Jim Jordan scraps committee contempt vote on Mark Zuckerberg
CNN —
House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan announced Thursday that he is scrapping his plans to move forward with a contempt vote in light of Facebook turning over more documents to the committee.
“Based on Facebook’s newfound commitment to fully cooperate with the Committee’s investigation, the Committee has decided to hold contempt in abeyance,” Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, wrote on Twitter. “For now. To be clear, contempt is still on the table and WILL be used if Facebook fails to cooperate in FULL.”
The committee had originally scheduled to consider a contempt resolution on Thursday afternoon, a committee vote for which would be precursor before a full chamber vote, with Jordan’s tweet coming just a few hours before the panel was scheduled to meet.
Republicans had initially subpoenaed the chief executive officers of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft in February for information about their companies’ communications with the executive branch over how their content is moderated as as part of their broader investigation into censorship allegations.
A source familiar told CNN that Facebook produced three recent batches of documents between Wednesday and Thursday morning. Prior to those batches, Facebook sent 53,000 pages of documents over 18 batches, and has allowed 10 employees to do transcribed interviews.
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, confirmed the company delivered additional documents to the committee and pointed to an earlier statement it has made on its cooperation with the committee.
“For many months, Meta has operated in good faith with this committee’s sweeping requests for information,” Stone said in the statement from last week. “We began sharing documents before the committee’s February subpoena and have continued to do so. To date we have delivered over 53,000 pages of documents – both internal and external – and have made nearly a dozen current and former employees available to discuss external and internal matters, including some scheduled this very week. Meta will continue to comply, as we have thus far, with good faith requests from the committee.”
Source: CNN
