Internal Amazon emails reveal that President Joe Biden's White House pressured the company to "censor" books about COVID-19 that presented views that differed with the administration, said House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
Jordan made the claims in a series of X posts on Monday. The emails were obtained by the committee through a subpoena by the panel's Republicans.
"Never-before-released internal emails subpoenaed by @JudiciaryGOP reveal that the Biden White House pressured Amazon to censor books that expressed views the White House did not approve of," Jordan wrote.
Jordan said that on March 2, 2021, Andrew Slavitt, a former White House senior adviser for COVID-19 response, sent an email demanding to know who he and his White House colleagues could talk to at the company about "the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon."
Jordan said the White House concluded there was "propaganda and misinformation" by simply running a keyword search for controversial topics such as "vaccine" and emailed the company when it didn't like how the search results appeared.
"Initially, Amazon decided to hold off on "doing a manual intervention" to censor books," Jordan wrote. "Why? Not out of any commitment to free speech, but because doing so would be 'too visible' to the American public and likely to spur criticism from conservative media," Jordan said.
"Amazon caved to the pressure from the Biden White House to censor speech. After the White House spent a week berating Amazon, what did the online bookstore do? Starting March 9 — the same day as its meeting with the White House — Amazon enabled 'Do Not Promote' for books that expressed the view that vaccines were not effective.
"And that wasn't all. Amazon also considered other ways 'to reduce the visibility' of certain books that the Biden White House disliked."
Jordan dubbed the emails as "the Amazon Files."
Jeffrey Rodack ✉
Jeffrey Rodack, who has nearly a half century in news as a senior editor and city editor for national and local publications, has covered politics for Newsmax for nearly seven years.
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