Mark Zuckerberg says the Biden Administration coerced Facebook into censoring content, Republicans file election integrity lawsuits in two states, and the immigration issue continues to dominate this election cycle. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.
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(upbeat music) - Mark Zuckerberg says the Biden administration strong-armed Facebook into censoring content. - It's the literal founder, CEO, the big Kahuna saying it. So there's zero hiding from it anymore. But if anyone had their eyes open, you have all the evidence you need even without this. - Will the administration be held accountable? And why did Zuckerberg go public now? - I'm Daily Wire, editor and chief John Wickley with Georgia Howe. It's Wednesday, August 28th, and this is Morning Wire. Republicans file election integrity lawsuits in Michigan and North Carolina over what they say are Democrat efforts to violate election laws. - If you're a person attempting to cheat in our elections or an illegal citizen attempting to illegally vote in our elections, we will find you, we'll track you down and we'll prosecute you to the full extent of the law. And record illegal immigration continues to shape the election, with voters seeing every state as a border state, while Kamala Harris reverses on Trump's border wall. - Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned, we have the news you need to know. - Security is top of mind for many Americans. Security for our country, security for our leaders, and security for our families. But what about your financial security? - Golden Silver are an excellent way to diversify your savings. You can own physical gold and silver in a tax sheltered retirement account. Plus, backed by popular demand, now through the end of the month, you can get your very own 24-carat gold-plated truth bomb on qualifying purchases. Text Wire to 989898 to receive a free no obligation info kit to learn the role that precious metals play in your overall saving strategy. Again, that's Wire to 989898 today. - Mark Zuckerberg said in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee Monday that the Biden administration pressured Facebook and other meta platforms to censor users. - Daily Wire culture reporter Meghan Basham is here now with more. So Meghan, what specifically did Zuckerberg say in this letter? - So he sent this letter to Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, and in it, he writes that in 2021, senior officials of the Biden administration, including some at the White House, repeatedly pressured meta's teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 related content, including humor and satire, and he says administration officials expressed significant frustration when meta didn't meet these demands. Now, Zuckerberg acknowledges that meta complied, but he now says he believes the government pressure was wrong and that he regrets not speaking up about it at the time. Now, that's significant because if Zuckerberg is telling the truth here, and it's hard to see why he wouldn't be, that would mean that Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, was not telling the truth when he told Missouri Senator Josh Holly this during a hearing in 2022. - We have example after example of this administration coordinated apparently, according to a federal court, by your agency, pressuring, coercing social media companies to engage in censorship. Is that constitutional? - That is unequivocally false. - Is what the emails show? - It is unequivocally false, Senator. - You are not pressuring the big tech companies to take down accounts. You are not meeting with them to ask them to censor on your behalf. - That is correct. - We are not. - Zuckerberg also said that he regrets suppressing the New York Post's story on Hunter Biden's laptop before the 2020 election. And he says that meta had been told by the FBI that it was Russian disinformation, but that he now knows that that was not true. And then maybe the most revealing part of this letter, Zuckerberg acknowledged that the 400 million he spent in 2020 to turn out that vote in heavily democratic areas has been viewed as partisan. Though he denies that it was, he said that he won't be making contributions like that going forward. - And how's the White House responding to the letter? - Well, they're only responding to part of it. So White House officials put out a statement saying that the administration simply, and I'm quoting here, "encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety during a deadly pandemic." And the indicated that they don't believe they did anything wrong in pressuring tech companies to please certain speech. Now, as for the Hunter Biden laptop story, the White House has never acknowledged that it was true and they're still not commenting on that. Now, all of this happened in 2021. So why is Zuckerberg speaking about it now? - Well, for one, I think a lot of this information is pretty public by now, but it also may be strategic for meta's business interests. We reached out to Mike Benz, who is a former State Department official and Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. And this is what he told us. Facebook is intensely dependent on the US diplomacy, intelligence, defense apparatus to secure Facebook's markets to protect them against foreign laws, to protect their data monopolies, to protect their advertising revenues. And Mark Zuckerberg was playing along for a very long time to giving them everything they wanted, but now they feel they're not being protected and they're giving away the store. So I think Zuckerberg is starting to flex that he's had enough. - Benz also said that Zuckerberg may have learned that he can never do enough to satisfy the bureaucracy and that it's a little bit of a, if you give a mouse a cookie situation. When Zuckerberg censors at the government's request, it only leads to more of those requests. But Benz did also warn that Zuckerberg said back in 2019 that Facebook was going to pull back on some of this content moderation and that it didn't last. So time will tell how serious Zuckerberg is this time and if he'll stick to his guns, if it looks like it might threaten Facebook's revenues. - Right, and so often these things come down to money. Meghan, thanks for reporting. Anytime. As part of its ongoing election integrity efforts, the Republican National Committee has recently filed voting related lawsuits in two states, Michigan and North Carolina. - Here to discuss the lawsuits and the RNC 2024 strategy is Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestigeakimo. Hey, Amanda. So the RNC has filed dozens of these election integrity lawsuits in recent months. Tell us about these latest two filings. - Yeah, sure. Well, I'll start with Michigan. That's a battleground state that Trump lost in 2020. The RNC is suing the city of Detroit over what they say is a deliberate refusal to hire an equal number of Republican poll workers as Democrat poll workers, as state law requires. Here's RNC co-chair Laura Trump discussing that. - We had 700 trained poll workers from the Republican side apply in Wayne County to be poll workers. Do you know how many of those they actually took 50? Guess how many Democrat poll workers they took? 2,300. - So for every seven Democrats, there's only one Republican. As the suit mentions, a Michigan election law requires that commissioners appoint quotes, an equal number or as nearly as possible of election inspectors in each election precinct from each major political party. The chairman of the RNC, Michael Watley, called Detroit's actions a breach of public trust and the quote, kind of bad faith Democrat interference that drives down faith and elections. - And how about the lawsuit in North Carolina? What's the RNC trying to do there? - The RNC is suing the North Carolina State Board of Elections for violating the Help America Vote Act or HAVA. The board was using a voter registration form that did not include HAVA required identification information. The board eventually corrected that non-compliant form, but the RNC says about 225,000 people in the state have been registered without the right identification. And the board is refusing to reach out to those voters and acquire the necessary ID. Watley said in the statement that North Carolina has failed in its mandate to keep non-citizens off voter rolls, which he said fuels distrust and jeopardizes elections. - Now let's zoom out for a second. This is all part of a larger effort from the RNC, which has been under new leadership since back in March. Tell us about their agenda. - Right, the RNC is now being led by Watley and it's co-chaired by Laura Trump, Donald Trump's daughter-in-law. It just days after they took over, the RNC launched an election integrity program and that aims to have over 100,000 volunteers and attorneys deployed across every battleground state to ensure, quote, "transparency and fairness" in the 2024 elections. This effort is obviously a response to the 2020 election where our voting system was completely upended by COVID policies. Here's Laura Trump back in March, talking about the RNC strategy and the 2020 election. - Right now we have 23 states that have 78 lawsuits in these states to ensure that it is harder to cheat and easier to vote. And unfortunately we had to learn a couple of hard lessons in 2020, believe me, we are taking those, we are applying them all across this country in every single state and we wanna ensure that indeed, every single legal vote is counted. - The RNC has already seen some legal successes in places like New York, Pennsylvania and most recently in Arizona. There they can now require proof of citizenship on voter registration forums. - And what about on the other side, the DNC? What are Democrats focusing on ahead of the election? - Well, the DNC is spending tens of millions of dollars to loosen restrictions on voting and counter Republican legal efforts. Democrats oppose voter ID laws and they've pushed back on citizenship verification for voter registration forums, even though it's illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections. Democrats also oppose GOP efforts to clean up voter rolls. They argue that this is actually not an issue in the first place and can effectively be an act of voter suppression. In Texas, however, a new state law mandated a voter roll cleanup and more than 1 million names were removed. The majority of the names were of deceased people or where a home address could not be verified, but there were also 6,500 names of non-citizens removed and thousands of felons who can no longer vote. - Hard to understand why anyone wouldn't want that kind of mess cleaned up. Amanda, thanks for reporting. - You're welcome. - Vice President Kamala Harris now supports finishing the border wall. Her surprising reversal is a stark reminder that illegal immigration will be one of the major issues in the last stretch of the presidential campaign. - Here with an update on the border crisis is Daily Wire Deputy Managing Editor Tim Rice. Hey Tim, so this crisis continues to be a top issue for voters. What's the latest on this front? - Well, it's hard to know where to begin. Let's start with some numbers. There were just over 54,000 illegal border crossings recorded in July, bringing the total number of illegal border crossings under the Biden-Harris administration to around 8.2 million. And that doesn't count the 2 million plus known waterways. And according to Gallup, in August, Americans ranked immigration as the country's most pressing problem for the third month in a row. The longest this issue has been Americans' top concern for 24 years. - Pretty striking considering everything else going on in the country. What's keeping immigration top of mind for so many Americans? - You know, there's been this steady stream of stories detailing crimes that illegal immigrants commit once they enter the country. Just this week, the Daily Wire reported that a North Carolina judge sentenced a suspected illegal immigrant to just 120 days in prison for killing 20 year old Michael Archuleta in a hit and run. The driver who pled guilty to the hit and run and driving without a license was eligible for up to 29 months in prison. She's also been fined for driving without a license at least seven times since 2009. Archuleta's sister called the verdict yet another slap on the wrist for the driver and slammed the legal system as, quote, "truly corrupt and backward." Well, you can understand the frustration there. And this isn't an isolated incident, correct? - Yeah, that's right. To pick just one other story earlier this month an illegal immigrant was arrested for raping a 10 year old boy in Mississippi. State auditor, Shad White, responded by declaring that, quote, "every state is a border state now." White's office released a report this month that found illegal immigration could cost Mississippi alone around $100 million a year. - Well, this issue is clearly going to remain a top one for the rest of the election cycle. How are politicians responding to stories like this? - Well, immigration was a winning issue for Donald Trump back in 2016 and he's absolutely beating the drum on the issue again this time around. But now so is Kamala Harris, who as we mentioned earlier is trying to reinvent herself as a kind of immigration moderate. Here she is pledging to crack down on illegal immigration at the Democratic National Convention. I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system. We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border. - At a Friday rally in Arizona, Trump pushed back against Harris's claim that he was to blame for the border crisis. - She blamed me for the border. I haven't been there in four years. You saw it, I had the safest border, the best border we've ever had, she blamed me for the border. - Now, Harris may be looking to change the narrative so she can better rebuff these sorts of attacks from Trump, but her fellow Democrats aren't making it easy for her. California lawmakers are expected to vote this week on the California Dream for All Act, a first-of-its-kind bill that would grant illegal immigrants up to $150,000 in zero-down, no-interest home loans. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who's been a major surrogate for both Biden and Harris, has not said if he plans to sign the bill, which is expected to pass the legislature. But if he does, we can expect Trump to bring it up on the campaign trail, and maybe even on a debate stage. - Yeah, sounds like a safe bet. Tim, thanks for reporting. - Thanks for having me. - Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back later this afternoon with more news you need to know. 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Mark Zuckerberg says the Biden Administration coerced Facebook into censoring content, Republicans file election integrity lawsuits in two states, and the immigration issue continues to dominate this election cycle. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.
Birch Gold: Text "WIRE" to 989898 for your no-cost, no-obligation information kit. Qualifying purchases will get an exclusive GOLDEN Truth Bomb.
Ramp: Now get $250 off when you join Ramp. Go to http://www.ramp.com/WIRE
