The Department of Defense, the CIA, and other U.S. intelligence agencies aggressively advocated for takedown requests and censorship to sway public opinion in favor of the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in the Christmas Eve batch of the "Twitter Files."
"The files," Taibbi writes, "show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government — from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA."
Before Elon Musk's takeover of the company, Twitter, Taibbi says, struggled so much to keep up with the constant requests from U.S. intelligence agencies "that executives lost track."
During that time, "thousands of official 'reports' flowed to Twitter from all over, through the" FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force and the agency's San Francisco office.
In numerous instances, the feds flagged the flow of "predominantly anti-Ukraine narratives" and "purported rights abuses committed by Ukrainians" as being spread by accounts allegedly tied to "Russian agents."
Taibbi qualifies that "intel about the shady origin of these accounts might be true. But so might at least some of the information in them — about neo-Nazis, rights abuses in Donbas, even about our own government. Should we block such material?"
Following the revelations of the "Twitter Files," Congress included in its $1.7 trillion omnibus bill to fund the government $45 billion in aid to Ukraine, according to The Hill.
In a report from The New York Times, Lawrence J. Korb, who served as an assistant defense secretary during the Reagan administration and as a former vice president to Raytheon, said last week, "the trillion-dollar defense budget — that is where we are headed. Nobody seems to want to make the tough choices. Even the Democrats now seem to be afraid to be seen as being soft on defense."
But despite Korb's comment, on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was hailed in a bipartisan fashion in the halls of Congress.