Ho Hum, Zucker’s Document Production Troubles the Courts Again

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan decided to abandon his plans to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress after the company’s last-minute document production.

• On February 15^th, Chairman Jordan subpoenas Meta for the missing documents.
• The company’s production is deemed inadequate, containing heavily redacted documents and non-responsive materials.
• Zuckerberg complies at the last minute, narrowly escaping jail time.

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan announced on July 27^th that he is scrapping his plans to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress over failure to comply with a congressional subpoena for document production.

According to the report, here’s the rundown of what happened since the fall of 2022 when members of the House Committee on the Judiciary started looking into the Executive Branch’s role in limiting lawful speech on social media platforms, including those operated by Meta.

December 2022: Meta provides only publicly available information in response to the request for documents related to Meta’s interactions with the Executive Branch and internal discussions on the topic.

January of 2023: House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (hereafter known as the Committee) starts investigating alleged abuses of federal authority, including collusion between federal agencies and private sector entities to suppress conservative viewpoints.

February 10^th: The Committee requests Meta’s “information about the company’s coordination with the Executive Branch to censor free speech online.” Meta’s document production include only 216 pages of material relevant to the legal proceedings, none of which were “internal communications related to Meta’s interactions with the Executive Branch.”

February 15^th: Chairman Jordan subpoenas Meta for the missing documents with a return date of March 23^rd, 2023. Meta, however, did not meet the deadline. Instead, it produced “a limited number of external communications with the Executive Branch and accompanying documents, many of which contained redactions of key information.”

In turn, Chairman Jordan sends a letter to Meta’s counsel in which he expresses concern over Meta’s lack of cooperation in good faith with the investigation. He stated that Meta’s “deficiencies are not simply technical errors or oversights. They are deliberate attempts to withhold information from the Committee.” In the letter he identified the following deficiencies:

1. Failure to produce any internal communications related to the company’s interactions with the Executive Branch.
2. Heavily redacted document production, making it difficult to understand.
3. Production of documents that were not responsive to the Committee’s request.
4. Production of documents that were not in English.

By July 19: Some of the Committee’s recorded interviews with Meta employees supported the existence of internal communications, as they confirmed written exchanges with other Meta employees concerning the company’s interactions with the Executive Branch.

Up until this point, Meta’s document production only included a limited selection of internal documents, consisting of fewer than 40 pages.

This brings us to our current situation. On July 17^th, Chairman Jordan had had enough of the cat-and-mouse game and announced the vote to hold Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress over failure to comply with the subpoena.

On July 20^th, a day before the vote was to take place, Meta produced an additional 53,000 pages of documents to the House Judiciary Committee. The document production included internal communications related to the company’s interactions with the Executive Branch and its content moderation policies.

The Committee was appeased as it found the documents “significant” and that they would “shed light on important issues” related to the investigation. However, the Committee also said that the documents were not “complete” and that it was still seeking additional information from Facebook.

The Committee’s investigation into the Biden Admin’s so-called suppression of the freedom of speech is still ongoing. But there’s one thing that is certain: Zuckerberg’s smoke screen is dissipating, and his less-than-ideal Modus of Operandi are slowly coming to light. What skeletons are you hiding in your closet, Zuck?

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