State Department Defies Congress, Revives Infamous Censorship Office in Absurd Prank

In a hearty double middle-finger to Congress, the "first scalp" of Donald Trump's efficiency campaign is alive and well, back to work with the same mission.

Anthony Blinken’s State Department just flipped off Congress and the incoming administration. Was it a bipartisan con?

A Senate staffer compared an infamous State Department unit to Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th fame.

“You can’t kill ‘em,” he said. “Every time we try, they pop up somewhere else in the lake.”

Two weeks ago, a celebratory post nearly appeared in Racket after Gabe Kaminsky reported in RealClear Politics that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) had finally been shuttered. GEC was “forced by Congress to close up shop,” Gabe wrote, in a story that’s been personal for us both, since documents emerged last year showing the agency strategized ways to discredit our work. Before the New Year, a watchdog agency sued to obtain records about the episode, litigation still ongoing.

However, I skipped the touchdown celebration after the closure of one of the more notorious bureaucratic characters in the Twitter Files, because I feared exactly what since took place. Just after the New Year, on January 2nd, Gabe reported in the Washington Examiner that as many as 51 GEC employees and tens of millions of dollars were moving in an effort to “realign” the office to a “hub” under a new name. The former GEC would be called the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, or R/FIMI, and report to the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy. The $29.4 million routed to the new “hub” would be “roughly the amount of base funds the GEC currently uses to fund counter-FIMI initiatives through grants and contracts,” a non-public letter dated December 6th and sent to Congress read.

That was bad enough. Two days ago, the mission statement for the new sub-agency leaked out, as reported by Ken Klippenstein. The text:

The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference Hub (R/FIMI) is a Mission Center energizing a network of U.S. interagency, international, and private sector partners that decisively exposes and counters disinformation and propaganda​.

Our Mission: To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.

If that language sounds familiar, you’re not alone. I too felt a flash of recognition. When I looked through the record, I found something shocking: