Investigation

Facebook Whistleblower Is Leftist Activist Repped By Lawyer For ‘Whistleblower’ Behind Trump Impeachment

   DailyWire.com
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen listens to opening statements during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing entitled 'Protecting Kids Online: Testimony from a Facebook Whistleblower' on Capitol Hill October 5, 2021 in Washington, DC. Haugen left Facebook in May and provided internal company documents about Facebook to journalists and others, alleging that Facebook consistently chooses profit over safety. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, has a record of donations to far-left Democrats and a history of raising issues about purported bias while at previous employers, a Daily Wire review found. She is working with Democrat operatives to roll out her complaint and has the same lawyers as the anonymous Ukraine “whistleblower” whose allegations led to Donald Trump’s impeachment, but who reportedly turned out to be then-Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisor on the country.

In a previous role at Pinterest, Frances Haugen was behind a “recent change to give users the option to filter searches to specific skin tones.” At Gigster, she gave a talk on how “if we don’t build with an eye towards inclusion, we can end up enshrining bias.”

In 2015, she complained that Google was not inclusive enough of women, saying: “I didn’t realize the way I had been worn down by being a woman in tech… the last team I was on at Google, it had a transsexual Eng[ineering] director, and as a result we had more transsexual women than cis women on our team, which also says something sad about the number of women in tech.”

“You don’t see them in major tech companies and when you do see them in major tech companies you see them in places that are in support roles like marketing or perhaps sales. I think that’s a problem,” she said.

According to public records, Haugen co-owns a house with Molly Tombley-McCann, a computer coder who made a “gamification tool to be a better ally.”

Haugen has made more than twenty federal campaign contributions since 2016, all of which have gone to Democrats, according to Federal Election Commission data. On January 13th, 2020, Haugen sent money to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign and a further contribution to her “Courage to Change” Political Action Committee. One of the most frequent recipients of her donations was the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

The Senate’s Sub-Committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, which is chaired by Sen. Richard Blumenthal  (D-CT), invited her to testify to the panel on Tuesday to air her complaints, which consist in part of contending that Facebook did not censor enough speech. She says she was motivated to take action after a friend became “radicalized” by “misinformation.”

Despite having money for political donations, in January 2020, Haugen had a $44,000 federal tax lien placed against her for unpaid taxes, according to public records reviewed by The Daily Wire. The lien was released on May 17, 2021.

Her lawyers are now seeking to raise $50,000 on GoFundMe, money they say will go to covering legal expenses for the attorneys, who are otherwise working pro-bono.

Those lawyers are Whistleblower Aid, a group founded by Mark Zaid, who previously represented the national security official who alleged that Donald Trump inappropriately pressed the Ukraine president on a phone call to, in turn, investigate whether Joe Biden inappropriately pressed the country to drop an investigation into his son’s firm, Burisma.

The identity of that “whistleblower” — who did not have first-hand knowledge of the call — was fiercely shrouded. But some outlets reported that it was Eric Ciaramelli, Joe Biden’s top advisor on Ukraine. That position meant he could have been personally implicated by any misconduct Joe Biden may have undertaken around Ukraine during the Obama administration. It could have also been motivated by personal loyalty: Ciaramelli was close enough to Biden that Biden invited him as a guest to a State Department dinner.

In a roll-out that appeared carefully crafted by political and legal professionals, the allegation was leveled, led to a series of moves culminating in the impeachment of Trump, and shrank away, without the whistleblower’s name — and the potential conflicts it could bring — ever being revealed.

Before filing his complaint with the intelligence community inspector general, the whistleblower met with staff for Democrat Adam Schiff. Schiff later claimed “we have not spoken directly with the whistleblower,” a statement The Washington Post said was “flat-out-false.” The whistleblower, meanwhile, concealed from the inspector general that he had previously spoken to Congress about it. The complaint was filed the same month that Schiff hired Sean Misko, an NSC colleague of Ciaramelli, the Washington Examiner reported.

Haugen’s case has some similarities to the Ukraine/impeachment case. She carefully fed internal Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal, working with Zaid and his law partners John Tye, a former Obama State Department official, and Andrew Bakaj, who worked for Democratic senators including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

The public relations firm of former Obama aide Bill Burton, a company called Bryson Gillette helmed by a raft of Democratic operatives, is providing Haugen with “strategic communications guidance,” helping run what one Republican called “an incredibly well-orchestrated communications campaign,” the Free Beacon reported. Bryson Gillette also runs publicity for the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology, which has waged a policy war with Facebook.

Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, worked for Bryson Gillette as a senior advisor until September 2020, with the Center for Humane Technology as one of her clients, according to ethics filings obtained by The Daily Wire. Bryson Gillette did not return a request for comment.

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