The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) has released six video depositions taken in a federal lawsuit that sheds light on what role government actors, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, played in censoring or, as revealed in the Twitter Files, the offshoring of government requests to private social media companies or foreign actors to censor speech around COVID-19.
In his deposition for State of Missouri v. Joseph R. Biden Jr., as NCLA outlines, Fauci "testified 'I do not recall' 174 times, and 'I don't remember,' at least 212 times." According to NCLA, evidence from "his own emails and past statements" indicate the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) "cast substantial doubt" on his claim to a "failing memory."
According to U.S. Right to Know, Fauci requested Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar organize a secret teleconference on Feb. 1, 2020, ostensibly to shift concerns from a lab leak to one of natural origin.
Furthermore, NCLA says, "his deposition testimony — that he genuinely believed COVID had natural origins — conflicts with emails he exchanged with scientists in early 2020, indicating that he believed the lab leak hypothesis could be accurate."
The recent ruling by Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana denying the government defendants' motion to dismiss has paved the way for the case to continue. The judge was unpersuaded by the defendants' arguments.
Elvis Chan, who has been named in the Twitter Files, said in his deposition that the FBI played a prominent role in working with Big Tech to sway public opinion. In regard to the wider scope of what's been termed the "censorship industrial complex," Chan, on the eve of the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story, sent Twitter's then-head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, 10 documents. "Within hours," journalist Michael Shellenberger writes, "Twitter and other social media companies" began censoring the story.
Nonetheless, the recently filed Supplemental Preliminary Injunction Brief as well as the Proposed Findings of Fact reveal a damning effort by the Biden administration and federal officials' in employing "illicit tactics" to silence voices on social media that presented views on COVID-19 that were otherwise deemed inconvenient or disfavored.
Jenin Younes, litigation counsel for NCLA, said, "These depositions further confirm what other discovery in the case has already demonstrated: Dozens of members of the federal government, including unelected bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci, orchestrated a campaign to shut down debate about COVID-19 related subjects; and they deceived the American public on issues ranging from the lab leak theory to efficacy of masks to the protection offered by naturally acquired immunity to whether the vaccines could prevent disease transmission."
The six video depositions from NCLA are included here: "Chan, FBI supervisory special agent; Carol Crawford, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief of the digital media branch; Fauci, NIAID director and White House chief medical adviser; Daniel Kimmage, acting coordinator of the State Department's Global Engagement Center; Brian Scully, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; and Eric Waldo, senior adviser to the surgeon general of the United States."
Newsmax reached out for comment to the defendants named in the case, including the Department of Justice and the National Institutes of Health.