GOP Floats Church Committee-Style Investigation of FBI After ‘Twitter Files’

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) speaks at a news conference in Washington, on July 21, 2021. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

House Republicans are now signaling a top-to-bottom investigation of the FBI when the party takes over the lower congressional chamber in January.

Incoming House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) suggested that the bureau needs to be investigated in the same manner as the Church Committee, which investigated abuses by the CIA, FBI, Internal Revenue Service, and National Security Agency. The committee, led by then-Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), revealed the now-infamous CIA MKULTRA program and COINTELPRO, which were commissioned by the FBI.

“We’ve been looking at a Church-style committee to look at this,” Jordan told Just the News last week.

And several days before that, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he was open to the suggestion. “We’ve got to get to the very bottom, and I think just subpoenas are starting, but you’re almost going to have to have a Church-style investigation to reform the FBI, the more that we are learning,” McCarthy told Fox News.

“With a new Republican majority next year, it’s not enough to just hold hearings, we need to hold people accountable,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) wrote last Tuesday.

Earlier in the week, Macy told Fox News that “I really want to know what government agents and agencies were censoring the free speech of Americans,” referring to the FBI’s interactions with Twitter. “I want to see heads roll. I want to see people fired for what they’ve done.”

The Epoch Times has contacted the FBI for comment.

Twitter Files

It comes after Elon Musk-owned Twitter released internal documents and communications to several journalists showing agents within the FBI attempting to discredit an explosive New York Post report published in October 2020 that detailed Hunter Biden’s business dealings and laptop.

FBI Director Christopher Wray at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on May 25, 2022. Bonnie Cash/Pool/Getty Images

“What I quickly put together is a pattern where it appears that FBI agents, along with former FBI agents within the company, were engaged in a disinformation campaign aimed at top Twitter and Facebook executives, as well as at top news organization executives to basically prepare them, prime them, get them set up to dismiss Hunter Biden information when it would be released,” author Michael Shellenberger, who posted internal communications from Twitter and FBI agents, wrote in a lengthy thread last week.

Other materials that recently have come to light include messages indicating that FBI officials had flagged specific posts to Twitter employees for removal. On Nov. 6, 2022, special agent Elvis Chan forwarded an email from the National Election Command Post (NECP) that flagged about two-dozen accounts, including a prominent one belonging to Right Side Broadcasting Network. Posts created by the account, the NECP wrote, “may warrant additional action due to the accounts being utilized to spread misinformation about the upcoming election.”

The FBI, according to separate installments of the “Twitter Files,” appeared to be constantly communicating with Twitter and even went so far as to create a specific communication channel shared by both company employees and the bureau’s employees. Internal messages released this month show that top former Twitter managers had expressed unease about the FBI’s advances.

On Saturday, journalist Matt Taibbi released more internal files, suggesting that the FBI had assigned staffers to look for Twitter term-of-service violations to get accounts suspended. He released a November 2020 message from then-Twitter lawyer James Baker, himself a former FBI official, noting that it is “odd that they (the FBI) are searching for violations of our policies.”

Another message from a Twitter staffer expressed concern about the FBI’s “aggressive” demands, according to another post Saturday. “Due to a lack of technical evidence on our end, I’ve generally left it be, waiting for more evidence,” he says. “Our window on that is closing, given that government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution.”

In response to the recent reports detailing the FBI’s interactions with Twitter, the law enforcement agency claimed that “conspiracy theorists” are trying to damage the bureau’s work.

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding, and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the FBI told Fox News last week. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”

“The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public,” the FBI statement added. “It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”