URGENT: The Empire Strikes Back in Berenson v Biden

The government, Pfizer, and Andy Slavitt just filed massive motions to dismiss my suit, including citing national security. If you aren't an Unreported Truths subscriber, NOW is a great time to join.

Bear with me.

I may be writing less for a bit, for the most interesting possible reason.

On Monday night, lawyers for the government, Pfizer, and Andy Slavitt filed motions to dismiss my lawsuit seeking to hold them accountable for violating my rights and pressing Twitter to censor me in 2021 over my criticism of the mRNA Covid shots.

The Department of Justice attorneys went so far as to claim that allow my efforts to protect my First Amendment rights “would impinge on foreign policy and interfere with national security.”

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(You think I’m joking about what they said? I’m not joking. Stand with me. Stand for free speech. Today.)

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You may recall that in April, I sued President Joe Biden and other federal officials, along with Slavitt, the former senior advisor to Biden’s Covid response, and Pfizer chairman Albert Bourla and board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

I alleged in federal court in New York they had engaged in a conspiracy to violate my First Amendment rights by causing Twitter to ban me in August 2021. I had previously sued Twitter over the ban in California and successfully forced the company to allow me back on Twitter before Elon Musk took over. (James Lawrence of Envisage Law in North Carolina represented both lawsuits.)

Now the defendants have responded.

Have they ever.

Three motions to dismiss, three memoranda supporting those motions, encompassing well over 100 precedents and statutes.

The defenses range from the routine - Slavitt’s lawyers claim a New York court should not hear the suit because he lives in California - to the highly unusual. Like the government’s claim that if I am allowed to sue over censorship, “efforts to combat misinformation would undoubtedly be hindered, to the detriment of its foreign policy and national security objectives.”

The replies are not just long, they are expertly crafted.

The Southern District of New York does not hire fools, and the private lawyers working for Pfizer and Slavitt are the best money can buy. They are taking this suit seriously. They know we beat Twitter’s motion to dismiss last year, and they know the stakes this time. This is, no exaggeration, likely the only lawsuit with any realistic chance to hold Pfizer accountable for anything related to the mRNA jabs, or to learn why the government panicked over me and a handful of other Covid vaccine skeptics in summer 2021.

The length of the defense responses is part of the defense strategy. Big law firms excel at the game of trying to drown their opponents in paper, of crafting motions that appear to be so well-supported by precedent no judge could possibly rule against them. (Twitter tried this too.)

So James Lawrence - and I - have a lot of work ahead. (He once called me “the world’s best paralegal,” a title I wear with pride.)

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(Warning: legal reading ahead.)

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As you may have noticed, I’ve been writing a lot of Substacks recently, four and sometimes five times a week.

I haven’t consciously upped the pace, but I feel like we’ve had a surprising amount of news around Covid and the mRNAs, not to mention the Trump indictments and the continuing assaults on free speech. I don’t mind - it beats working. I hope you don’t either. (Unreported Truths readers are generally not shy about saying what they think, and I haven’t had many complaints, so I assume you are on board.)

Now, though, I am going to have to pull back a little, to focus on helping James with our responses to the motions to dismiss. As I did in Berenson v Twitter, I promise that at some point I will discuss to the extent possible the strengths and weaknesses we see in the complaints, as well as our broad strategy in the case. (Obviously I don’t want to give away anything that will help the defense.)

In the meantime, I hope you will understand if I’m writing less for a few weeks.

The cause is just!

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(Seriously, join Team National Security Threat!)

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One final note: If you’re interested, you can find more background on Berenson v Biden is here: