EXCLUSIVE — House Republicans are expanding the scope of their investigation into the Biden administration’s alleged ties to “censorship” and “disinformation” tracking through a new demand for a trove of records from the State Department.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) issued subpoenas on Friday to the heads of three federal agencies, including the State Department-housed Global Engagement Center interagency, with the aim of uncovering government coordination with social media companies on content moderation. Now, House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans are asking the GEC for records on grants to entities tied to efforts to fight “disinformation” and “misinformation,” citing various lucrative awards in recent years, according to a Monday letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and obtained by the Washington Examiner.
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The letter, led by Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) and signed by seven other Republicans, alleges that the GEC “continues to stray from its founding mission through its subsidized censorship of free speech and disfavored opinions” by handing taxpayer dollars to groups like the Global Disinformation Index, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. The Washington Examiner revealed in February that GDI has been blacklisting conservative media outlets and pocketed $100,000 from the GEC in 2021.
“The GEC’s founding mission, effectively, was to provide a ready resource for the truth about America and our fight against global terror, particularly ISIS,” McCaul and the Republicans, including Reps. Brian Mast (R-FL), Chris Smith (R-NJ), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), Keith Self (R-TX), Cory Mills (R-FL), and Ken Buck (R-CO), wrote in their letter to Blinken. “We therefore are forced to wonder about the authority by which the GEC justifies its mission creep, and the direction of its current evolutionary trajectory.”
In September 2022, the State Department’s inspector general found that the GEC was both not properly taking steps to thwart foreign threats and vetting how its grants are being used overseas. The GEC was founded in 2016 during the Obama administration, and its first head was then-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel — now an MSNBC on-air analyst.
Following that report, Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee decided to delay reauthorizing the GEC “until issues related to internal staffing, organizational structure, and policy priorities were resolved,” the lawmakers wrote in their Monday letter. The center is up for authorization in 2024, and several congressional staffers told the Washington Examiner that Republicans are still weighing their options — growing increasingly unhappy with the GEC’s ties to the “disinformation” tracking industry.
GEC’s current legal authorities will cease on Dec. 23, 2024, unless action is taken by Congress.
The Monday letter cited several examples of the GEC’s role in aligning with this industry, including its move to spend $275,000 in 2021 to produce a video game called Cat Park that “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 the censorship watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online.
Similarly, the GEC-funded GDI has alleged that the 10 “riskiest” news outlets for disinformation are the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post. The GEC has also reportedly granted tax dollars to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Lab, which flagged over 40,000 Twitter accounts in June 2021 that were purportedly engaged in “inauthentic behavior” and boosting Hindi nationalism, according to documents published by journalist Matt Taibbi in March as part of the “Twitter Files.”
“The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits government officials from censoring disfavored speakers and viewpoints,” the Republicans wrote in their letter to Blinken. “Merely labeling speech ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ does not strip away First Amendment protections, and government officials may not circumvent the First Amendment by inducing, threatening, and/or colluding with private entities to suppress protected speech.”
They are demanding that the GEC hand over all documents and communications by May 11 between itself and “any entity with a domestic presence in the United States, including media outlets, mentioning ‘disinformation,’ ‘disinfo,’ ‘misinformation,’ ‘misinfo,’ or ‘malinformation.'”
The Republicans also seek records on federal funds that have flowed to the Atlantic Council, GDI, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Digital Public Square, Alliance for Securing Democracy, Google Jigsaw, German Marshall Fund of the United States, and Moonshot CVE.
Moreover, the letter demands emails and correspondence between GEC employees, contractors, consultants, 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.
“Material preservation is essential for Congress to conduct a comprehensive fact-finding investigation into actions by the GEC and grantees in stifling, censoring, and silencing conservative speech through the guise of labeling it as misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter.
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The letter added, “Please notify all relevant current and former employees, colleagues, officials, contractors, subcontractors, and consultants who may have worked on documents, communications, or information that is or would be potentially responsive to this congressional inquiry. Thank you for your cooperation in this critical oversight matter.”
The State Department did not return a request for comment.
