The Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the U.S. State Department that was
credibly accused of working with organizations both at home and abroad to silence conservative voices, supposedly died last week. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) was unable to get his one-year extension of the center into the continuing resolution that was ultimately passed on Dec. 20.
It appears, however, that the censorious practices undertaken by the agency established by Barack Obama in 2011 might ultimately live on in another form and under a new name.
Documents recently
obtained by the Washington Examiner and reviewed by senior Republican staffers have reportedly exposed the State Department’s intention to “realign” over 50 GEC officials and divert tens of millions of dollars in funding to what appears to effectively be the same controversial agency by another name, this time the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub.
This would not be the first time the agency —
deemed the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation” by Elon Musk in the wake of the Twitter Files, found to be internally dysfunctional in a 2022 State Department Office of Inspector General report, and defended ardently by Sens. Christopher Murphy (D-Conn.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), and John Cornyn (R-Texas) — underwent a name change. When first established by a 2011 Obama executive order, the agency was called the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications.
Weeks ahead of the GEC’s closure, the State Department reportedly noted in a Dec. 6, 2024, non-public letter to members of Congress, “Should the authority for the GEC not be extended, the department plans to realign 51 employees and associated funding from the GEC to a proposed Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub reporting to the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy (R).”
The associated funds funneled into this hub would reportedly total $29.4 million.
According to the documents obtained by the Examiner, the remaining GEC staffers and funds would be assigned to the Bureaus of African Affairs, East Asian and Pacific Affairs, European and Eurasian Affairs, and other offices at the State Department.
“The Department of State intends to realign $18.2 million in DP Public Diplomacy funding (of which $15.0 million is bureau-managed and $3.2 million is American Salaries) to eight bureaus and one office that will receive U.S. Direct Hire or third-party contract staff from GEC as part of the realignment,” said the documents.
A senior Republican aide told the Examiner, “Donald Trump and Marco Rubio are going to have to track every single office, down to every single staffer, if they want to end the weaponization of the federal government against conservatives.”
“The State Department is filled with Resistance Democrats who think they got through the first Trump administration and will get through the second the same way,” added the aide.
While the GEC may survive in spirit, a source familiar with the matter told the Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky that the proposed hub would not have the grant-making power the agency previously enjoyed.
After it was
codified into law in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, the GEC was equipped with both grant-making authority and the ability to “build a decentralized network of private sector actors and allow the integration of capabilities and expertise available outside the U.S. government into the strategy-making process.”
‘The GEC — a government center antithetical to a free press.’
In the lawsuit
filed December 2023 by Texas, the Daily Wire, and the Federalist in hopes of halting “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation,” the plaintiffs alleged that the GEC backed at a minimum two American censorship enterprises: the Disinformation Index Inc., the American component of the British think tank Global Disinformation Index, and NewsGuard Technologies.
Blaze News
previously reported that both organizations produced blacklists of supposedly risky or misleading news outfits with the objective of getting them demonetized and directing funds to news organizations that regurgitate approved narratives.
Whereas the Washington Post, HuffPost, and other liberal news pages were categorized as the “least risky sites” in the GDI’s fall 2022 report, Blaze News, Reason, the Federalist, the Daily Wire, the New York Post, and other conservative publications made the top-10 list of “riskiest sites” and were smeared as having the “greatest level of disinformation risk.”
The Examiner
revealed last year that the GDI had pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money from the GEC in 2021 and 2022.
“It’s an incubator for the domestic disinformation complex,” a former intelligence source previously
told investigative reporter Matt Taibbi. “All the s*** we pulled in other countries since the Cold War, some morons decided to bring home.”
In addition to the apparent survival of the GEC in the form of the proposed hub, senior GEC officials have migrated to the wings of senior officials in the State Department. For instance,
James Rubin, former special envoy and coordinator at the GEC, is now reportedly a senior adviser to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and the agency’s former acting coordinator, Leah Bray, is now chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell.
The State Department did not provide the Examiner with comment on its congressional notification. However, a State Department spokesman
made clear to Politico in October that Blinken was committed to “preserving the GEC’s critical work.”
“No matter what, combatting foreign information manipulation overseas will continue as a critical part of the Department’s mission,” said the spokesman.
“It is heartening to see Congress has refused to continue funding the GEC — a government center antithetical to a free press,” Margot Cleveland, an attorney with the New Civil Liberties Alliance involved in Texas’ lawsuit against the State Department and GEC,
said in a statement Thursday. “NCLA remains concerned, however, that the State Department has ‘realigned’ GEC personnel and funds to other areas of the State Department and to date has refused to even provide a copy of the notice of the realignment the agency shared with Congress nearly a month ago.”
While the suit has been stayed until Feb. 18, the NCLA indicated that it is “continuing to review and obtain discovery aimed at exposing the true depth of the government’s egregious censorship regime.”
The GEC was also named in a new civil lawsuit
filed Monday by the Functional Government Initiative. According to the complaint obtained by Reclaim the Net, the GEC failed to comply with records requests that could have provided “increased transparency and allow[ed] the public to see if and how State Department officials were collaborating [with] or discussing EU censorship.”
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Read the full article here
