Gov’t censors funded by Congress broke rules by targeting domestic ‘disinformation’.

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center Violated Congressional Mandate

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) colluded with tech giants and nongovernmental organizations to silence disfavored speech during the 2020 election cycle. However, an investigation by The Federalist now indicates that GEC violated its congressional mandate by financing activities and organizations that targeted the speech of Americans.

GEC’s Creation and Mission Creep

The Global Engagement Center is a multi-agency center housed in the State Department that originated in 2011 as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC). In 2016, the Obama administration issued a second executive order, morphing the CSCC into the GEC. However, when Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, the center’s purpose was expanded beyond its original mandate of countering the influence of international terrorists such as the Islamic State, al-Qaida, and other foreign extremists.

• The 2017 NDAA directed the GEC to “coordinate efforts of the Federal Government” to counter foreign state and foreign nonstate “propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.”
• The 2019 NDAA then further expanded the GEC’s mission, authorizing it to counter foreign “propaganda and disinformation” that undermines not only the United States’ national security interests but also the “policies, security, or stability” of the U.S. and our allies.

While Congress dramatically expanded the breadth of the GEC’s mission, its purpose still remained limited to combatting “foreign” disinformation.

GEC Violated Mandate Big Time

Open-source material reviewed by The Federalist establishes that GEC exceeded its statutorily defined purpose by seeking to counter supposed domestic “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Likewise, it illegally used funds appropriated to counter “foreign propaganda and misinformation” for other purposes.

• The “Twitter Files” revealed GEC sought to censor Americans’ speech.
• It endeavored to censor foreign speech that did not fall within the statutory categories of “propaganda” or “misinformation.”
• GEC created, ran, and funded censorship initiatives that targeted both domestic and foreign speech.
• GEC’s funding of technology and organizations that censor domestic speech represents a fourth way the center exceeded its statutorily defined authority.

The GEC-sponsored U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge provides a clear example of a monetary award funding an organization that targets the American marketplace of speech — including news outlets — for censorship, namely the Global Disinformation Index.

So to the tune of some $100,000 in U.S. taxpayer funds — the prize awarded the GDI — the Global Engagement Center helped “bolster” the infrastructure of GDI’s ratings system that resulted in American conservative news outlets being blacklisted, notwithstanding the congressional directive that funding be limited to combating foreign propaganda and disinformation.

The “Twitter Files” and many GEC-funded initiatives that target both domestic and foreign speech tell a very different story.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor.