Disinformation Inc: Biden administration misses GOP deadline for ‘censorship’ records

EXCLUSIVE — The State Department has failed to meet a House GOP-set deadline to provide a trove of records related to the Biden administration’s ties to “censorship” and purported “disinformation” tracking, the Washington Examiner has learned.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee demanded on May 1 that the Global Engagement Center, a State Department-housed interagency, turn over documents on its efforts to fight “disinformation” and “misinformation,” including through lucrative grants. But the GEC, which has come under fire from Republicans for bankrolling groups like the Global Disinformation Index that blacklist conservative media, has missed the deadline.

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“State’s failure to meet the deadline continues a troubling Biden administration practice of noncompliance with congressional oversight and a lax attitude about its obligation to respond,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the committee’s chairman who led the May 1 letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, told the Washington Examiner. “The Foreign Affairs Committee will keep this in mind as it considers any and all State Department-requested legislative proposals.”

A subpoena to the GEC is definitely “not off the table” with regard to the request for documents, two sources close to the committee said.

McCaul’s May 1 letter to Blinken was also signed by seven other lawmakers, including longtime free speech advocate Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Ken Buck (R-CO). It alleged that the GEC “continues to stray” from its mission, which is to “direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate” government efforts to fight “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation” through its funding of the Global Disinformation Index, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, and Moonshot CVE.

The GEC was founded in 2016 during the Obama administration, and its first leader was Richard Stengel, then-secretary of state for public diplomacy and now an MSNBC on-air analyst. Stengel once famously said that he’s “not against propaganda,” a clip Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) highlighted in a March congressional hearing that saw Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, authors of the “Twitter Files” based on internal documents provided by now-Twitter CEO Elon Musk, testifying.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans previously decided to delay reauthorizing the GEC “until issues related to internal staffing, organizational structure, and policy priorities were resolved,” the May 1 letter noted. The GEC, which is up for reauthorization in 2024, was found by the State Department’s inspector general in September 2022 to be insufficiently taking steps to thwart foreign threats and not vetting how overseas entities use taxpayer dollars.

Unless Congress takes action to safeguard its powers, the GEC’s legal authority will cease on Dec. 23, 2024, according to government records.

“Neither the State Department, nor the GEC, have come close to detailing for Congress the extent of their censorship activities or provided any confidence that the problem isn’t even worse than is known right now,” Issa, who previously sent a letter in March to the State Department over it funding the Global Disinformation Index, told the Washington Examiner.

“This is the time to come clean,” the congressman added.

The May 1 letter asked the GEC for emails and correspondence between any of its employees, contractors, or subcontractors with the keywords “disinformation,” “misinformation,” or “malinformation,” in terms of the Washington Examiner, RealClearPolitics, the Federalist, the New York Post, and other conservative media outlets. These outlets were labeled as “disinformation” by the Global Disinformation Index, which received $100,000 from the GEC in 2021 and roughly $860,000 from 2020 to 2022 from the National Endowment for Democracy, a State Department-funded nonprofit group authorized by Congress in 1983.

The Republicans also seek records in connection to the State Department’s contracts, grants, and agreements with the Global Disinformation and other entities, including the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a nonprofit think tank, and its project called Alliance for Securing Democracy.

ASD “develops comprehensive strategies to deter, defend against, and raise the costs on autocratic efforts to undermine and interfere in democratic institutions,” according to its website. It has come under heightened scrutiny following Taibbi publishing internal Twitter emails on Hamilton 68, a dashboard ASD launched to track alleged Russian disinformation, in which then-Twitter trust and safety head Yoel Roth told his colleagues in 2018 that it “falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots.”

The advisory council for ASD previously included Obama Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff, neoconservative writer Bill Kristol, Biden clean green czar John Podesta, and Mike Morell, the ex-Obama CIA head who organized the infamous 2020 letter linking Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop to Russia. Morell told congressional investigators in April that then-Biden campaign adviser Blinken “triggered” him to write the letter, which was approved before publication by the CIA and passed around for signatures by a then-CIA official, according to testimony provided to the House Judiciary Committee.

“The Alliance for Securing Democracy used no government funding for the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which was operational from August 2017 to December 2018,” Irvin McCullough, a spokesman for ASD, told the Washington Examiner. “During this time, ASD drew 100 percent of its revenue from private philanthropic foundations and individual donors.”

When it comes to the GEC itself, Republicans took aim in their May letter at its decision in 2021 to spend $275,000 on the making of a video game called Cat Park. Another funder of Cat Park was the U.S. Embassy in The Hague in the Netherlands.

The game “inoculates players against real-world disinformation by showing how sensational headlines, memes, and manipulated media can be used to advance conspiracy theories and incite real-world violence,” according to a leaked State Department memo obtained by America First Legal Foundation, a right-leaning charity founded by ex-senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller, and also Foundation for Freedom Online, a free speech watchdog led by ex-deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information technology Mike Benz under Trump’s State Department.

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America First Legal is one of several groups, like Protect the Public’s Trust led by ex-Trump Education Department official Michael Chamberlain, that has launched Freedom of Information Act request investigations in order to obtain State Department records on efforts to thwart alleged disinformation.

The Washington Examiner has reached out to the State Department for comment.