House Committee Rips State Department Over Censorship

The House Committee on Small Business prints a blistering report on the Global Engagement Center, a State Department "counter-messaging" entity at the center of the Twitter Files

The Global Engagement Center (GEC), a “counter-messaging” operation of the State Department created in Barack Obama’s last year in office, is raked over the coals in a new House investigation. The Committee’s work confirms reports by Racket and the Washington Examiner about taxpayer-funded censorship, but goes beyond to detail a more profound corruption of the agency’s ostensible mission.

“The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech,” the House Committee on Small Business found, adding that GEC “circumvented its strict international mandate” by funding private contractors with “domestic censorship capabilities.”

Not only did the Committee find evidence the State Department strategized to discredit reporting both by me and by Gabe Kaminsky of the Examiner (see reader note, coming), it also showed the State Department blazing new trails in the annals of “the dog ate my homework” chutzpah in response to Congressional oversight requests. “Despite the fact the Committee subpoenaed documents which it had been requesting for more than 14 months,” the Committee wrote, “State said it would take approximately 21 months from the date of the subpoena to produce these documents in full — around March 2026.” 

Worse, when the Committee asked GEC for basic contractor information:

Categories were provided for several recipients rather than specific organizations or individuals, such as $240,136 for “Radio Programmes” [sic] and $42,600 for “On-Air Discussion…” In six instances, subawardees were just the first names of individuals… in one instance the field denoted “Report mentions subpartners; unable to find details…”

Since January of last year, GEC has been the focus of multiple Racket and Twitter Files stories, because of its role in Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, the ties GEC personnel had to the infamous Hamilton 68 “Russian influence” dashboard, and other reasons. In February of last year, meanwhile, Kaminsky of the Examiner launched a brutal investigative series that began by describing GEC’s funding of the UK-based Global Disinformation Index, showing how U.S. taxpayers unwittingly funded conscious efforts to take away revenue from American businesses like the New York Post, the Federalist, and RealClearPolitics.

That latter angle inspired the Small Business Committee investigation. Chairman Roger Williams of Texas last year demanded the State Department turn over an “unredacted list of all GEC grant recipients” from 2019 through the present. As reported here at Racket and in the Examiner, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken responded with a remarkable letter. Complaining about Examiner reporting, Blinken declared that without a “better understanding” of how the Committee planned to “utilize this sensitive information,” he would only release information in an “in camera setting.” Even in camera, however, the State Department claimed lost records while submitting answers of the “We spent money on discussions and stuff” variety.

Despite stonewalling, the Committee was able to answer a slew of key questions raised in nearly two years of reporting. The struggle to identify GEC’s contractors (especially those with stateside presences) ultimately revealed a larger ugly truth, namely that the ostensibly outward-facing State Department is pouring resources into a broad new propaganda mission at home: