A legal group has sued the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for allegedly illegally failing to produce documents that may prove it harassed Elon Musk and Twitter.
America First Legal (AFL) has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for allegedly illegally concealing documents that could prove it engaged in “partisan retaliation against Elon Musk and Twitter for exposing the Biden Administration’s collusive censorship.”
In March 2023, the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government issued a staff report that concluded that the FTC harassed Twitter after Elon Musk bought it for $43 billion last fall.
The staff report found that the FTC “inappropriately stretched its regulatory power to harass Twitter,” misusing a revised consent decree “to justify its campaign of harassment” for political reasons.
Initially established in 2011 and later revised in 2022, the FTC’s consent decree resolved charges that Twitter (now rebranded to X) failed to adequately safeguard user information.
The consent order also governs how Twitter stores and uses information about its users and includes provisions that require Twitter to comply with requests by the FTC to provide documents to assess compliance with an FTC-approved privacy and information security program.
But Twitter and the Weaponization Subcommittee have argued that the FTC has abused the consent decree to harass the social media company after Mr. Musk took it over.
Twitter, in July 2023, asked a federal court to end or modify the consent decree, arguing that the FTC’s investigation “has spiraled out of control and become tainted by bias.”
‘Collusive Censorship’
After the Weaponization Subcommittee staff report was released in March, AFL announced that it had launched an investigation into the FTC for alleged partisan retaliation for “exposing collusive censorship conducted by the Biden Administration and its deep state allies.”
As part of that effort, AFL filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records that would shed light on what it called the FTC’s “egregious abuse of power.”
After the FTC failed to comply, AFL filed a lawsuit (pdf) on Sept. 19 at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging that the FTC had not produced a single page of requested documents.
In its lawsuit, AFL is asking the court to force the FTC to provide the records.
The FTC told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that it has “no comment” on the AFL’s lawsuit.
By Tom Ozimek
