Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll on Wednesday canceled an academic appointment at West Point for a former Biden administration official accused of pressuring social media companies to throttle comments considered “disinformation.”
Jen Easterly, a former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, had been offered a position as the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy.
In a memo, Mr. Driscoll directed the academy to terminate the agreement with Ms. Easterly, a graduate who spent 20 years in the Army.
“The United States Military Academy will immediately pause non-governmental and outside groups from selecting employees of the Academy, including instructors, professors, teachers, and shaping academic or developmental lectures,” Mr. Driscoll wrote.
He also asked the head of the West Point Board of Visitors, Rep. Steve Womack, Arkansas Republican, to conduct a top-down review of the academy’s hiring practices.
“We’re not turning cadets into censorship activists. We’re turning them into warriors and leaders,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement. “Our future officers will get the most elite training so that America can continue to dominate on the battlefield.”
In April 2023, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the GOP chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Ms. Easterly during her time as head of the CISA. He said a release of information from X that came to be known as the Twitter Files exposed how the federal government “pressured and colluded with Big Tech” to censor viewpoints on social and other media in ways that undermined First Amendment principles.
“Government officials may not circumvent constitutional strictures by using private actors — whether through coercion, encouragement, entwinement, or joint participation — to accomplish what the government cannot directly,” Mr. Jordan wrote.
His committee asked CISA for any communications between the agency and other third parties discussing content moderation. The Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena after it failed to respond or produce the documents. The pressure reportedly caused the agency to purge a website link that coordinated private sector counter-disinformation operations.
Ms. Easterly later slammed the Trump administration for the decision to fire Air Force Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, former director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command, and Chris Krebs, her predecessor as CISA director.
She said the firings were part of a larger drift that risks politicizing the federal cyber ecosystem at a time when Chinese state-sponsored hackers were holding the nation at risk.
“What’s happening now is not a policy disagreement, but something dark: the targeting and removal of non-partisan public servants at the normalization of loyalty oaths to something other than our Constitution,” Ms. Easterly wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “And if we — who aim to protect critical systems — can’t defend the humans who manage and maintain them, what exactly are we securing?”
• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.