GEC Global Engmnt Ctr DOS GDI
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DOGE? RUBIO BENZ TARGET KILLED DEFUNCT
~ DISINFO
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GUK 9 26
Inside the US state department, critics are still attacking a shuttered office established to counter foreign propaganda. Now, some of its work is also being resumed
Joseph Gedeon in Washington
Sun 30 Aug 2026
A botched leak of purportedly explosive government files to a prominent conservative online personality was supposed to offer proof of what the Trump administration and its allies have long alleged: that a little-known office inside the US state department, created to fight foreign propaganda, had secretly become a tool for domestic censorship.
Two former high-ranking officials at the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a target of Republican ire that lost its funding in 2024 and was disbanded after Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, say the documents show nothing of the kind.
Instead, they argue, the files are a symptom of a protracted and bitter political fight over an office that spent nearly a decade tracking and countering foreign influence operations, particularly from Russia, China and Iran.
Trump administration shutters US office countering foreign disinformation
And the state department is now resuming some of this work in other parts of its operation, including plans – laid out in a proposal reviewed by the Guardian – to pay social media influencers across south-east Asia as part of an $11m campaign to counter Chinese propaganda.
Sarah Rogers, the state department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy, provided the so-called “GEC files” to Jennica Pounds, a rightwing online data analyst known as DataRepublican – only for Pounds to claim earlier this month she was leaked the documents as part of a bid to “entrap” her.
Rogers, who denied this claim, then published the files herself, claiming officials inside the center “betrayed their stated mission”. The files included a 2022 GEC report on “gendered disinformation”, a flashpoint in the culture wars.
“These guys have consistently misrepresented what the GEC did, and this was a great example of that,” said Daniel Kimmage, who served as the center’s principal deputy coordinator and acting coordinator from its founding in 2017 until its complete dissolution in 2025. His own congressional testimony was included in the leaked files.
Kimmage and Carrie Goux, a Joe Biden appointee and the center’s former acting deputy coordinator, say nothing in the material shows the GEC, whose mandate was explicitly foreign-facing, ever turned its tools on Americans.
“If the smoking gun was a gendered disinformation report, that feels like they came up short,” Goux said. “There seems to be absolutely nothing here.”
Weaponization
The dispute is the latest chapter in a years-long campaign by conservatives to portray the GEC as part of a broader effort by the US government and technology companies to suppress rightwing speech.
Republican congressmen including Michael McCaul, former chair of the House foreign affairs committee, argued in a July 2024 letter that the GEC was “at best indifferent to, and at worst complicit in” stretching the definition of disinformation to “censor” conservative speech in the US.
Trump’s return to the presidency drew this view into the heart of the federal government. The center was abolished in 2025, and what remained of its work scattered across the state department.
Much of that Republican-led campaign centered on how the GEC had funded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a UK-based non-profit that rates media outlets by how likely they are to spread disinformation, to help monitor propaganda in Asia. But in 2022 the GDI separately published its own study of the US media market that rated several conservative outlets, including Newsmax, One America News and the New York Post, as high-risk – a finding its critics have cited ever since as evidence that a foreign-facing office had funded a group meddling in domestic politics.
The question raised by the files leaked this month is narrower, however: whether they show the GEC itself ran a domestic censorship operation. Kimmage and Goux insist they do not.
Kimmage said his own congressional testimony, which Rogers included in the leak, had been selectively read. “If you look at the transcript, [the question was], ‘Does GEC take positions on US outlets?’ And I said, ‘No, it didn’t,’” he said.
Rogers “tried to twist that into something that it wasn’t”, according to Kimmage. “For people who talk a lot about weaponization of government, this seems a lot closer to the weaponization of government and psy-opping of the American people than anything that the emails from the Global Engagement Center show.”
‘False’ allegations
Pounds, the rightwing analyst, is not a neutral bystander. Days after the documents were released, she disclosed that she had been quietly working since July as a special government employee for the defense department.
On Friday, Pounds released a database to track US citizens in the Democratic Socialists of America. The Pentagon did not respond when asked whether the database is included in her scope of government work.
Both former senior officials, Kimmage and Goux, draw a sharp line between the accusations made by critics of the GEC and what the center actually did. “We were not ever looking at Americans,” Goux said. “We were looking at the foreign actors and what their [tactics, techniques and procedures] … are doing overseas.”
The GEC “did what its congressional mandate charged it to do, which is to fight foreign [misinformation and] disinformation”, added Kimmage. “This allegation that it’s censoring Americans is false.”
During its almost decade-long existence, the center published eight detailed public reports on Russian and Chinese information operations and ran four major exposures of Russian disinformation campaigns – in Latin America, Africa and Moldova, and on the Kremlin-linked network RT.
Its largest such operation traced a Kremlin-backed effort called the “African Initiative”, which the center said had recruited local journalists, bloggers and public figures to spread conspiracy theories about US-funded health programs across the continent.
In January 2024, the GEC helped broker an international pact on countering foreign state disinformation that eventually drew more than two dozen government signatories, among them Moldova, Spain, Estonia, Poland and Finland – a framework its backers hoped other countries would use to build their own version of the office.
A 2022 inspector general review found the GEC “generally effective” at supporting counter-disinformation programs overall, while flagging weaknesses in its internal controls, contractor oversight and strategic planning. That record was enough to sustain bipartisan support: senators Rob Portman, a Republican, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat, repeatedly pushed to fund and strengthen the center, and its authorization survived multiple renewal fights before House Republicans, increasingly focused on the domestic-speech question, declined to extend it again in 2024.
That mandate cost roughly $61m per year. The GEC employed about 120 people before Congress declined to reauthorize it, letting the office lapse at the end of 2024. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, later folded what remained of its work into a new counter foreign information manipulation and interference office, framing the closure as an end to wasteful, censorious government overreach.
Trust exercise
Now, less than a year after the GEC shut down, a proposal reviewed by the Guardian shows the state department preparing to pay up to 30 online influencers across 11 countries in south-east Asia $2,500 apiece as part of an $11m, multi-year campaign to counter Chinese propaganda.
The project, which would be operated by the US Mission to ASEAN, has three parts: a $5m messaging campaign, a $3m program training influencers and journalists to counter Chinese propaganda, and a $3m trip bringing about 180 participants to studios in Washington and Houston “for intensive collaboration, studio production and first-hand engagement with US institutions and creators”.
The proposal’s planning materials describe the ideal recruit as starting from a “welcoming” position of what one document calls the “rejecting-affirming continuum”: someone not yet sold on the US, but not hostile either. As participants move through the accelerator, the materials say, exposure to evidence of US commitment in the region and training in spotting propaganda from China (which has reportedly invested billions of dollars in disinformation efforts globally) is meant to carry them toward the “affirming” end of that scale, publicly backing closer ties with Washington on trade, tech standards and the South China Sea.
The document cited the rightwing analyst and new Pentagon special government employee, Jennica Pounds, the DataRepublican, as an ideal model to seek out in other recruits abroad.
Contacted for comment, the state department declined to directly address questions about the documents released by Rogers, the influencer proposal, the department’s current foreign influence programs and whether other regions are being targeted as well.
A state department official said: “Undersecretary Rogers has been clear that the department will continue to confront censorship, anti-American propaganda and coercive influence directly while demonstrating the enduring advantages of freedom, accountability and open communication.”
Meanwhile, the office of policy, planning and resources for public diplomacy (R/PPR) was separately shopping for commercial help with a similar mission this spring. A government filing from May 2026 shows the R/PPR requesting information from vendors on software that can mine open-source data, map “adversarial propaganda influence networks” and detect deepfakes.
That apparent contradiction is not lost on the GEC’s former staff.
“Are they trying to re-create it? Probably,” Goux said. “But now they’re spending a lot more tax dollars doing that, trying to get contractors to do some of the stuff that we were doing.”
Goux put the broader cost in plainer terms still. “The US has lost their seat at the table to do that, and that’s unfortunate,” she said. “I hope we can gain it back, but we’re losing trust too, and that’s significant.”
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just the news solomon bs
justthe news
USAID 'Disinformation Primer' targets gamers, advertisers, memes, 'right not to be disinformed'
...ng further than the Treasury Department's tacit support for debanking alleged "hate groups" after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, a State Department component that "strengthen[s] resilient democratic societies" developed a more sweeping plan for financially choking off disfavored narratives a month later.
The U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a "Disinformation Primer" that appears to have been started in "late 2020," judging by a reference to the most up-to-date "social media initiatives" by Facebook and Twitter "to address disinformation and misinformation."
It was still being written at least 10 days into the Biden administration, referring twice to the Jan. 31, 2021 Myanmar military coup, which the primer says "underlined issues of internet freedom and disinformation."
State turned over the 88-page document, dated February 2021 and marked "internal use only," as part of a 102-page production in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation by America First Legal.
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The primer was "conceived and developed by Joshua Machleder and Shannon Maguire at USAID, together with" the University of Chicago organization formerly known as the National Opinion Research Center, the introduction says.
It thanks dozens of individuals at universities and government institutions including the National Endowment for Democracy and U.S. Institute for Peace "for sharing their time, opinions, and expertise," and current and former USAID staff for "opinions and feedback."
USAID didn't respond to requests for comment on its view of the primer now.
"Just as human rights advocates have argued that internet access is a human right and that there is a fundamental right to access of information, there is also a right not to be disinformed," the primer says in a section laying out 10 steps for USAID and partners to take in "countering and preventing disinformation."
These include partnering with other governments, supporting "media monitoring and fact-checking initiatives," and "form[ing] synergies" with "civil society, media, social media platforms, internet governance forums, and other donors" to prevent disinformation, especially working with "data scientists, social scientists, and journalists."
miller?
AFL gave the FOIA production to the Foundation for Freedom Online, which published an analysis Thursday by executive director and former State communications official Mike Benz, managing director Allum Bokhari and graduate student Oscar Buynevich.
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The primer mentions "advertising" 19 times and advertisers or advertisements a dozen times, showing USAID support for the "well-established tactic of the censorship industry – financial blacklisting," FFO's analysis says.
While much of the report promotes the more-speech-is-better approach, such as funding local journalism, a section on "supply-side responses" – written in the passive tense – implies both governments and activists should pressure advertisers to flee alleged sources of disinformation.
Most advertisers are "unaware of the disinformation risk of the domains featuring their ads due to the automated process of ad placement," the "Advertiser Outreach" subsection says.
"Thus, cutting this financial support found in the ad-tech space would obstruct disinformation actors from spreading messaging online," it says. "Efforts have been made to inform advertisers of their risks, such as the threat to brand safety by being placed next to objectionable content, through conducting research and assessments of online media content."
While the primer says it provides examples of advertiser outreach in an annex on "emerging solutions," none of the examples explicitly mentions advertising. The annex does include the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's public awareness campaign about pineapple on pizza.
FFO highlighted the primer's support for the supply-side "Redirect Method," piloted by Moonshot and Google's Jigsaw in 2016, "an open-source methodology that uses targeted advertising" on platforms such as Google Adwords "to connect people searching online for harmful content with constructive alternative messages."
It was used to "target individuals susceptible to ISIS radicalization via recruiting measures" and "is being adapted in several countries to combat vaccine hesitancy and hate speech," the primer says.
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The Redirect Method is a "precursor" to Google's "prebunking" initiative, which the Alphabet-owned company said last year it was expanding into Germany and India, FFO said. Prebunking is based on inoculation theory, which treats disfavored narratives as a virus.
FFO notes the primer touts the work of former Harvard misinformation researcher and Hunter Biden laptop truther Joan Donovan, who advocates prebunking.
Comedian Jon Stewart publicly challenged Donovan's work and former Facebook policy chief Eliot Schrage reportedly did so privately as a Harvard Kennedy School adviser, both questioning who gets to decide what counts as "disinformation."
USAID separately thanked State's Global Engagement Center staff for "their review and feedback."
GEC has funded and promoted internet games that teach children to view populism as disinformation – a form of prebunking – and promote "social justice."
It also funded the Global Disinformation Index, which pressures advertisers to cut off alleged sources of disinformation, predominantly conservative publishers – drawing the ire of congressional Republicans and a lawsuit by two publishers.
The primer calls for targeting "gaming sites," including Amazon-owned Twitch, because "problematic information more regularly originates from networks of alternative sites and anonymous individuals" than from state actors.
USAID put scare quotes around "mainstream" twice to describe sources outside of gaming communities. While these "conspiracy theories may seem farcical or preposterous to an outsider," the primer warns, mainstream sources covering gaming communities "may unknowingly provide wide coverage of misleading information."
The primer also puts scare quotes around "research" to describe gamers taking the initiative to educate themselves, "collectively reviewing and validating each other to create a populist expertise that justifies, shapes and supports their alternative beliefs."
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Malinformation, sometimes described as true but inconvenient, also makes an appearance in the primer. It's defined as "deliberate publication of private information for personal or private interest" that is "taken out of context," as well as the "deliberate manipulation of genuine content" and "hate speech."
Memes are "a common means" for malinformation to spread, the primer warns. "[T]he most effective are humorous or critical of society ... but researchers note they also can be dangerous."
The supply-side section acknowledges the "inherent contradiction between the democratic ideal of free speech and the regulation of online content" and warns that democracies that pass anti-disinformation laws can embolden "authoritarians" to do the same.
One way to have their cake and eat it too is for democracies to adopt "co-regulatory models" such as the "industry-led Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and the government-led Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs)," the primer says.
REF to?
Inside the Hidden Conservative Network Bankrolling an “Ecosystem” of Right-Wing News – Mother Jones
GFX
“Now more than ever, the world needs an honest newsroom.” With these words, the little-known Informing America Foundation was awarded the $250,000 Gregor G. Peterson Prize in “venture philanthropy” last December for its “high-quality journalism.”
If few had heard of IAF, hinted the nonprofit’s CEO, Debbie Myers, it was by design. “We stay very much under the radar,” she said, accepting the prize at the 2024 annual summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate-funded group that works to advance conservative policies at the state level. IAF’s goal, Myers explained, was to create an “ecosystem” of news. The group boasts of funding a network of thousands of platforms that have quietly shaped public opinion by stoking an array of right-wing conspiracy theories, from the alleged corruption of Joe Biden to the supposedly nefarious mission of the US Agency for International Development, along with more recent attacks on critics of President Donald Trump.
Myers, who once led Gingrich 360, Newt Gingrich’s multimedia production firm, is a longtime TV executive who helped produce shows such as Little People, Big World; Talk Soup; and Punkin Chunkin. Her “partner in crime” in launching IAF in 2021, as she described him as he joined her onstage, is John Solomon, a former investigative reporter for the Associated Press and Washington Post and a DC fixture who has drawn criticism for pushing right-wing stories and smearing Democrats with the kind of allegations that a Post ombudsman once described as “‘gotcha’ without a gotcha.”
In 2019, Solomon was at the forefront of efforts to tie Biden to shady dealings in Ukraine on his son Hunter’s behalf, penning a series of columns for The Hill that reported dubious information from Ukrainian prosecutors with an axe to grind. A 2020 review of his work by the paper called its reliability into question, concluding Solomon had “failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources, including the fact that they had been indicted or were under investigation.”
In the wake of the controversy, he set up the independent outlet Just the News and launched a podcast, John Solomon Reports. In an email, Solomon defended his Hill reporting’s accuracy and claimed he has no formal role at IAF, while confirming he provides it an office at the same K Street address as Just the News and another Solomon enterprise, Bentley Media Group. In 2021, Myers and Solomon also formed the Affinity Media Exchange, an advertising business that soon inked a deal with Trump’s Truth Social to be one of the platform’s ad representatives.
IAF’s tax filings, which say its mission is funding “investigative, explanatory, data-driven and multimedia journalism,” show it brought in close to $8 million in contributions during its first year, with the largest nonprofit donation coming from the family foundation of Diana Davis Spencer, whose late father, an investment banker, once chaired the Heritage Foundation. In subsequent years, millions have flowed to IAF through donor-advised charities that do not disclose the source of their initial contributions.
IAF, in turn, has doled out funds to an array of right-leaning outlets, including Just the News and Off the Press, run by Joseph Curl, a veteran of Drudge Report and the Washington Times. ADN América, aimed at Spanish speakers, received more than $1 million from IAF in the site’s first three years of operation. The foundation sent another million-plus to Performance One Media, which owns Real America’s Voice, the right-wing network best known for carrying Steve Bannon’s War Room. Real America’s Voice gave Solomon his own nightly show in 2022, which he has used to promote IAF allies.
IAF has also directed more than $1.7 million to Star News Digital Media, a conglomerate of 12 mostly battleground state sites whose names suggest a local focus but that actually push pro-GOP partisan news. Star News’ Tennessee Star, for instance, featured a section called “KamaLawfare” prior to the 2024 presidential election that highlighted incidents from Kamala Harris’ prosecutorial tenure in California, but seemed to ignore top news events in the state. One day this past June, the homepages of Star News outlets in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and Virginia looked almost identical, all covering transgender youth health care in California, New York City’s mayoral race, and a Florida sheriff’s threats against anti-Trump protesters.
Media observers have dubbed such agenda-driven news sites “pink slime”—so named for by-products added as filler to ground beef. Pink slime news is a growing phenomenon, according to University of Cincinnati journalism professor Jeffrey Blevins, rising as partisan interests take advantage of the devastated newspaper market. “We saw these news deserts popping up,” he says. “It was very cheap to put in a website and say, ‘Okay, we’re doing local news.’ Local news is always seen as being more credible.” Sites like the Tennessee Star, he explains, use that perception to push “poor-quality” coverage “funded by some outside political interest.”
In 2023, the most recent year tax records are available, filings show IAF’s largest contribution—more than $1 million—went to the Institute for Citizen Focused Service, a secretive nonprofit set up by Interior Department officials from Trump’s first term. In turn, ICFS has funneled money to Pipeline Advisors, which holds a portfolio of local outlets—including the Midland Times, Austin Journal, Federal Newswire, and others—that have also been described as pink slime. All told, IAF says its news “ecosystem” includes “more than 2,000 hyperlocal platforms and 10 national platforms” reaching an audience of more than 50 million people.
One hallmark of IAF-connected organizations is that they often promote the same allegations and storylines. This is no accident: At the award ceremony last December, Myers provided a glimpse into how IAF works, explaining that each morning, the team gathers on a call to choose the stories they believe the mainstream media is ignoring. After hanging up, “we amplify each other,” she said, “and get it to the hands of the American people.”
Star News outlets regularly repackage Just theNews articles. Just the News writes stories based on Off the Press coverage and vice versa. They do not disclose their financial links. For example, Just the News covered the 2021 launch of Off the Press without noting that either organization was funded by IAF.
The network’s thousands of platforms have quietly shaped public opinion by stoking an array of right-wing conspiracy theories.
Solomon’s podcast often features guests from the broader IAF universe, including Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer and former Trump State Department official whose attacks targeting USAID as a “censorship octopus” helped fuel Elon Musk’s crusade to feed the agency to the “wood chipper.” Benz, a onetime alt-right Twitter troll, has appeared on Solomon’s show to rail against social media censorship and US foreign aid. In such appearances, he’s been identified as the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online—which is not a foundation, but which launched as a project of an organization called Empower Oversight that has also been heavily funded by IAF. An Empower Oversight spokesperson said the group served as FFO’s fiscal sponsor through February 2023. That year, Benz was paid $253,889 by ICFS.
In 2022, Benz began issuing reports from his one-man think tank positing a conspiracy to silence conservatives online. IAF-funded outlets have presented a drumbeat of interviews with him, in which he argued that outfits battling online disinformation—from media watchdogs like NewsGuard to the US military and Big Tech—were actually undertaking a project to suppress conservative voices. The interviews presented Benz as an independent expert—“Mike Benz exposes State Department’s use of USAID as an ‘intelligence cloak,’” said one Just the News headline—without revealing that his think tank was little more than a website whose existence seems to have been made possible by IAF. The interviews got repackaged as news by other outlets in the IAF stable, expanding their reach.
Empower Oversight, the organization that originally backed Benz, was formed in Virginia in 2021, just one day before IAF was registered in Washington, DC. IAF supplied Empower Oversight with the sole grant it received that year, a $400,000 allocation whose purpose, according to tax filings, was to “develop an infrastructure to cultivate, protect and work with whistleblowers.” Since its founding, Empower Oversight has focused heavily on typical MAGA obsessions, including the Russian collusion probe, purported FBI involvement in January 6, and Hunter Biden.
Empower Oversight is headed by Jason Foster—a longtime aide to Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley—whom ProPublica exposed in 2018 as an inflammatory blogger who wrote under the handle “Extremist.” According to ProPublica, Foster, a “partisan combatant” known for his “conspiratorial thinking,” was the main force behind the Senate Judiciary Committee’s scrutiny of research firm Fusion GPS and ex–British spy Christopher Steele, author of the 2016 memos alleging collusion between Trump and Russia.
Empower Oversight, which continues to receive most of its funding from IAF, represented Gary Shapley, an IRS criminal investigator who alleged that the Biden administration sandbagged a tax fraud investigation into Hunter Biden. (Earlier this year, Shapley briefly served as Trump’s IRS director.) Shapley’s allegations were heavily promoted by members of the IAF network, including Just the News, the Tennessee Star, and other Star News outlets such as the Pennsylvania Daily Star and the Arizona Sun Times.
During the Biden years, Empower Oversight’s work followed a familiar formula: First, it would file a battery of Freedom of Information Act requests to a federal agency, usually related to some right-wing intrigue or a query Grassley’s Senate office had submitted to that department. Empower Oversight then would frequently follow up with a lawsuit alleging deficiencies in the agency’s response. With the help of Solomon’s Just the News, it turned routine records requests and civil complaints into a PR bonanza, while fueling a narrative that the Biden administration and its supposed deep state allies were suppressing information.
While Benz did not respond to our requests for comment—and hung up when we called—he’s arguably delivered the most impact for IAF’s supporters. In April, the State Department shuttered its Global Engagement Center, which focused on combating foreign disinformation but which Benz had alleged was a government tool of anti-conservative censorship.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio rewarded Benz with an exclusive interview announcing the move. The next day, Just the News announced that the “censorship nerve center” had been shut down, and multiple Star News platforms dutifully signal-boosted the news. All cited Benz as merely a “former State official.”
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