State Department officials were explicitly ordered in spring 2019 to stop tracking 13 prominent Americans’ social media accounts for information about the Joe Biden-Ukraine scandal because the monitoring violated federal law, according to emails that were originally redacted to hide the concerns from the American public.
“We are barred by law from actively monitoring the accounts of American citizens in aggregate — and particularly from identifying and monitoring individual, selected accounts,” a State Department official wrote in an April 1, 2019 email to officials in Washington and the U.S. embassy in Kiev.
The unredacted emails, obtained by Just the News, raise new questions about the accuracy of State Department officials’ testimony during President Trump’s impeachment proceedings. They also provide a window into how the department used redactions in a Freedom of Information Act case to hide the potentially explosive information just weeks before Election Day 2020.
The emails show State Department officials under Trump openly worried a year before the 2020 election that the emerging storyline that Vice President Joe Biden may have engaged in a conflict of interest by presiding over Ukraine policy while his son worked for a corrupt Ukrainian gas company might prove to be “the motherload [sic] and main thread to play out, possibly thru Nov. 2020.”
The illegal monitoring was, in fact, ordered specifically to counter that narrative as well as another storyline that involved the liberal megadonor George Soros, the newly unredacted passages of the emails show.
The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch first raised concerns earlier this year that the U.S. embassy in Kiev run by then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch had created an “enemies list” by ordering the monitoring of social media accounts of prominent Americans last year when the Ukraine scandal about Joe and Hunter Biden first surfaced.
After a protracted legal fight, the State Department released memos to the group last month confirming the embassy did in fact monitor the accounts of 13 Americans, including Fox News personalities Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Lou Dobbs, the president’s son Don Jr., his lawyer Rudy Giuliani as well as this reporter, whose articles in The Hill first shined a light on the Bidens’ possible conflict of interests in Ukraine.
The April 1 email was among those released, but it was heavily redacted to hide the statements showing the monitoring was ordered shut down specifically because it violated the law.
Tom Fitton, the Judicial Watch president, accused the State Department of editing the documents to hide the truth from the American people.
“It looks like this material was blacked out not for legal reason but for political reasons: namely to help Joe Biden,” Fitton said. “Judicial Watch first exposed this illicit spy operation against Trump world, and the coverup of this material by the State Department for over a year is inexcusable. Our lawyers will review this new material and consider the legal ramifications.”
You can view the redacted memo here.
And here is the unredacted version.
