The FBI has reportedly placed Assistant Special Agent in Charge Elvis Chan on terminal leave.
Sources told Independent Newsroom that the agency has not allowed Chan to access his devices for more than a month.
Chan became known as one of the primary government officials pushing social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop stories and other information the Biden administration did not approve of.
Chan’s leave follows a turbulent period involving a lawsuit filed by the House Judiciary Committee last year. The committee accused Chan of obstructing its investigation into alleged social media censorship by failing to comply with a subpoena for a deposition. The lawsuit, lodged in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., claims Chan disregarded the subpoena after the Department of Justice challenged the committee’s deposition protocols. “Chan has violated and continues to violate his legal obligations by refusing to appear before the Judiciary Committee,” the House’s Office of General Counsel stated in the filing.
Chan also appeared as a witness in Missouri v. Biden, a federal case examining government influence over social media content moderation. During a deposition, he claimed to have “no internal knowledge” of the suppression of The New York Post’s 2020 story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
🚨EXCLUSIVE🚨
— Breanna Morello (@BreannaMorello) May 1, 2025
FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Elvis Chan has been placed on “terminal leave” and has not accessed his agency devices for over a month, sources confirm.
Chan served as the main censorship liaison between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and social… pic.twitter.com/2no8aktzf2
This is HUGE.
— Official Leftist Translator. - AKA Tony (@tony4mrht) May 1, 2025
Elvis Chan did a lot more damage than just coordinating the Big Tech censorship. He was a driving force for the FBI's pressure on BT to censor what the government wanted to censor.
The government couldn't legally censor you, so they had Chan force the BT… https://t.co/M45dXQDEuz
Chan repeatedly pressured executives at X, then Twitter, to suppress certain types of content on its platform under the guise of combating foreign disinformation efforts.
Journalist Matt Taibbi on Sunday published a “supplemental” thread to his most recent Twitter Files release about the FBI’s contact with the social media giant, which as he explained Friday, was “constant and pervasive.”
The latest information shows one other conflict between the two parties.
"In July of 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan tells Twitter executive Yoel Roth to expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), the inter-agency group that deals with cyber threats," Taibbi tweeted. "The questionnaire authors seem displeased with Twitter for implying, in a July 20th ‘DHS/ODNI/FBI/Industry briefing,’ that ‘you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.’"
As Taibbi explained, the agency didn’t appear to think that was good news.
“Chan underscored this: ‘There was quite a bit of discussion within the USIC to get clarifications from your company,’ he wrote, referring to the United States Intelligence Community,” Taibbi’s thread continued. “The task force demanded to know how Twitter came to its unpopular conclusion. Oddly, it included a bibliography of public sources - including a Wall Street Journal article - attesting to the prevalence of foreign threats, as if to show Twitter they got it wrong.”
Agents like Chan were instrumental in the FBI’s censorship efforts under the Biden administration. Now, it appears that under Trump, those who helped the former president crack down on dissenting voices on elections and the COVID-19 pandemic are being held accountable. Hopefully, now that there is a new sheriff in town, people will see that participating in the silencing of Americans will face consequences.
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