“No amount of lies and excuses will stop the Committee from deposing FBI Agent Elvis Chan,” the Judiciary Republicans wrote on X. “The American people deserve to hear the full truth about the Biden censorship regime. And they will.”

According to the state prosecutors, Chan indicated that the FBI had played a major role in censoring speech online with actions ranging “from weekly meetings with social media companies to demanding takedowns of specific accounts and facilitating suppression of certain stories.” Chan testified that the platforms became far more aggressive in removing alleged “misinformation” during the 2020 election cycle than in previous election cycles, and they have remained so.

Last month, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan accused Chan of making false statements in his testimony regarding the FBI’s role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Chan and Foreign Influence Task Force Section Chief Laura Dehmlow had met with representatives from Facebook on Oct. 14, 2020, the same day the New York Post published its bombshell story on the Hunter Biden laptop. Dehmlow and other members of the FBI task force spoke with Twitter employees by phone the same day.

When asked during that call whether the laptop was authentic, according to Dehmlow’s deposition, ”one of the FBI folks who was on the call did confirm that, ‘yes, it was,’ before another participant jumped in and said, ‘no further comment.’”

After that, the FBI was careful to say “no comment” when asked if the laptop was authentic even though the Bureau had possessed the laptop since 2019 and knew it was authentic.

During his deposition, Chan was asked if he had taken part in other meetings with Facebook other than the Oct. 14 meeting, and he responded that he was confident that he had not been “a party to” any other meetings with social media companies regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop.

When asked again whether he was aware of any other communications between anyone at Facebook and anyone at the FBI related to the Hunter Biden’s laptop, Chan replied “no.”

“COMPLETELY FALSE,” Jordan wrote on Twitter. The chairman shared a recently obtained internal Facebook document showing that Chan took part in a follow-up call on October 15, 2020—the very next day. Chan said during the call that there wasn’t currently evidence proving “a foreign connection or direction” to the laptop leak. Of course, the FBI knew by this point that there was no foreign connection—Russian or otherwise— to the laptop.
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The Judiciary Committee Republicans notified the FBI as soon as the GOP won the House to let them know that they wanted to interview Chan.

“On January 17—after the start of the 118th Congress—we sent another letter to the FBI instructing them to make Chan and other FBI agents available for an interview,” The Judiciary Republicans wrote on X, adding that the FBI claimed they didn’t know about the request until March of 2023.

The Republicans posted the Committee’s November 2022 and January 2023 letters to the FBI to prove that they had made the request.

“As a courtesy, the Committee permits government witnesses without personal counsel to appear with agency counsel and avoid the financial burden,” they wrote. “But if the government witness has personal counsel, then the rationale for this accommodation no longer applies.”

However, according to the Committee’s protocol, the witness may appear with either the agency counsel or the personal counsel—but not...