Jim Jordan by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee released a bombshell report on the Biden-Harris Federal Trade Commission (FTC), detailing how Chair Lina Khan and her progressive army of unelected bureaucrats have weaponized the agency against Elon Musk, an influential White House critic. In the report, House investigators outline the FTC’s involvement with the privacy and data security policies of X, a social media platform, over the past decade. As lawmakers have discovered, the FTC’s regulatory harassment of X has exploded since Elon Musk purchased the company in late 2022, leading the House Judiciary Committee to conclude that the Biden-Harris administration has once again weaponized an administrative agency to silence an ideological foe.
Americans for Tax Reform applauds the House Judiciary Committee for uncovering the Biden-Harris administration’s weaponization of the FTC, which has been used to silence conservative voices and unfairly penalize thriving American businesses.
Beginning in 2011, Twitter, now X, first entered into a consent decree with the FTC that required independent audits of the platform’s privacy and data security protocols for ten years. For eight years, this arrangement ran smoothly until Twitter self-reported a decree violation for user information that “may have inadvertently been used for advertising” in 2019. Under the direction of the Trump administration, the FTC quickly worked to tighten the decree with heightened privacy and security standards to prevent future mishaps.
By 2021, the Trump FTC had been working on a revised decree for nearly two years, with agency officials recommending a routine approval of the modified agreement for the incoming Biden-Harris administration. Nevertheless, following the installation of Chair Lina Khan as FTC czar, the report finds that “she demanded that FTC staff renegotiate the new consent decree to obtain additional concessions from Twitter.” For nearly a year, it appears that Chair Khan was content to play the waiting game with Twitter, although the report has found that “the negotiations did not lead to a stronger settlement.”
That is, until Elon Musk, a vocal critic of the Biden-Harris administration, decided to purchase the platform in late 2022. While the FTC was in no rush to finalize the revised decree for nearly a year, once Democrats deemed Musk a threat to democracy, Chair Khan demanded an immediate vote without giving her fellow commissioners adequate time to review the recommendation package. As the report emphasizes, “prior to Chair Khan’s takeover, the practice of withholding information from Commissioners until the last second was extraordinarily rare, if not unprecedented.”
When Republican FTC commissioners inquired about Chair Khan’s sudden change of heart on the Twitter decree, her attorney was surprisingly candid, stating that “the urgency is due to Elon Musk’s purchase of the company this week.” This admission contradicts Chair Khan’s past insistence that the rushed vote had nothing to do with Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
Ironically, Chair Khan’s frantic attempt to rush a vote was quite unnecessary, with Musk himself publicly committing to degree compliance. As Musk insisted, “I cannot emphasize enough that Twitter will do whatever it takes to adhere to both the letter and spirit of the FTC consent decree. Anything you read to the contrary is false.” Nevertheless, Chair Khan refused to even meet with Musk until Twitter complied with the FTC’s endless document demands, while continually moving the goalposts to make compliance impossible. For example, as the report explains, “the FTC sent a letter to Twitter requesting, among other things, every communication sent to, from, or about Musk” because they may contain unspecified “relevant information.” It is hard to interpret these opaque and tedious FTC demands as anything less that ideologically motivated harassment.
While Chair Khan’s FTC had no problem harassing Twitter, it hypocritically stonewalled oversight requests from the House Judiciary committee at every turn. Most alarmingly, the report acknowledges that “there is evidence that the FTC has destroyed many documents related to the Twitter investigation” with FTC staff being instructed to “dispose of all materials relating to this matter” in a June 14th, 2022 email. Unfortunately, because of the sly maneuvers of senior FTC leadership, House investigators have concluded that “because of the destruction of critical documents related to the FTC’s investigation into Twitter, the Committee and the public may never know the true extent of the political harassment of Twitter.”
Over the past four years, the Biden-Harris administration has not shied away from leveraging the administrative state to bully its ideological foes. In 2022, President Biden noted that Musk, an American citizen for over twenty years, was “worthy of being looked at” for his alleged relationships with foreign countries. Since this ominous remark Musk has been subjected to an avalanche of inconclusive investigations from the DOJ, FCC, FAA, and the NLRB. Similar to these witch hunts, the FTC’s harassment of Mush is yet another example of how Chair Khan has weaponized her agency to hammer the Biden-Harris administration’s political opponents.
Americans for Tax Reform applauds the House Judiciary Committee for investigating the Biden-Harris administration’s weaponization of the FTC, which has been allowed to bully ideological foes with impunity for far too long.