New House Judiciary report claims FBI worked with Ukrainian agency to remove verified social media accounts

The FBI participated in a flawed effort to stop Russian disinformation at the behest of a Ukrainian intelligence agency that instead ensnared authentic American accounts - even a verified Russian-language US State Department account, the House Judiciary Committee alleges in a new report obtained first by CNN.

The report accuses the FBI of not properly vetting social media accounts that one of Ukraine's main intelligence agencies, the SBU, flagged as spreading Russian disinformation. Some of the accounts that the FBI passed on to Meta for review, according to the report, were actually criticizing Russia and its war on Ukraine.

The report, drafted in tandem with the House subcommittee on the alleged weaponization of the federal government, draws on information from a subset of subpoenas the committee sent to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, in February as part of its investigation into whether the federal government played a role in censoring speech on social media platforms.

The interim report is being released just two days before FBI Director Christopher Wray is scheduled to testify before the panel - a hearing that will place Wray in front of some of his harshest critics on Capitol Hill, including the committee's chairman, Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who has made Wray and the alleged politicization of the FBI a central focus of his panel's investigative work.

It's the latest in a series of Republican efforts to attack the Biden administration's work with social media platforms, which ramped up over intervention on stories about Hunter Biden's laptop. It comes after a federal judge ordered some Biden administration agencies, including the FBI and top officials, to stop communicating with social media companies about certain content, a ruling viewed as a victory for GOP states who filed a lawsuit accusing the government of going too far in its effort to combat Covid-19 disinformation.

Before and after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the FBI and other US agencies tried to blunt the impact of Russian propaganda about the war. Part of that work typically includes the FBI passing along tips to social media platforms about coordinated disinformation campaigns.

In this case, however, the committee is alleging that the FBI uncritically passed on information from the SBU without vetting the information.