House Judiciary Committee Report Reveals How FBI Schemed with Ukrainian Intelligence Services
by Jeremy Kuzmarov
To Censor Social Media Accounts of American Journalists and Even State Department Officials
Among the corrupting aspects of the Ukraine War has been the further erosion of democratic standards in the U.S.
On July 10, the House Committee on the Judiciary and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government issued an interim staff report detailing how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) worked with the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) to try to censor social media accounts of Americans in violation of First Amendment rights to free speech.
The Americans who were targeted included journalists and, amazingly, the U.S. State Department, whose Russian-language account was flagged by the SBU for promoting pro-Russian disinformation.
In February, the House Committee on the Judiciary, chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH), issued subpoenas to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube.
The documents that they obtained revealed that the FBI requested on behalf of the SBU that the world’s largest social-media platforms censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online.
FBI Special Agent Aleksandr Kobzanets, the FBI’s Assistant Legal Attaché in Kyiv from 2020 to 2022, worked closely with the SBU, an organization heavily supported by the CIA, which monitored social media with the purpose of identifying suspected Russian “influence operations.”
The SBU passed information through Kobzanets to the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which was established in 2017 by Director Christopher Wray to “identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the U.S.”
