Judicial Watch announced today it received 110 pages of heavily redacted records from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that show state election officials in the days before and after the 2020 election flagging online content deemed “misinformation” and sending it to the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a DHS-funded nonprofit, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), and others.
The records were obtained in response to a November 2022 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for records of communications between the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a division of DHS, and the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which was created to suppress online election content for censorship and suppression(Judicial Watch Inc. vs. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:22-cv-03560 )). Judicial Watch filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after DHS failed to respond to an October 2022, FOIA request.
The newly obtained records include a November 4, 2020, email report from CIS “Misinformation Reports” to Brian Scully, head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Mis-, Dis-, Malinformation (MDM) branch, a division of DHS. The report originated in the Washington State secretary of state’s office and states: