JEFFERSON CITY — Missouri’s soon-to-depart attorney general is scheduled to depose Dr. Anthony Fauci Wednesday in a lawsuit alleging Biden administration officials worked with social media companies to suppress misinformation about COVID-19.
Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is leaving the office in January to become Missouri’s next U.S. senator, said he and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry will depose Fauci as part of their effort to prove the federal government colluded with social media companies to censor speech.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, is among a number of high-ranking officials targeted in the lawsuit.
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Schmitt, who also sued Missouri school districts that imposed masking mandates to protect students from the deadly virus, said the deposition is just one piece of the evidence being gathered.
“Since we filed our landmark lawsuit, we have uncovered documents and discovery that show clear coordination between the Biden Administration and social media companies on censoring speech, but we’re not done yet,†Schmitt said.
The lawsuit, filed in May, is being heard in Louisiana before U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, who was appointed by Trump. The deposition will take place in the Washington, D.C. area and Schmitt will be in attendance, a spokesman said.
Allegations of social media censorship became a hot-button issue for Republicans after former President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters.
Under new ownership, Twitter recently reinstated Trump’s account.
In addition to Schmitt’s numerous lawsuits, Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, soon to be Missouri’s senior senator, previously introduced legislation requiring companies to prove that their content-moderation practices are politically neutral.
Legal experts have panned Schmitt’s lawsuit as political grandstanding.
George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, told The the lawsuit is “outlandish†and doesn’t make sense.