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The Biden-Harris Department of Homeland Security is facing a major new lawsuit that would force the agency to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding a task force established in Pennsylvania to combat alleged “election threats.”

Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania announced the formation of the “Election Threats Task Force” in a Feb. 29 release, claiming it would provide “trusted election information” and “mitigate threats” to elections.

The Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) reports that the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged its request for information on Pennsylvania’s collaboration with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). However, according to court documents first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, CASA, a division of DHS, claims it has received no documents or further contact since then.

CASA’s FOIA request followed a March report by The Federalist, which revealed that the Shapiro administration was collaborating with CISA as part of the task force—a detail not explicitly mentioned in Shapiro’s February 29 release.

“In March, the Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) submitted a FOIA request to DHS-CISA in order to uncover communications related to the creation of the Pennsylvania Election Task Force, which is designed to censor election-related speech that it deems as ‘misinformation’. CISA is yet to respond to CASA’s request,” CASA Director James Fitzpatrick told the news outlet.

Federal law mandates that the government respond to FOIA requests within 20 working days of receipt, according to the National Archives. In its lawsuit, CASA is requesting that the court compel DHS to produce the documents within ten days of its decision.

“CASA filed this FOIA request to DHS 145 days ago. We are now 80 days from the election, and the public still has not seen the communications on the creation of this task force, which may be empowered to potentially censor election-related speech in the top battleground state in America,” Fitzpatrick told the DCNF. “We are filing suit to force DHS to comply with the law and immediately provide these records to the American people.”

Shapiro said in the original press release that the task force, which is comprised of several federal and state agencies and offices, would “share information and coordinate plans to mitigate threats to the election process, protect voters from intimidation and provide voters with accurate, trusted election information” and “establish clear, strategic communication and information sharing among public agencies and officials to identify and mitigate threats to the election process.” The Democratic governor also highlighted a web page that would “fact-check” claims about the state’s election processes in the release.

In June, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s injunction that had barred multiple government agencies, including CISA, from requesting social media companies to censor posts on contentious issues such as the COVID-19 response and election integrity. Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia noted during a conference that CISA and other agencies resumed their collaboration with social media companies in March.

Censorship emerged as a contentious issue during the 2020 presidential election when Twitter locked several accounts, including that of then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, for sharing an October 14, 2020 report by the New York Post about the contents of a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden.

At the time, several current and former intelligence community officials claimed that the information on the laptop appeared to be ‘Russian disinformation,’ but multiple reports well after the election confirmed that the damning contents of the laptop were genuine and not part of a Russian intelligence operation.

Some of those reports noted that enough voters in some of the swing states won by Joe Biden would have cast their ballots for then-President Trump instead had they known that the contents were real. That led Republicans to charge Democratic sympathizers in the intelligence community and the media with censorship and promoting “misinformation.”

The post Biden-Harris Admin Sued Over ‘Elections Threat’ Effort In Swing State appeared first on Conservative Brief.