The nonprofit that represented the two IRS whistleblowers who exposed the mishandling of the Hunter Biden investigation says Meta, X, and Google are now blocking ads for a documentary about that very saga, a pattern its lawyers call a repeat of the censorship that shaped the 2020 presidential election.
Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, sent a letter Wednesday to four senior Republican committee chairmen warning that all three major social media platforms "strongly appear to be suppressing advertisements" for the forthcoming film Shielded By Power: The Whistleblowers vs. the Big Guy. A copy went to the Trump White House.
The accusation carries weight because the same platforms admitted, years after the fact, that they wrongly censored the New York Post's October 2020 reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop and overseas business dealings. If the allegations hold up, it means the companies that promised reform are doing it all over again, this time to the people who helped set the record straight.
Empower Oversight represented IRS supervisory special agent Gary Shapley and IRS special agent Joseph Ziegler when the two came forward to tell Congress that the Justice Department slow-walked its probe of the president's son. The organization partnered with Fruition Productions to turn that story into a documentary, as Just the News reported. The crowdfunding campaign launched on Indiegogo, but not before that platform demanded content changes that delayed the launch by several weeks.
When the campaign finally went live, Empower Oversight tried to run digital ads on Facebook, X, and Google directing viewers to the documentary's website. The ads featured clips from journalists Miranda Devine, John Solomon, and Matt Taibbi, as well as commentators including Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online and the Republican lawmakers themselves.
None of the ads ran. Not one, on any platform.
Leavitt described a "Kafkaesque series of hoops" his team jumped through. Meta suspended the ad account entirely, wiping all user data, even for unrelated ads, and forced the team to use different accounts just to propose the documentary spots. Google also suspended the ad account. Customer service representatives at all three companies could not explain why, Leavitt wrote.
One Meta customer service specialist reportedly told the filmmakers that the platform doesn't "support the scope of this content." Leavitt fired back in his letter that "not only is this reminiscent of prior instances of viewpoint discrimination, it constitutes suppression of the story of Facebook's very own past actions on this exact same topic."
X, Facebook, and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Just the News.
The parallels to October 2020 are hard to miss. When the New York Post published stories about Hunter Biden's lucrative business dealings in Ukraine and his connections to Chinese businessmen, Twitter locked the newspaper out of its own account. Then-CEO Jack Dorsey later tweeted that "straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix." He testified before the Senate weeks later, admitting the company made "a quick interpretation, using no other evidence, that the materials in the article were obtained through hacking."
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg offered his own mea culpa, four years after the fact. In an August 2024 letter, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook "sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply." He added a key concession:
"It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story. We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again."
Zuckerberg also suggested his platform blocked the laptop stories at the urging of the FBI. That detail matters. Former Twitter head of site integrity Yoel Roth said in a December 2020 declaration to the Federal Election Commission that he held weekly meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers about election security starting in 2018.
Roth stated he was told "the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks" and that "material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter." He added that "there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden."
That framing gave the platforms the pretext they needed. The infamous laptop letter, signed by more than fifty former intelligence officials aligned with the Democratic Party, fueled the baseless narrative that the Post's reporting was Russian disinformation. Joe Biden's 2020 campaign seized on that narrative, and some of the letter's signers spread it further.
Allegations of the FBI's role in sidelining Hunter Biden-related evidence have surfaced in other contexts as well. Rudy Giuliani's attorney has claimed the FBI avoided Hunter Biden's laptop during a 2021 raid, raising separate questions about how federal law enforcement handled digital evidence tied to the Biden family.
Shapley and Ziegler risked their careers to tell Congress what they saw inside the IRS investigation of Hunter Biden. In congressional transcripts, they said special counsel David Weiss claimed he was limited in his prosecutorial decision-making, directly contradicting Attorney General Merrick Garland's public assurances that Weiss had full authority.
The whistleblowers described a pattern of obstruction. A Hunter Biden business associate told the FBI that Joe Biden had stopped by at least one China-related business meeting at Hunter Biden's apparent request. Investigators were told that "optics" prevented a search warrant at Joe Biden's guest house. And the assistant U.S. attorney in the Delaware federal prosecutor's office allegedly told investigators "don't ask about the big guy", a reference to Joe Biden.
Investigators were also reportedly blocked from probing Hunter Biden's lucrative business dealings in Ukraine through Burisma under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The whistleblowers' disclosures had direct consequences. Hunter Biden initially reached a plea agreement with Weiss on tax crimes and the illegal purchase of a handgun, what congressional Republicans called a "sweetheart deal", in June 2023. That deal collapsed under scrutiny by a federal judge the following month, in part because of what Shapley and Ziegler brought to light.
A Delaware jury convicted Hunter Biden on gun charges in June 2024. He pleaded guilty to tax charges in California that September. Then-President Biden pardoned his son in December 2024, despite repeatedly promising he would not do so.
The Trump administration recognized the whistleblowers' service. In March of last year, both Shapley and Ziegler received promotions to serve as senior advisers to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The broader question of government-directed censorship reached the federal courts. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in September 2023 upheld a lower court decision in Missouri v. Biden barring the federal government from working with social media companies to remove First Amendment-protected content. The case was later settled by agreement, resolving a lawsuit brought by Missouri, Louisiana, and individual plaintiffs who alleged the Biden administration unlawfully coerced major platforms into censoring posts about the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.
The pattern of government-coordinated content suppression extended well beyond the Hunter Biden laptop story. Documents have shown that the Biden-era Surgeon General coordinated a campaign to suppress COVID dissent on social media, reinforcing the picture of an administration comfortable using tech platforms as instruments of information control.
Leavitt's letter to Grassley, Jordan, Comer, and Smith frames the current ad suppression as a test of whether anything has actually changed. Zuckerberg said Facebook updated its policies. Dorsey said Twitter fixed its enforcement. Google made similar noises. Yet when a nonprofit tries to promote a documentary about the very whistleblowers who exposed the original scandal, the ad accounts get suspended, the customer service lines go dead, and nobody at any of the three companies can say why.
The letter went to the chairmen of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the House Oversight Committee, and the House Ways and Means Committee, all Republicans with subpoena power. Whether Congress acts on the complaint will say something about how seriously Washington takes its stated commitment to free expression on dominant digital platforms.
Leavitt called it "ongoing viewpoint discrimination." Given the track record, that description is hard to argue with. The platforms blocked the story in 2020, admitted they were wrong, promised it wouldn't happen again, and now appear to be blocking the people who proved it.
When "never again" lasts about five years, it's not a policy change. It's a cooling-off period.
