Judicial Watch: FBI Met with Twitter Officials Days Before 2022 Election to Discuss Twitter ‘Content Moderation Policies’

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it received a heavily redacted email from the U.S. Department of Justice in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit which shows Biden-era FBI personnel discussing a “touch point meeting” with Twitter regarding reported meddling by China in the 2022 midterm election and the social media platform’s “potential changes” in its “content moderation policies” soon after Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk and shortly before Election Day.

 Judicial Watch filed the April 2023 lawsuit against the Justice Department, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence after the FBI failed to respond to a December 2022 FOIA request for “Twitter Files” records concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop and other censorship (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:23-cv-01163)).

The lawsuit references Yoel Roth, Vijaya Gadde, and Jim Baker, who were prominent in internal discussions at Twitter about censoring the New York Post’sHunter Biden laptop story, as journalist Matt Taibbi revealed in the December 2022 release of the “Twitter Files.”

A hearing was held in this case in June 2025.

The newly obtained email, with the subject line “RE: Midterm Election Touch Point Meeting with Twitter,” that was sent on November 3, 2022. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was finalized on October 27, 2022. The midterm election was on November 8, 2022. All names of the sender and recipients of the email are redacted, with the exception of Laura E. Dehmlow, former Section Chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. The email instructs:

Twitter folks, 

For tomorrow’s meeting here are the topics we would like to discuss:

1. Recent disclosure of the three PRC [People’s Republic of China] networks of activity (WAPO [Washington Post] article).

2. Any potential changes to Twitter’s accout verification and content moderation policies.

Let us know if you have any topics to cover so we can prepare accordingly. Thanks! 

The response states:

Thanks [redacte] Looking forward to meeting tomorrow. Can you also add [redacted] to the invite? He’ll be joining us from the legal side of the house.

The Washington Post article the referenced in the email is likely from November 1, 2022, and headlined: “MAGA porn, hate for Trump: China-based accounts stoke division.” 

“This smoking-gun email shows that the Biden FBI were working with Big Tech to censor Americans just before a key election !” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

Through FOIA and other direct litigation, Judicial Watch continues to investigate and litigate the broad range of censorship that had been imposed upon tens millions of Americans.

In June 2025, Judicial Watch sued U.S. State Department for all records which allege President Trump or any current or former member of his cabinet are “purveyors of disinformation.”  

In March, Judicial Watch filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States concerning a Judicial Watch lawsuit asserting that the California Secretary of State retaliated against Judicial Watch because of an accurate election integrity video posted to YouTube just before the 2020 Election (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Shirley Weber, in her official capacity as Secretary of State of the State of California (No. 2:22-cv-06894)). The California Secretary of State used its well-established working relationship with Big Tech to have YouTube remove and censor Judicial Watch’s video.

In November 2024, Judicial Watch uncovered records from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealing an extensive effort by government and non-government entities to monitor and censor social media posts on fraud during the 2020 election.

In June 2024, heavily redacted Homeland Security records from a Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit showed state election officials in the days before and after the 2020 election flagging online content deemed “misinformation” and sending it to the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a DHS-funded nonprofit, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is a division of DHS, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which was created to flag online election content for censorship and suppression, and others.

In December 2023, Homeland Security records from the same lawsuit showed a close collaboration between its Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) and the leftist Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to engage in “real-time narrative tracking” on all major social media platforms in the days leading up to the 2020 election.

In November 2023, Judicial Watch uncovered Homeland Security records that showed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) communicating during the 2020 election campaign with the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). The CISA records showed government involvement in the EIP pressure on Google, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit and other platforms to censor “disinformation.”

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