Dept of State

SEE DOGE CUTS SOFT PWR FOR AID USAID

SEE RUBIO 3 SOS

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By Brandy Zadrozny

Aug. 25, 2026,

For 17 months, the State Department has promised to deliver proof of a long-promoted conspiracy theory about its own agency: that its officials routinely censored conservative Americans. This week, it failed that mission, as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers released a trove of documents that proved nothing.

The conspiracy theory has grown during President Donald Trump’s second term, providing the State Department with a rationale for dismantling the offices that once studied and countered foreign disinformation campaigns, for firing officials with decades of experience and for shuttering entire departments.

The effort was first led by acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie, a former far-right academic who had been fired from the first Trump administration after he attended a white nationalist conference. Beattie claimed the DOGE-style decimation of the State Department was necessary to rid the agency of officials who were tied to a baseless conspiracy theory known as the “censorship-industrial complex.”

Promoters of the censorship-industrial complex — a secret but somehow sprawling partnership between the Biden government, journalists, academics and civil society groups, aimed at silencing conservative Americans — have repeatedly failed to prove their case, in congressional investigations and in the courts, including the Supreme Court. Still, the theory persists.

Beattie had no evidence for his unfounded claims that the State Department had participated in that conspiracy, but in March 2025, he launched an investigation inside the State Department that he said would reveal all. Beattie requested the files, emails and other communications of State Department officials, including any records with seemingly random keywords like “Black Lives Matter,” “great replacement theory” and “Pepe the Frog,” as well as any communications with figures Beattie believed to be part of the conspiracy. (These included The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, Bill Gates, disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz and some 60 others, including this reporter.)

In the official announcement for the closure of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Mike Benz, a former pseudonymous racist YouTuber and chief architect of the censorship-industrial complex theory, that a reckoning was coming. It would be driven by evidence, disclosed in the model of the “Twitter Files,” a 2022 dump of internal Twitter records that Elon Musk gave to selected writers to show the alleged censorship of conservatives. (It didn’t.)

Rubio said the job now was to “document what happened.”

“Because one thing is to say it in a broadcast like this, another thing is to actually put it on paper,” he said.

This week, Rogers, Beattie’s replacement, finally had something to share.

According to a series of posts on X, some since deleted, Rogers messaged Jennica Pounds, a self-described analyst who goes by the moniker Data Republican, known for creating massive, if amateur, data troves used to allege government waste, fraud and abuse, which made her a favorite of Musk’s.

Pounds said she thought Rogers was handing documents about Cuba, but got “shoved a bunch of hard copy documents to leak” about the GEC.

“I wanted to give you the option of ‘breaking’ the story as sort of a gift,” Rogers told her, according to a direct message that Pounds posted.

Then things got weird. Pounds has been a reliable vector for the Trump administration to push its narrative that a so-called deep state, or shadow government, was operating in secret and against the best interests of its citizens. But when she received the State Department’s “gift,” Pounds determined that it was a plot by Rogers to entrap her into committing a crime, asserting that releasing or reporting on the documents would be illegal.

Rogers responded “lol” and released the documents herself in a series of 35 posts that borrowed the breathless cadence of the Twitter Files, drawing ominous connections between GEC emails, international projects to combat foreign disinformation, and nongovernmental coalitions. It all implied the existence of a censorship-industrial-complex operation — without proving it. Rogers’ document dump got little attention from right-wing media.

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“There were State Department employees sharing news articles. Diplomats had communicated with foreign governments. And somewhere in the rubble was a project examining ‘gendered disinformation’ that had been — wait for it — announced at the Summit for Democracy and published on the State Department website,” former senior foreign service officer Orna Blum wrote sarcastically on Substack.

Pounds seemed to agree with the former State Department official.

“The actual documents were nothingburgers,” she posted.

Neither the State Department nor Pounds responded to requests for comment.

The debacle may show that the half-decade of unproven censorship claims has exhausted their audience.

“The under secretary is yet again twisting decontextualized snippets of emails and long-public documents to try to propagate a conspiracy theory,” said Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University. As the former research manager for the Stanford Internet Observatory, DiResta has long been a boogeyman of the censorship-industrial complex theory.

“The mass censorship claims were a hoax,” DiResta said.

Over the weekend, some of the State officials pushed out in last year’s purge lit up Signal chats, commenting on Rogers’ rollout of the long-promised proof of the conspiracy that had cost them their jobs and hollowed out the agency where they had spent their careers. One former senior official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told MS NOW: “In the end, it’s not the greatest consolation on earth to find out that the people who wrecked 10 years of your work and your career are a bunch of galaxy-level dipshits.”

The release did reveal something, however: an unintentional revelation about an undisclosed relationship between a federal agency and Pounds, a professed independent researcher who has often criticized others, without evidence, of being “a fed.”

In her posts, Pounds alleged that Rogers was trying to threaten her employment, revealing along the way that since July she had been a special government employee of the Department of Defense. Before that, Pounds had been provided credentials as a member of the Pentagon’s hollowed-out press corps.

A Defense Department official confirmed her employment but declined to give further details.

Brandy Zadrozny

Brandy Zadrozny is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW.

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AN 2 26

President Donald Trump's appointee Susan B. Rogers is “arguably… the public face of the Trump administration’s growing hostility to European liberal democracies,” according to a prominent British publication that accuses her of propping up far right regimes.

Rogers, who has been Trump’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs since October, has repeatedly characterized efforts to stop the rise of the far right as threats to free speech and met with marginalized extremist parties, according to a Wednesday report in The Guardian.

On the social media platform Twitter/X, Rogers has characterized German migrants as “barbarian rapist hordes,” linked Sweden’s immigration policy to sexual violence (“If your government cared about ‘women’s safety,’ it would have a different migration policy”) and claimed that “advocates of unlimited third world immigration have long controlled a disproportionate share of official knowledge production.”

The Guardian also highlighted Rogers’ meetings with members of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party, which is widely viewed as neo-Nazi in its ideology. After meeting with AfD parliamentarian Markus Frohnmaier, Rogers wrote that “unlike the Russian government (and the current German one), AfD took an anti-censorship stance in its meeting with me last week. One reason they’re gaining popularity in Germany.”

Rogers defended her meeting by telling The Guardian, “Mr Frohnmaier is the foreign policy spokesman for the most popular political party in Germany. He delivers AfD’s foreign policy positions in the Bundestag, and is the person German media call when they want a policy statement from AfD. For this reason, we talk to him in his official capacity to understand AfD’s positions.”

Yet Rogers has done more than meet with AfD. According to The Financial Times, Rogers has also scheduled meetings with far right parties throughout Europe on a mission to “fund MAGA-aligned think-tanks and charities.” According to a senior member of the UK’s far-right Reform party, Rogers has a “State Department slush fund to get MAGA-style things going in various places” and was keen to “fund European organisations to undermine government policies.”

Others in Trump’s orbit have also worked to prop up AfD. Twitter/X CEO Elon Musk, who performed a Nazi salute at Trump’s 2025 inauguration, has publicly embraced AfD as the “last spark of hope.” Meanwhile Vice President JD Vance wrote a Twitter/X post promoting Musk’s pro-AfD statements while adding, “I’m not endorsing a party in the German elections, as it’s not my country and we hope to have good relations with all Germans. But this is an interesting piece.”

Vance then added, “Also interesting; American media slanders AfD as Nazi-lite, But AfD is most popular in the same areas of Germany that were most resistant to the Nazis.”

Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, describing the Trump administration’s opposition to the pro-democracy multinational alliances that governed the post-World War II international order, argued that “the postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us. Eight decades later, we are once again called to create a free world out of the chaos, and this will not be easy.”

In response to Trump’s support for the far right from Germany and the United Kingdom to Marine Le Pen in Russia and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the Munich Security Conference — widely regarded as the world’s top independent forum for analyzing foreign policy — warned that his policies could lead to global conflict.

“Transactional deals may well replace principled cooperation, private interests may increasingly trump public ones, and regions may become dominated by great powers rather than governed by international rules and norms,” the Munich Security Conference’s recent report warned.

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PCO

A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from deporting a British man who was recently placed on a visa ban after U.S. officials accused him and four other Europeans of online censorship.

Center for Countering Digital Hate CEO Imran Ahmed filed a complaint Thursday against Secretary of State Marco Rubioand Attorney General Pam Bondito prevent “the imminent prospect of unconstitutional arrest,” the lawsuit reads.

“The government’s actions are the latest in a string of escalating and unjustifiable assaults on the First Amendment and other rights, one that cannot stand basic legal scrutiny,” it continues. “Simply put, immigration enforcement—here, immigration detention and threatened deportation — may not be used as a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express views disfavored by the current administration.”

The suit adds that Ahmed is a lawful permanent resident with a wife and son who are U.S. citizens.

The complaint cites other recent cases where foreign nationals on student visas, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, were stripped of their documentation and faced with deportation as “part of a larger pattern of attempted repression of constitutionally protected speech.”

“The government has no power to punish Mr. Ahmed for his research, protected speech, and advocacy, and Defendants cannot evade those constitutional limitations by simply claiming that Mr. Ahmed’s presence or activities have ‘potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,'” the suit reads.

The administration placed the visa ban on Ahmed, along with French former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton, Global Disinformation Index CEO Clare Melford and HateAid leaders Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, on Tuesday.

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Breton backed the EU’s Digital Services Act, which compelled online platforms to tackle hate speech and misinformation and remove it from their pages. U.S. officials claim the law unfairly targets American tech companies and citizens, Reuters reported.

On Tuesday, Rubio accused the five of leading “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose.”

“Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States,” Rubio posted on social media. “We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”

Undersecretary of State Sarah Rogers shared Rubio’s message and warned that “if you spend your career fomenting censorship of American speech, you’re unwelcome on American soil.”

Breton criticized his visa ban, asking in an X post if “[former. Sen. Joe] McCarthy’s witch hunt” was back.

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sadly no paste

U.S. bars five Europeans it says pressured tech firms to censor American viewpoints online | PBS News

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DOGE CUTS?

AN 12 25

The New York Times reports U.S. diplomacy is floundering with fully 98 percent of diplomats reporting plummeting workplace morale since the Trump administration took over in January.

“The Foreign Service is in crisis,” said John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association, or A.F.S.A. “Damage is being done to America’s diplomatic service that we will be paying for for decades to come.”

An upcoming A.F.S.A. report warns that “America’s diplomatic capacity is being decimated from within” as seasoned diplomats are laid off or abandon their government roles. The Times reports findings are consistent with “countless anecdotal complaints from both Foreign Service officers, trained professionals who work in embassies and consulates abroad, and the civil servants who mainly staff the State Department’s headquarters in Washington.”

Likely fueling the dissatisfaction is a sense among current and former U.S. officials that, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the department has become more political and less relevant, despite Rubio initially assuring department workers that he valued their expertise and wanted the department to play a greater role in foreign policy.

Surveys show 86 percent of employees say it has become harder to carry out U.S. foreign policy. Just 1 percent reported an improvement.

Diplomats say their years of experience and input is not welcome, especially if it diverges from President Trump’s views.

“They have watched from the sidelines as much of America’s most sensitive diplomacy is conducted not by … Rubio but by Trump insiders such as Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul with no prior diplomatic experience, and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, often acting with little or no assistance from career diplomats,” the Times reports.

Just this week Witkoff and Kushner traveled to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, just after leaked transcripts show Witkoff coached Putin apparatchik Yuri Ushakov on how to manipulate President Donald Trump with flattery.

Until this year, the Times reports the State Department had a strong ethos of nonpartisanship, and “many career officials have blanched at the appointments of relatively inexperienced ideological conservatives to senior positions.” A more politicized workplace has also led diplomats to self-censor their observations and advice, according to Dinkelman. Additionally, orientation training for new workers no longer informs them of the State Department’s “dissent channel,” which was created in 1971 in response to concerns that unwelcome opinions about the disastrous Vietnam War that proved accurate were ignored or suppressed.

“If I’m not telling you everything I know because I fear that you might not like the answer to the question, then what is the value of diplomacy?” Dinkelman said.

Read the New York Times report at this link.

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2025

'Shameful': Trump State Dept Official Fired After Efforts to Denounce Ethnic Cleansing, Killing of Journalists | Common Dreams

aug 21

Human rights advocates and critics of the Trump administration are denouncing the US State Department's firing of a top media relations official who reportedly recommended "expressing condolences" for journalists killed by Israeli forces in Gaza and drafted a statement articulating US government opposition to what amounts to ethnic cleansing in the besieged enclave.

According to the Washington Post, Shahed Ghoreishi, the department's lead press officer on Israeli-Palestinian affairs, was fired Monday after a series of internal debates over how to characterize aspects of White House policy regarding Gaza, including over the release of a statement which simply said: "We do not support forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza."...

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Brent Nelson, emergency manager for Walsh County, North Dakota, told the local Grand Forks Herald that the cleanup process could take months.

“The roads around the spill area have been closed to assist with the cleanup,” the Herald reported. “Walsh County Sheriff Ronald Jurgens asks the public to avoid the area so the cleanup process can proceed. On-site security will stop and fine any driver ignoring the closed road signs.”

TC Energy, previously known as TransCanada, denied that the spill had any impact on drinking water, a claim that was met with skepticism.

@RuthH_Hopkins

Keystone Pipeline leak spills oil in northeastern North Dakota

Corp says the oil hasn’t contaminated any drinking water & they’re cleaning it up butanyone who drives to the site will be fined by their security so who knows what’s going on. #NOKXL https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/4746575-Keystone-Pipeline-leak-spills-oil-in-northeastern-North-Dakota …

Keystone Pipeline leak spills oil in northeastern North Dakota

Corp says the oil hasn’t contaminated any drinking water & they’re cleaning it up but anyone who drives to the site will be fined by their security so who knows what’s going on. #NOKXL https://t.co/7H6Dcz4bsm

— Ruth Hopkins (@RuthH_Hopkins) October 31, 2019

Catherine Collentine, associate director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Dirty Fuels initiative, said “this is not the first time this pipeline has spilled toxic tar sands, and it won’t be the last.”

“We’ve always said it’s not a question of whether a pipeline will spill, but when,” said Collentine, “and once again TC Energy has made our case for us.”

Keystone’s leak in North Dakota was detected just hours after the U.S. State Department held a public hearing in Billings, Montana to solicit comments on the department’s new analysis (pdf) of the potential environmental impact of the Keystone XL project.

The Trump administration has worked hard to approve and accelerate the project over the protests and legal challenges of indigenous rights organizations and green groups.

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Joye Braun, frontline community organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said the State Departmentmeeting on Keystone XL “seemed more like an industry showcase rather than public comment hearing.”

“We stand firm in opposing this project as the latest spill is further evidence of just how dangerous pipelines are,” said Braun.

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fire disloyal, in line for bolton gig?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/trump-official-expected-to-get-slammed-and-recommended-for-discipline-in-new-ig-investigation-report/

Tony Perkins, president of the anti-LGBTQ Religious Right organization Family Research Council, was invited to speak at an event hosted by the State Department this week, where he has been rubbing elbows with some of the Trump administration’s top brass, who have been dropping by his radio studio for exclusive interviews on his show, Washington Watch.

The State Department is hosting a three-day Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom in Washington, where a bipartisan lineup of high-ranking officials is discussing threats to religious liberty across the world. Perkins spoke at the event yesterday, and broadcast his weekday radio program from the State Department.

In addition to his role at Family Research Council, Perkins chairs the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, to which he was appointed on the recommendation of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell despite the fact that Perkins’ group was identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its attacks against the LGBTQ community and brings with it a well-documented track record of anti-Muslim rhetoric.

On Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was a guest on Perkins’ show, there to hype the State Department’s event to Perkins’ Religious Right audience. The following day, Mark Green, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), joined Perkins on his radio show to talk about the importance of USAID pairing with religious groups to fulfill their missions abroad.

“For us at USAID, around the world, we are far more effective when we partner with the community of faith,” Green said. “The community of faith, faith-based organizations, help us to reach corners that we could not reach in this world through the government.”

Perkins agreed, praising the Trump administration for its work with religious groups, adding, “Together we can do so much more than if we try to do it alone.” At the end of the interview, Green told Perkins, who has a troubled history regarding racism: “I’m honored to be with you.”

That affirming message is in stark contrast to the elements of Perkins’ public record that raised concerns about his appointment to the USCIRF. As Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery noted after Perkins’ election to USCIRF chair in June:

As recently as 2015, Perkins claimed that Islam “is incompatible with the Constitution.”  That same year, he defended calls to restrict the immigration of Muslims by declaring that “only 16 percent of Islam is a religion.” The year before, he suggested that Christians who support legal equality for LGBTQ people don’t have the same legal protections as more conservative Christians, because a “true religious freedom” has to be “based on orthodox religious viewpoints.”

It’s also worth noting that the Family Research Council is one of the Religious Right groups that have eagerly worked with the most religiously oppressive regimes—those classified by the USCIRF as among the worst for religious liberty—in order to resist international recognition for the rights of LGBTQ people and to defend governments’ right to enforce “traditional” religious views on gender, sexuality, and family.

Scholars have argued that religious intolerance at home undermines the United States’ ability to advocate for human rights overseas.

Tags: Mark GreenMike PompeoTony PerkinsAnti-LGBTReligious RightFamily Research CouncilU.S. State DepartmentUSAID

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Trump State Dept. Attempts 'Shortcut' to Build KXL Pipeline, Groups Say

Environmentalists spoke out against President Donald Trump's State Department after it found "no significant environmental impacts" in its review of TransCanada's long-gestating Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline.

The alternative route approved by Nebraska regulators in November would have "minor to moderate" impacts from its construction and operation, according to the 300-page draft report released Monday. It said the route would not have a major impact on the state's water resources, soils or wildlife. It may cause minor impacts on cultural resources such as Native American graves.

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Andrew Veprek

https://www.alternet.org/donald-trumps-startling-global-agenda-taking-white-supremacy-worldwide

Trump is engaged in a systematic effort to make the United States less powerful and less respected around the world. America is too great a country to be defeated and brought down by an outside power. Such damage can likely only be inflicted from within at the hands of a dangerous president, a feckless political party and their tens of millions of authoritarian followers.

President Barack Obama warned about this threat in his farewell address:

But protecting our way of life, that's not just the job of our military. Democracy can buckle when it gives in to fear. So, just as we, as citizens, must remain vigilant against external aggression, we must guard against a weakening of the values that make us who we are. ... So let's be vigilant, but not afraid. ISIL will try to kill innocent people. But they cannot defeat America unless we betray our Constitution and our principles in the fight. Rivals like Russia or China cannot match our influence around the world -- unless we give up what we stand for and turn ourselves into just another big country that bullies smaller neighbors. Which brings me to my final point: Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.  Examples of the ways Trump is weakening America's global position are numerous: He has threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO, nearly broke apart the G7 alliance at the recent Quebec summit, has effectively surrendered economic leadership across the Pacific region to China by withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and has withdrawn from both the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Climate Agreement.

Donald Trump's administration has also shown a clear and obvious disdain for human rights. To that end, he has gone so far as to withdraw the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Donald Trump's hostility to human rights and human dignity does not stop there. In an underreported but important story, several weeks ago the Trump administration launched an effort to remove any language from standard United Nations documents condemning racism as a threat to democracy.

Donald Trump's white supremacist agenda is not limited to the United States. It is international.

Writing at CNN, Michelle Kosinski explains this extraordinary event, when a career foreign service officer named Andrew Veprek, who was rapidly promoted by the Trump administration to a senior State Department post, "disputed the idea that leaders have a 'duty to condemn hate speech and incitement, and repeatedly rejected use of the words nationalism, populism, and xenophobia":

Rob Berschinski, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for human rights under Obama, told CNN that Veprek's changes seemed to reflect a feeling that "the UN language is targeted at the Trump administration, when it mentions racism in political circles. ... Clearly, he is making these edits to reduce the power of the resolution, as relates to racism in politics.""The drafters say 'populism and nationalism' as if these are dirty words," wrote Andrew Veprek, the deputy assistant secretary for refugees and migration, in documents obtained exclusively by CNN. "There are millions of Americans who likely would describe themselves as adhering to these concepts. (Maybe even the President.). So are we looking to here condemn our fellow-citizens, those who pay our salaries?" ...

Veprek also pushed to soften language about fighting racism and about racism in politics in his proposed amendments to a UN Human Rights Council resolution titled "The Incompatibility between Democracy and Racism" that is adopted without a vote, with much of the same language, every few years.

In response to one section that says national leaders have a responsibility to condemn hate speech, Veprek writes, "'[d]uty to condemn' goes too far. Our public figures can't be obliged to police every intolerant thought out their [sic] at the risk of being condemned for intolerance themselves."

Veprek apparently also objected to language that said the UN remained "alarmed at the rise of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance in political circles."

There are several serious problems with the Trump administration's effort to whitewash the UN language about racism and its relationship to human rights and healthy societies. First, as is common with Trump's administration and the American right more generally, there is a deep disdain for empirical reality. This is especially true in discussions of the color line."To refer to the 'rise' of racism resumes [sic] (1) there was some more innocent time when racism didn't exist in the world; or (2) racism is increasing over some unspecified previous time," Veprek wrote, as quoted by CNN. "Is there evidence for either of these assertions?"

Contrary to Veprek's claims, there is considerable evidence that racism is increasing in the U.S. specifically and throughout the West more generally. Most notably, as evidenced by the election of openly racist candidates like Donald Trump to high office.

Structural violence persists and has expanded, with increasingly draconian and often punitive state-sponsored harassment directed against nonwhite immigrants and refugees throughout the Western world.

In the United States, police continue to kill assault, and harass innocent and unarmed black and brown people at disproportionate rates, as compared to whites. The racial wealth gap persists, and depending on how it is measured, is actually growing. It has been suggested that by 2053 the average net worth of African-American families will be zero.

There is also a coordinated effort by the Trump administration and the Republican Party in general to prevent black Americans and other nonwhites from voting, This is both part of a broader assault on civil rights and a means of locking down political power.

Trump and the Republican Party's assault on the social safety will also disproportionately harm nonwhites. This too is a type of structural violence and racism.

Right-wing authoritarian movements based upon racism and nativism are threatening democracies around the world. In Europe and the United States this global movement has overtones of violence and views the Other -- in particular, nonwhites and Muslims -- as the enemy.

Public opinion and other research also shows a shift in mass opinion in Europe and America (especially among white conservatives and less educated people) toward more intolerant attitudes regarding nonwhites, immigrants and Muslims.

The UN has issued several reports calling attention to structural and interpersonal racism and other forms of social inequality in the United States.

After the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust the United States assumed a global leadership role in advancing the cause of human rights. This was complicated by the harsh reality that the United States was a society where discrimination against African-Americans and other nonwhites remained commonplace. In the context of the Cold War and the global struggle against Soviet power and influence, Jim Crow American apartheid was a mark of shame which the Soviets exploited to their advantage to build alliances with revolutionary movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The foot soldiers and leaders in the black freedom struggle also highlighted this gross hypocrisy: How could a country that fought against Nazism and condemned the horrors of the Holocaust allow lynchings, racial violence and discrimination against its own citizens?

Mary Dudziak explores this theme in her book "Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy":

The lesson of this story was always that American democracy was a form of government that made the achievement of social justice possible, and that democratic change, however slow and gradual, was superior to dictatorial imposition. The story of race in America, used to compare democracy and communism, became an important Cold War narrative.

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson once observed that “the existence of discrimination against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. We are reminded over and over by some foreign newspapers and spokesmen, that our treatment of various minorities leaves much to be desired. … We will have better international relations when those reasons for suspicion and resentment have been removed.”

America's more forward-thinking elites understood that if the United States was to defeat the Soviet Union and Communism abroad it would have to confront Jim and Jane Crow and other forms of white supremacy at home. Winning the Cold War, expanding and maintaining American hegemony required it.

Trump and his allies and supporters reject this legacy of American leadership. Their policies seek to undermine human rights both globally and within the United States. In all, the Trump presidency and Republican Party are overtly hostile to nonwhites around the world.

The United States (ostensibly) defended human and civil rights both abroad and at home as a means of defeating the Soviet Union. Now, some three decades after the Cold War ended, Donald Trump has embraced the Christian nationalism and racial authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin's Russia. It appears that Trump does not want the United States to be the world's preeminent power but rather a country (and people) in the orbit of Russia. History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce -- and in the case of Trump's America, as tragedy once again.

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APRIL 23, 2018

War on Peace

Ronan Farrow talks about the role of the State Department and American diplomacy in the world today.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?444249-2/war-peace

https://www.ecowatch.com/keystone-xl-approval-2538558599.html

Inside the Trump Admin's Fight to Keep the Keystone XL Approval Process Secret

By Steve Horn

At a Feb. 21 hearing, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that the Trump administration must either fork over documents showing how the U.S. Department of State reversed an earlier decision and ultimately came to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, or else provide a substantial legal reason for continuing to withhold them. The federal government has an order to deliver the goods, one way or the other, by March 21.

DeSmog has reviewed the court evidence from the environmental groups bringing the case, records which help illuminate their argument that the government is, in fact, withholding such documents. The judge will decide if those documents, legally, should be made public.

The case, which began in March 2017, pits the Indigenous Environmental Network and the North Coast River Alliance against the State Department, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Department of interior and TransCanada, the owner of Keystone XL. During his first week in office, Donald Trump signed a memorandumcalling for the State Department to perform an expedited 60-day permit review of the pipeline. Two months later, the State Department gave Keystone XL the permit it needed to cross the U.S.-Canada border.

Under the Obama administration, the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Alberta's tar sands, underwent a years-long environmental review process which culminated in President Barack Obama nixing it in November 2015. For the better part of the past decade, the pipeline has served as a central mobilizing force for the environmental movement.

Dispute Over Records

At the center of this case is a dispute over the administrative records of federal agencies, which in other lawsuits are routinely made public as part of the pre-trial process.

Generally, releasing such documents gives a snapshot of the full deliberative process behind federal agencies' decisions. DeSmog, in fact, published a story on such documents in 2015 related to a different tar sands pipeline project, which involved Enbridge's Alberta Clipper (also known as Line 67), part of a broader pipeline system DeSmog calls the "Keystone XLClone."

In the TransCanada case, the State Department has argued for keeping these pre-trial records sealed while the plaintiffs, the environmental groups, have argued they should be made public. These documents, which might include emails and memos, would offer the plaintiffs and the general public an idea of how the Trump administration decided to approve the Keystone XL.

The plaintiffs say that not all of those records have been turned over.

"Federal Defendants have wrongly omitted an unknown number of emails and other internal communications considered by the agencies during their review of the Keystone XL pipeline," the plaintiffs in the case argued in court documents on Jan. 8.

In an affidavit exhibited as part of that filing, Cecilia Segal, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs, cited a Dec. 19 phone call she had with the federal defendants, in which they said that agency emails and other records do not need to be disclosed as part of the case.

Another letter exhibited as part of the Jan. 8 filing, written on Nov. 30 by attorneys for the Center for Biological Diversity, further complained that the documents already handed over were not adequately comprehensive or organized in a manner useful for the case. And many documents, they allege, seem to be missing entirely and without explanation.

"We are concerned that both the State Department and Service have withheld records as privileged without identifying and certifying them on a privilege log," wrote the attorneys.

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https://theintercept.com/2017/04/24/trumps-new-state-department-spokesperson-spread-anti-muslim-hate-as-fox-anchor/

Nauert is the second Fox journalist to jump to the State Department.

Jonathan Wachtel, who served as a producer for the network's United Nations beat, was named spokesman for the U.S. mission to the U.N. on Feb. 25.

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trans team dhs: Michael Dougherty, CEO of the Secure Identity and Biometrics Association and former ombudsman at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

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trumpistas:

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The entire senior level of management officials at the State Department exited en masseThursday, according to a new report from the Washington Post.

The move comes on the heels of the Senate committee's approval of Rex Tillerson for secretary of state and a new executive order to freeze all federal hiring. The Trump administration had been narrowing its search for its No. 2 and three officials at the time of the announcement. Departing members of state include Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions. Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy, who had served in the department for nine years and had been working with the Trump transition team, abruptly quit as well.

"It's the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that's incredibly difficult to replicate," said David Wade, the State Department chief of staff under John Kerry. "Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector."

Wade further highlighted the dangers implicit in such a move, especially with Trump left to fill those positions.

"Diplomatic security, consular affairs, there's just not a corollary that exists outside the department, and you can least afford a learning curve in these areas where issues can quickly become matters of life and death," he told the Washington Post. "The muscle memory is critical. These retirements are a big loss. They leave a void. These are very difficult people to replace."

The new administration has yet to comment on the resignations. Donald Trump has been in office for a total of six days.

UPDATE: CNN confirms that senior management at the State Department was removed as part of a larger White House effort to "clean house." All four career officials reportedly submitted letters of resignation shortly after Trump's inauguration.

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occupy:

On Thursday we found out via Inside Climate News and Brad Johnson over at Grist that the environmental impact statement the State Department just released on the Keystone XL pipeline was written by a private consulting firm being paid by the pipeline’s owner.

This obviously raises concerns about conflicts of interest with the report itself, but it also highlights the problems with turning government work and analysis over to private firms with possible financial ties to other private entities who may be affected by that work and analysis — a phenomenon that’s been underway since the 1990s.

State’s report, which found that the pipeline was “unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands,” and will “not likely result in significant adverse environmental effects,” was written by Environmental Resources Management (ERM).

Several years ago, Cardno Entrix, another private consultancy, was contracted by TransCanada to handle the State Department’s initial draft of the environmental impact statement, the Department’s hearings on the pipeline, and even its Keystone XL website.

As Johnson reported, ERM was paid “an undisclosed amount under contract to TransCanada” for the assessment:

The documents from the ERM-TransCanada agreement are on the State Department’s website, but payment amounts and other clients and past work of ERM are redacted. In the contract documents, ERM partner Steven J. Koster certifies that his company has no conflicts of interest. He also certifies that ERM has no business relationship with TransCanada or “any business entity that could be affected in any way by the proposed work” (notwithstanding the impact statement contract itself). In a cover letter, Koster promises State Department NEPA Coordinator Genevieve Walker that ERM understands “the need for an efficient and expedited process to meet the demands of the desired project schedule.” An investigation by Inside Climate News finds that ERM’s report draws from work done by other oil industry contractors, Ensys Energy and ICF International.

According to State’s report, the department “directed the preparation,” but the project’s manager is the only government official actually listed on the cover page.

Inside Climate News reported Ensys has worked with ExxonMobil, BP and Koch Industries, though Ensys president Martin Tallet emphasized the consulting firm has also worked with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the World Bank.

“We don’t do advocacy,” Tallett told Inside Climate News, pointing out that EnSys employees acted as expert witnesses for various state water agencies and against the oil industry in court cases on groundwater contamination from MBTE, a gasoline additive. “If we were the pet of government agencies or oil companies, the other side wouldn’t come to us.”

ICF International declined to comment on the Keystone report.

According to both David Driesen, a law professor at Syracuse University and a former attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Joel A. Mintz, a law professor at Florida’s Nova Southeastern University, conflicts of interest can be difficult to avoid in practice, whatever the official statements:

“I think the question of conflict of interest is a legitimate one,” Driesen said. If consulting firms are “used to working for industry clients, it’s possible they would subtly orient their analysis in a certain way, and that could be reflected” in the document. “The marketplace and ethics sometimes collide,” said Mintz, who is a member scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform, which favors green policies. “If their livelihood comes from consulting for the oil and gas industry, I think it would be expected they’d be sympathetic to their future and past clients. They’ll want to keep consulting.”

As Inside Climate News points out, State’s Keystone report is actually part of a larger trend, spanning more than a decade, of government farming out work it used to do in-house to private contractors.

While the Defense Department has driven the majority of the contracting the United States government does with private firms, the practice ramped up in other departments significantly in the 1990s with the arrival of then-Vice President Al Gore’s “Reinventing Government” initiative. Since then, the federal workforce has shrunk as the contractor workforce has grown.

According to a report by the Center for Public Integrity, the government was spending $200 billion a year on private contractors as of 2003. A scholar at the Brookings Institution named Paul Light called this workforce the “shadow government,” estimating its size in 1999 at 5.6 million.

Government agencies now routinely outsource reports like State’s environmental impact statement because they don’t have the staff or resources to handle the work in-house, and given the ubiquity of consulting firms’ work with industry, it’s difficult to find a company that doesn’t have industry ties.

Kathleen Clark — a practicing lawyer and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and an expert on government ethics — told Inside Climate News that, “In general, the government has rather strict standards for conflict of interest for its own employees, and in general when it outsources work to contractors, it doesn’t outsource those standards.”