Gizmodo

Millions of records that the Federal Communications Commission’s top lawyer once fought to hold back from state law enforcement officials now serve as key evidence in a year-long probe into cases of Americans being impersonated during the agency’s latest net neutrality proceeding.

An organization run by a former Trump campaign statewide director is being investigated by the New York attorney general’s office for its role in submitting potentially hundreds of thousands of fraudulent comments to the Federal Communications Commission during the agency’s 2017 efforts to rollback Obama-era network neutrality rules. Research reveals the group’s deep ties to prominent GOP firms, including one paid more than $31 million by the Republican National Committee (RNC) to provide email lists of potential voters during the 2016 campaign.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) joined CA state senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), firefighters, state legislators and community advocates in support of CA Senate Bill 822, which would enact the strongest net neutrality standards in the nation. “Once we have established California as a model of a state taking action, other states may follow,” she said. “And then I think you will see some of corporate America say, okay, let’s have a federal law because we don’t...want to do different things in different states,” she says.

As it wrestled with accusations about a fake cyberattack, the Federal Communications Commission purposely misled several news organizations, choosing to feed journalists false information, while at the same time discouraging them from challenging the agency’s official story.

At its own discretion, the Federal Communications Commission has chosen to block the release of records related to a video produced in 2017 in which FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and a Verizon executive joke about installing a “Verizon puppet” as head of the FCC.