The federal government buried a true story about the president's son – and billed you for it.
Now a Republican congressman is teaming up with Democrats to make sure the agency that did it keeps running.
The Swamp is working to make sure the government's top censorship agency rises from the dead.
CISA's Censorship Operation Targeted Conservatives Before the 2020 Election
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – CISA – was supposed to protect power grids and water systems from foreign hackers.
That's not what it became.
The House Judiciary Committee documented exactly what happened: CISA created the Election Integrity Partnership in the summer of 2020 to give the federal government a way to launder its censorship activities and bypass the First Amendment.
The EIP's own emails confirmed it was created "at the request of DHS/CISA."
CISA interns – simultaneously on loan to Stanford's Internet Observatory – filed "Jira tickets" flagging conservative speech across every major social media platform for removal.
Then came the laptop.
A CISA employee personally labeled the Hunter Biden laptop story a "convoluted web of falsehoods being spread to undermine Joe Biden" – and the agency linked it to QAnon and Pizzagate to make the smear stick.
Twitter locked the New York Post's account for reporting on it.
The Daily Caller News Foundation verified the laptop contents within two weeks.
The New York Times and Washington Post eventually confirmed it too – years later, long after the election was over.
Fifty-one former intelligence officials called it Russian disinformation, then many went on to serve in the Biden administration.
The Republicans Fighting to Restore the Censorship Industrial Complex
Rand Paul – chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee – has been saying for years exactly what CISA is.
"The First Amendment is pretty important, that's why we listed it as the First Amendment," Paul told Politico. "I'd like to eliminate it."
In April 2025, Paul stated the agency had "been weaponized to silence dissent."
RINO Representative Don Bacon acknowledged the laptop censorship was "wrong" and "a significant leadership mistake."
Then he said Trump's cuts were "harmful to the country" and demanded the agency be rebuilt.
That is not a contradiction in Bacon's mind.
It should be a contradiction in yours.
Virginia Democrat James Walkinshaw – Bacon's new partner – said restoring and expanding CISA should be a "top priority" for Congress.
Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Andrew Garbarino of New York have also backed the agency.
The Senate Appropriations Committee rejected the administration's proposed cuts, putting CISA's 2026 funding at roughly $2.8 billion.
Trump's budget called for cutting the agency to just over $2 billion – down from the $3 billion it had when he took office.
The bipartisan pushback is blunting those cuts.
How the Government Used CISA to Bypass the First Amendment
This fight follows a familiar playbook.
Every time a conservative administration tries to dismantle a bureaucracy that turned its power against American citizens, the same coalition forms: a handful of Republicans – usually from purple districts, usually with ties to the defense and tech industries that feed off federal cybersecurity contracts – join with Democrats to call the cuts "dangerous" and the agency "essential."
The argument always sounds reasonable.
China and Russia are real threats.
Cyberattacks on banks and power grids are real.
Nobody is arguing otherwise.
But CISA was not defending power grids when it built a shadow censorship operation to suppress a true story about the president's son during a presidential election.
DHS knew the First Amendment barred it from censoring speech directly.
So it built a cutout – staffed with friendly academics, funded with federal dollars – to do it for them.
That operation worked exactly as designed.
Bacon knows this.
He called it a "significant leadership mistake."
Then he asked for your tax dollars to rebuild the agency that made it.
Rand Paul has been outnumbered on this from the beginning.
The question is whether the voters who sent Republicans to Washington to clean this up are paying attention to who is doing the cleaning – and who is protecting the mess.
Sources:
- Nicole Silverio, "Republicans Cozying Up With Democrats To Save Liberals' Favorite Censorship Agency," Daily Caller News Foundation, May 27, 2026.
- House Judiciary Committee Staff Report, "The Weaponization of 'Disinformation' Pseudo-Experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered with Universities to Censor Americans' Free Speech," November 6, 2023.
- Judicial Watch, "Records Show Homeland Security's Cybersecurity Agency Worked with Election Integrity Partnership to Suppress 2020 Election 'Disinformation'," November 11, 2023.
- Alex Nitzberg, "Rand Paul Wants to Abolish Agency Established Under Trump, Calls Prospect 'Unlikely'," Fox News, November 15, 2024.
- Sara Friedman, "Restoring CISA Is One Issue Many Lawmakers Can Agree On," Federal News Network, May 2026.
