In the News

In 2017, Rep. Ro Khanna entered Congress, and in his first year began speaking out about a price-gouging defense contractor named TransDigm that ultimately returned $16 million in overcharges to the Pentagon.

A longtime creature of the tech world, it's perhaps not surprising that Rep. Ro Khanna makes an appearance in the latest Silicon Valley scandal.

Last week, a House investigation into Big Oil profiteering and greenwashing released its latest report — the result of more than a year of research, subpoenas and hearings.

Those who followed Friday's release of the "Twitter Files" — a series of emails concerning Twitter's decision to suppress a New York Post story on Hunter Biden just prior to the 2020 presidential election — were treated to a surprise guest appearance from Bay Area Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat who represents Silicon Valley.

When Twitter tried to smother distribution of an October 2020 New York Post exposé of Joe Biden's son, Hunter, just weeks before the presidential election, Republicans cried foul.

Thanks to new owner Elon Musk's big reveal Friday of internal communications showing how it all went down, we now know one Bay Area Democrat privately echoed the GOP's free-speech concerns to the San Francisco social media giant's decision-makers: Rep. Ro Khanna.

Congressman Ro Khanna, who represents California District 17 in the Silicon Valley region, visited Berlin, N.H. in early November to meet with a gathering of local community activists and elected officials. He is perhaps best known for recently chairing Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign and acting as point man for the Biden administration's negotiations with Sen. Joe Manchin and others to finally pass the Inflation Reduction Act with both record climate action and pharmaceutical price reductions.

Most of the Party operatives I spoke with emphasized that, as a first task, the Democrats have to upgrade their direct, in-person campaigning rather than focus on fine-tuning their message and beaming it out through expensive television ads. Steve Rosenthal, a long-discontented member of the pro-labor wing of the Party, complained about the Party's drift during the high era of television advertising: "The Party was too invested in television ads and messaging, and it ignored infrastructure—block captains, precinct leaders, people who knock on doors.

Ro Khanna, the Democrat who represents a big chunk of Silicon Valley in Congress, is still optimistic that his party will hold onto the House and that Congress will pass meaningful regulations of Big Tech . But if Republicans win the House, he warns, they'll devote less time to those issues and more to investigating Hunter Biden.