The Biden administration’s short-lived disinformation chief refused to answer questions during congressional testimony about her false claims surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop story and the debunked Steele Dossier.
Nina Jankowicz, former executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s disinformation-governance board testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee as part of its oversight of the briefly assembled DHS panel, according to a newly released transcript.
Towards the end of her testimony, Jankowicz was confronted with old tweets of hers about the Hunter Biden laptop archive and the Steele Dossier, topics she considered irrelevant to her responsibilities with DHS.
“The [disinformation governance] board had nothing to do with arbitrating truth, and therefore, my expressions of my First Amendment rights as an American citizen have nothing to do with the board’s activities,” Jankowicz said after being pressed on her suggestions the Hunter Biden laptop story was inauthentic and linked to Russia.
Her assertions were based on a discredited letter by 51 former intelligence officials published ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Former senior CIA official Michael Morell, a signatory of the letter, testified last year that it was orchestrated by then-Biden campaign senior advisor Tony Blinken.
Federal investigators verified the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop in late 2019 by cross referencing it against Biden’s Apple iCloud server, according to the Justice Department and IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley.
Jankowicz refused to give her thoughts on the Steele Dossier after she was pressed on her claims it was a product of the Trump campaign, even though it resulted from opposition research sought out by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“Pertinence. There’s no reason for me to answer questions that have no purview related to the Disinformation Governance Board. As the Disinformation Governance Board, we wouldn’t have touched the Steele dossier with a 100,000-foot pole, so don’t understand why we should be talking about it today,” Jankowicz asserted.
“I don’t — I don’t have any interest in commenting on the contents of the Steele dossier, alleged or not.”
At the conclusion of her testimony, Jankowicz rejected the notion that her tweets cast doubt on her “disinformation” work prior to running the disinformation governance board. She was formerly an unpaid policy advisor to Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Most of the hearing was focused on the creation and rapid dissolution of the disinformation-governance board due to widespread criticism from the outset. Critics accused Jankowicz of being a partisan Democrat with a history of flawed research, and believed the disinformation governance board posed a significant threat to civil liberties and First Amendment rights.
The board was announced in April 2022 and Jankowicz resigned the next month following a barrage of conservative criticism. The DHS concluded in August 2022 the board was unnecessary and dissolved it.
She lamented the DHS’s quiet rollout of the disinformation board and failure to combat perceived falsehoods surrounding her role because of bureaucratic delays, non-existent media strategy, and a lack of transparency with lawmakers and the public.
“A fulsome rollout plan that would’ve encompassed pre-briefs with decisionmakers on Capitol Hill on both sides of the aisle, meet-and-greets across the interagency, releasing a transparent fact sheet about the work that we were meant to do, and potentially doing calls with industry, with think tanks, with academics, with folks around Washington who work on these issues to make them aware of the efforts,” Jankowicz said early in the hearing.
The DHS rollout ended up being a short blurb in Politico’s Playbook newsletter after weeks of delays. Jankowicz repeatedly described the rollout as “botched” and criticized the DHS’s communications strategy once conservatives began sounding the alarm about the disinformation board when it was announced.
In her view, the board was supposed to be a single “point of contact” at the DHS for all things disinformation, not an entity involved with censoring speech online. She said she was expected to mostly work on intra-departmental coordination and spend the rest of her time engaging with external actors.
The Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) within DHS has coordinated with third-party organizations and social-media companies on restricting certain speech online, according to reports produced by the House Judiciary Committee.
When she testified, Jankowicz was working for the Centre for Information Resilience, a British anti-disinformation think tank partially funded by the U.K. government, Jankowicz registered as a foreign agent for her work at the think tank.
Last month, Jankowicz launched a new organization devoted to countering perceived disinformation. The group likened House Republican scrutiny of partisan disinformation researchers to McCarthyism.