Brandy Zadrozny
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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 is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW.
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45 hours in Kash’s Corner: A look at the show co-hosted by Trump’s pick to lead the FBI
Brandy Zadrozny
Updated December 8, 2024
Rampant FBI misconduct, election fraud, the deep state. Such were the weekly topics on “Kash’s Corner,” the eponymous online show hosted by President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI.
From 2021 to 2023, Kash Patel made content for The Epoch Times, a news organization known for its far-right conspiracy theories, its association with a Chinese dissident religious group, and, since June, a sprawling multimillion-dollar money laundering scheme allegedly perpetrated by one of its top executives.
NBC News reviewed 79 episodes totaling over 45 hours of content featuring Patel and his co-host, Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek, neither of whom is accused in the federal case. Together, they spun detailed but unfounded claims of conspiracies involving government officials, law enforcement agencies, the media and tech companies, among others, all aiming to rig elections, silence conservative voices and undermine Trump’s presidency and re-election.
Billed as a show where the former deputy director of national intelligence would “break down the biggest issues of our day, from the origins of Covid-19 to the politicization of the intelligence community,” “Kash’s Corner” offered commentary on the news, often with a conspiratorial flourish.
The show, available only to Epoch Times subscribers, could receive fresh scrutiny as Patel faces Senate confirmation hearings. His lack of experience, his promotion of politically motivated conspiracy theories in a book vilifying the FBI, and his public remarks promising to “come after” judges, lawyers and the media involved in Trump’s many legal investigations are also likely subjects.
It wasn’t just his namesake show. Patel was a constant contributor across Epoch Times properties, appearing on other shows, on the sister television network NTDTV, and in the outlet’s Jan. 6 documentary. The last “Kash’s Corner” dropped in August 2023 with an announcement that Patel would be appearing on other shows and that the “Corner” would be back after the election.
The details of Patel’s contract with The Epoch Times aren’t known. (Financial disclosure forms filed by talk radio and Epoch Times host Larry Elder during a failed presidential run showed the company paid between $1 million and $5 million for a similar show.) A representative for Patel declined to comment.
Jekielek and The Epoch Times did not respond to requests for comment. In a June statement on the money laundering allegations, The Epoch Times said it “intends to and will fully cooperate with any investigation dealing with the allegations,” and noted that its chief financial officer, Bill Guan, had been suspended “until this matter is resolved.”
Turning the 'Corner'
“Kash’s Corner” debuted in the summer of 2021, when after years of increasingly powerful roles within Trump’s national security agencies, the former federal prosecutor was out of a full-time job following his boss’ election loss.
That January, he began consulting for Trump’s Save America PAC, which devoted most of its spending to the ex-president’s legal bills. (Patel ultimately earned $325,000 for the job.) In April, he started “fundraising consulting” for the campaign committee Friends of Matt Gaetz, pulling in $145,000 that year, following news that the far-right congressman was the subject of an underage sex-trafficking investigation (Gaetz has denied the allegations and no charges were brought). Patel also set up a website, Fight for Kash, where he solicited donations for undefined legal efforts that promised to “strike a major blow to the far-Left media and Big Tech!”
It was a consequential moment for The Epoch Times, too. After years of struggling, the once-fringe newspaper powered by Falun Gong, a religious group persecuted in China, had finally found a foothold in conservative media. The company had spent a small fortune on pro-Trump ads in the run-up to 2020 and was amassing a windfall in the wake of Trump’s loss, increasing revenue by a staggering 685% over two years, to $122 million in 2021 — revenue that would later come under federal scrutiny. Executives and editors credited its success to subscriptions driven by their editorial vision, which they said offered a counterbalance to mainstream media, with reports downplaying the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, denying climate change and fearmongering about vaccines.
Patel, a major force behind an effort to undercut the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, made sense for The Epoch Times, an outlet that had grown its audience in part by exposing what it dubbed “Spygate,” a disproven conspiracy theory alleging President Barack Obama had spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign as part of an intricate plot to meddle with the election and tar the incoming president with scandal. In one episode of “Kash’s Corner,” Patel called The Epoch Times’ intricate chart laying out the conspiracy theory, including red strings, “the best one ever created in history.”
In March 2021, Jekielek first interviewed Patel for an “Inside Story of How Spygate Was Uncovered” edition of his show, “American Thought Leaders.” By April, Patel had a show of his own.
A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alabama who studies conservative media, said Patel brought a shared worldview and White House credentials that lent an air of authority to claims that are usually only found on the fringes.
“I think it was circumstance and dovetailing ideology around conspiracism and the notion of a deep state out to get Trump” that landed Patel at The Epoch Times, Bauer said. “And I imagine that Kash — sorry for the bad pun — brought cache.”
Fraud allegations
Patel joined The Epoch Times as it appeared to be among the most successful media upstarts in the U.S., surging at a time while many other outlets were struggling to build an audience or turn a profit.
The company said it was making money through subscriptions and donations, claims that federal prosecutors now say were false.
According to an indictment unsealed in June, Guan, The Epoch Times’ chief financial officer, oversaw a group within the company’s Vietnam office called the “Make Money Online” team. Allegedly, the team used cryptocurrency to buy stolen funds, including debit cards loaded with fraudulent unemployment benefits, at a discount, and then funneled the laundered money into Guan’s and The Epoch Times’ bank accounts. Guan has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.
Prosecutors claim the alleged money laundering scheme netted the group some $67 million.
There’s no reason to believe that Patel, Jekielek or anyone else in the newsroom was aware of any alleged fraud.
It’s unclear if or how the FBI was involved in the investigation, whether and how it would be in the future, and how having a former Epoch Times content creator as director of the agency might affect any investigation going forward.
The initial press release noted the charges against Guan were the result of a joint investigation between the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General and the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, along with “law enforcement partners.” The prosecution is part of an operation by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces focused on “dismantling high-level criminal organizations.” The FBI is a member agency.
A spokesperson for the FBI referred questions about the investigation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Public affairs chief Nicholas Biase declined to comment.
'Just the beginning'
If Patel offered legitimacy to The Epoch Times’ short-on-substance claims and connections to Trump that culminated in a 2022 Mar-a-Lago interview with the former president, he also brought a firebrand persona who was comfortable courting fringe audiences.
Patel became a frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s “Real America’s Voice” show, where he promoted his books and Trump-themed merch, and made his most controversial statements, including an appearance last year where he imagined what he might do with federal power: “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” he said. He qualified those remarks last year, telling NBC News that he only intended to pursue those who had broken the law.
Things were slower over at “Kash’s Corner,” less self-promotional and more cerebral, where he had more than half an hour to lay out his version of the world. Most shows ran between 30 and 40 minutes.
On the FBI, Patel said it needed “a huge overhaul,” charged its leadership with “going after political targets” and putting “the law second,” and praised three FBI agents who had been stripped of their security clearances and been put on leave for either being at the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 or sharing conspiracy theories about the attack afterward. (Patel’s foundation also provided “grants” of unknown size to those ex-agents.)
“We’ve proven the illegitimacy of the FBI and its actions,” he said in December 2022, falsely citing “Russiagate” and Hunter Biden’s laptop as evidence the FBI has been “completely politicized.”
Later that month, he suggested the FBI was part of a Big Tech conspiracy to censor Americans and promoted a debunked theory that the FBI paid Twitter to censor conservatives as part of “the largest disinformation campaign to rig a presidential election.”
“This is just the beginning, and if anyone thinks that it was a one-off, they are completely wrong,” he said. “What, is the FBI going to come around and say, ‘Now, oh, we were just spending government dollars to help safeguard a nation’? I mean, that’s going to be the epithet they come back with, but we now know the true nature of their corrupt ways.”
Patel often invoked what he labeled a “two-tiered” justice system. “The FBI and DOJ [are] politicizing targets and manufacturing crimes. They’re basically saying, show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” he said on a 2022 show.
In another 2022 episode, Patel voiced his concerns about what he termed the FBI’s “confidential human source corruption cover-up network.” He claimed the agency used confidential sources during the Jan. 6 riots for political purposes, asking whether rioters had been goaded by agents to commit crimes and questioning the related convictions. Did “those confidential human sources engage people who are not going to conduct criminal activity and convince them to do so? That is the definition of entrapment, which is illegal, and you can’t charge someone who’s been entrapped.”
The belief that confidential FBI sources contributed to the violence on Jan. 6 or that the agency set up rioters is an unfounded, yet persistent one. “Any suggestion that the violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was orchestrated by the FBI is categorically false,” the FBI said in a statement to Politifact this year.
Patel suggested a specific solution: for Congress to use the power of subpoena to uncover crimes and conspiracies via “a Church Commission,” similar to the 1975 congressional investigation into federal intelligence agencies.
“I don’t see how Americans can have any faith in this FBI anymore,” he said in December 2022. “It’s going to take a major overhaul from these guys in Congress when the gavels flipped to conduct some rigorous oversight, but also to retool the FBI and DOJ, so it actually has credibility again. But that’s going to be a multiyear lift.”
As for who should be investigated first, Patel suggested in January that it be Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a physician and immunologist who has become a major target of Covid-era conspiracy theories.
“Fauci, I guess, is the one-word name that you can say is deserving of an entire investigation,” he said.
Trump’s legal woes were a popular subject, too. In multiple episodes last year, Patel repeatedly framed multiple civil and criminal cases against Trump as politically motivated and without merit, including the Stormy Daniels hush money case (“That’s not a crime”), the classified documents case (“When you’re president and you leave, you can take whatever you want”), the E. Jean Carroll case (“Basically, a jury disregards the facts and the law and bases a decision on emotion alone.”) and the federal indictment accusing Trump of conspiring to overturn the election (“The criminalization of thought and free speech.”).
Complicit in nearly every scheme, according to Patel, was the media.
“There’s a whole lot of people out there just thinking, ‘What can I believe?’” Jekielek said in a 2022 show. “It’s hard,” Patel replied. “What they should believe is Epoch Times, but I’m biased.”
Brandy Zadrozny
USEFUL IDIOT
oct 16
The fake whistleblower videos started popping up last fall, the work of a small but prolific Russian group that researchers call Storm-1516.
Much remains unknown about Storm-1516 — one prong of Russia’s propaganda operation — but it has produced some of the country’s most far-reaching and influential disinformation.
The Storm-1516 campaigns rely on faked primary sources — audio, video, photos, documents — presented as evidence of the claims’ veracity. They are then laundered through international news sources and influencers to reach their ultimate target: a mainstream Western audience.
...
At least 50 false narratives have been launched this way since last fall, according to a count NBC News assembled with researchers. The narratives aim to diminish Western support for military aid in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, a contentious issue in Congress. The videos also back the re-election of Donald Trump, who has pledged to halt military aid to Ukraine, while painting the former president as a victim of a “deep state.” And they attack Vice President Kamala Harris.
In one fake video, a Ukrainian troll farm operative reveals the machinations behind a CIA plot to defeat Trump.
In another piece of propaganda, a woman says she was paralyzed as a child — by Harris in a hit-and-run accident.
In a third, a “whistleblower” falsely claims Ukraine’s leaders spent U.S. aid money on yachts.
The claims peddled by the actors and false primary sources in these videos fall apart upon basic inspection. Experts quickly identified Olesya, the Ukrainian troll, as an AI-generated fake. The 2011 hit-and-run never happened, according to San Francisco police, and KBSF-TV, the local news station behind the claims, does not exist.
And the companies that own the yachts told reporters they hadn’t been sold. But the story spread anyway, and this time, far — from small-time right-wing influencers to members of Congress, including Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, now the Republican vice presidential nominee.
Vance did not respond to a request for comment.
“It is very purposeful, very systematic, and it's a process that we see over and over,” said Darren Linvill, co-director at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, whose team uncovered the Storm-1516 campaign last fall.
Russia is the most active foreign threat to the 2024 election, according to U.S. officials. A pair of indictments unsealed in September alleged an expansion of Russia’s influence operation: from crude, fake social media posts and bot networks in 2016 to more ambitious and successful recent campaigns. That includes laundering propaganda through seemingly independent U.S. actors, according to one of the indictments. It was a scheme that entangled several popular right-wing creators, including Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin and Tim Pool, who all said last month they had been unaware their employer was working with Russia.
“It’s a bigger threat than it ever was,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said of Russia's influence operation at a recent news conference, where federal prosecutors unsealed indictments regarding two alleged state-sponsored propaganda schemes. “Russia has meddled in our society and tried to sow discord for decades. Really what we're seeing is just more tools in the toolbox.”
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.
Experts fear Storm-1516 and similar groups have the potential to sway public opinion by undermining the credibility of democratic institutions, influencing U.S. policy and diminishing people’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction.
Russia is increasingly leaning on an advancing technology landscape — including artificial intelligence and more sophisticated bot networks — to spread its falsehoods. But Storm-1516’s most valuable quality is persistence, according to Clint Watts, the general manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center.
“The danger comes with just the sheer volume of claims that they make, and it only takes one person, one influencer with outsized influence, to grab onto a video and amplify it in the United States,” Watts said. “They may miss 99 times, but the 100th time they may get it just right.”
The dozens of Storm-1516 storylines examined by NBC News offer a window into the disinformation pipeline: where the most successful false claims originate and how they spread.
Stage 1: The video
In February, a Russian man falsely confesses on YouTube that Ukraine promised him $4,000 to assassinate Tucker Carlson while he was in Moscow. The man says he was caught before he could detonate a bomb in the underground parking lot of the Four Seasons Hotel there.
Stage 2: The placement
Like a criminal gang’s ill-gotten cash, this video — and its manufactured evidence — is laundered through Kremlin-linked platforms and websites in a quest for legitimacy. First in Russian, then in English.
Stage 3: The spread
Russian propagandists pick up the story. The anonymous account MyLordBebo, known to researchers as a spreader of false stories about Ukraine, first posts the video to X, with English subtitles. Then, a Q-Anon influencer, KanekoaTheGreat, shares it. The videos go viral. no lnx
Stage 4: The mainstream
Simon Ateba, the Today News Africa reporter known for disrupting White House press briefings, posts the video. Right-wing creators and pundits leap on the story, using it to ask whether U.S. funding for the war in Ukraine is being weaponized to kill an American citizen.
Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk, podcaster Tim Pool, conservative commentator Benny Johnson and comedian Jimmy Dore share the false story with their millions of U.S. followers.
videos storm 1516 4 stages
cheap video, 1/2 fail but a few hits/viral
2 picked up by russ sites jrnl fake bio
3 launder thru telegram and local sites that look legit eg duggan mtg shared w 3 mil followers
how-foreign-disinformation-makes-its-way-into-the-american-mainstream-221936709542